Censorship, Movie Ratings, & Marketing

Most large industries have regulatory bodies or rating systems which aim to keep power where it lies. I recently watched Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a film about the MPAA ratings board.
The MPAA ratings board is composed of what is deemed as typical moral parents, but they play up to support large movie studios. If a film is rated NC17 some studios won't release it, and even if they will it is hard to advertise the movie.

Matt stone, one of the creators of South Park, mentioned that when he tried to get an independent film reviewed they gave it a NC17 rating, and would not say why because they said if they gave specific reasons they would be practicing censorship. Later on he got Team America reviewed, and they gave him a laundry list of what specifically needed to be changed to avoid an NC17 rating.

Some of the absurdity of the movie ratings game include the likes of good ratings for violence in movies (especially without blood), but non missionary sexual intercourse is not proper. The support for violence in unsurprising given the absurd number of movies that run military ads prior to starting the film. The military is not only a leading advertisers, but if a producer needs military stuff to create a movie, the pentagon has to view the film before public does.

Virtually every large market has some form of censorship / reviews board. The stuff they censor is likely a large market waiting to be tapped. If they are unwilling to target those markets because of fear of blowback from advertisers that presents a large targeted audience and strong monetization strategy for independent creators.

FUD & Relevancy: Inside the Mind of a Google Search Engineer

A large part of the search marketing game that gets little discussion is perception. Are the search results relevant? Are the search results fresh? Is there adequate result diversity? Is that particular result worthy of that ranking? What techniques did they use to rank there?

User vs Engineer Perspective

Gord Hotchkiss does a great job covering the searcher's perspective, but rarely do you get to see how a search engineer thinks of the results. This NYT article offered a snapshot, but that has been filtered through the public relations team. The results show not what the engineers want, but the best they can do given their current mindset and computing resources.

Reading Changes in the Search Results

If you can learn to read changes in the results you can see what they are trying to fix right now, what issues will become a big problem, and what issues they do not care about. For example, right now, Google does not care for result diversity. They are so afraid of small spam sites that they:

Why You Should NOT Trust a Search Engineer's Blog

You can't really trust the perspective of a blog posted by a search engineer because they typically discuss the view of search from an ideal world. In addition, the role of the search engineer blog is to control and manipulate public perception more than it is to share useful information. In some cases they tell you how going off topic is wrong, while they are proud to cite your off topic marketing and praise it if you are syndicating their spin.

If You Were a Search Engineer, Would You Lie?

When you look at how they try to manipulate people you can see the holes in their algorithms. They are nothing but an algorithm, an ad network, marketing, and how they manipulate people to cede power and authority to their fickle relevancy algorithms. If they are hypocritical in their view of the web then manipulation is a large and important piece required for them to keep what authority they have.

How to Spam Google Right Now

A few tips they don't want you to know the truth about:

  • Buying old sites works amazingly well.

  • Buying and redirecting sites works amazingly well.
  • Paid links work amazingly well, and you have a strong brand or can tolerate a bit of risk you would be an idiot not to exploit that hole.
  • Exact match domain names play a good role in helping a site rank for the associated keyword phrase.
  • The supplemental results suck, but they don't want the portion of the web they throw into it to realize just how bad it sucks.
  • The search results have a lot of hand editing in them. Hand editing is gratuitous for smaller websites, but they are afraid to edit out large corporations.

Why might Google refer to some of the above techniques as spam? Simply because they are effective. We don't write the algorithms. We give the search engines what they want.

Have You Ever Been Hand Edited?

Search relevancy algorithms change depending on what types of spamming are popular and effective at the time. After experiencing your first hand edit on something you worked hard to build it changes the way you perceive search engines, and how much you are able to respect them. If you are a professional you are not supposed to take it personally, but it is hard not to if you have to fire all of your employees.

Why is it that one person can review your site and kill your business model, but they wrap their ads around people stealing your content and it is a long drawn out process to get them to fix that problem? It is just an extension of how Google thinks of consumers. If you don't have lawyers they don't give a crap about you.

What is Spam?

Spam used to be irrelevant, but now that the web is a direct marketing channel spam is typically more seen as being focused on who was paid to achieve the results. Search relevancy algorithms are based on ad sales. Something that is spam is perfectly acceptable if Google gets a buck a click out of it. Ad networks dictated by automation and economic efficiency also push a lot of fraud. Consider the following:

Much of their profit margins come from supporting fraud, but most people do not realize the extent of it.
Why is Google's ad centric view of the web viewed as more honest than any other business model?

How to React to a Hand Edit

The way to look at search is that they want their techniques to be robust and scalable. Anytime a search engineer does something to you that is unjust and draconian it is because they have a huge hole in their algorithm. After you get hand edited the four strategies worth exploring are

  • how to obfuscate your identity

  • how to scale exploiting the holes which required a search engineer to try to destroy your business
  • how to make your "spam" fit their view of relevancy so they don't go out of their way to keep hand editing your businesses
  • let others know if you think something is dishonest so you can help them avoid trusting it too much

Every Brand is an Ad Network

TechCrunch recently highlighted how most of Glam's growth has come from the combination of shallow pure SEO play to pump pageview stats and syndicating their ads on other related sites to further pump the success story, all while the network is projected to lose over $20 million this year. But VentureBeat also noted that the growth is significant enough that Google wants to do a custom ad deal with them.

Marchex recently had a brutal quarter which drove their stock price down to $9 a share. Their site development process was far too broad and far too shallow. They need to start developing their top domains or sell them off to someone who will leverage them for their full value. In response to Marchex's down quarter Sahar Sarid asked what they should do and got this brilliant comment:

What is the business model here… we got out sites indexed by Google but the users had a shit experience and BTW our indexed sites make nothing compared to if we just parked them. Come on - it not really very hard to figure it out- take the top 30 golden domains and build them into authority sites NOT openlist scrape sites but bankrate.com’s

Keep in mind that when you create one Bankrate.com you get the leverage to charge advertisers more, which allows you to spend more on marketing. As you increase that spend search engines are willing to look the other way if you create a bottomless pit of near identical white-labeled search spam.

As markets consolidate, 2 of the biggest determiners of who will win a market are going to be
brand perception and AdWords ad budget.

  • Brand perception: Google gives brands a discount on AdWords ad prices while price gouging smaller competitors, which subsidizes the value of building a brand. If BMW spams, Google is afraid to remove BMW from their index for very long. If a smaller site does something that is borderline gray and comes under scrutiny Google may penalize the domain and pay an AdSense spammer for stealing that content and keeping it in the Google index. It all feels a bit like the mafia, but this is Google's way to extort you and kill smaller market players without being branded as a corporate criminal.

  • AdWords ad budget: if you are blowing millions a month on Google AdWords then Google will be more likely to white list your sites and less likely to penalize you for white-label clone sites, robotic content, subdomain spam, or bought links.

Even if you lose money on the main brand, it still allows you to backfill with high margin garbage with limited risk from Google. What are the odds of Google doing anything about this BizJournals spam? If you want to monetize garbage you have to put one star brand at the center of it to mitigate you risk profile.

10 First Page Rankings: How Google Helps Build & Reinforce Monopolies

Should one company own 10 first page results for a commercial non-brand keyword?

If you or I ever ranked this well and were that over the top with white-label domains we would expect a swift hand edit from the Google engineering department. Should Bankrate? Or is it ok for them to monopolize the search results if they already are a near monopoly? What is questionable here is not just the number of results or similarity of offering between different brands, but that a couple of the domains are the exact same names with the exception of one of them sporting a hyphen and the other going without. It is not like the competition is weak, with them outranking Fannie Mae, Yahoo! Finance, and Bloomberg.

In a few months all those Bankrate sites will still rank because they have the AdWords budget and brand to support it.

Google Gadget for Keyword Research & Competitive Analysis

I put my favorite keyword research tools and competitive research tools in a Google Gadget. Thanks to Jay at Widget Waker for making the original version with a sweet design, which I hacked up a bit to add a few more tools at the last minute.

If you use the iGoogle homepage you can add the tool to your homepage by selecting add by URL and then submitting this URL:
http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/keywords.xml Creating tools for Google's platform allows Google to suck down even more of my time and attention. Many others are also hooked on iGoogle and the Google feed reader, to the point where they scream and/or unsubscribe if a channel only uses partial feeds. If Google doesn't lose the farm on copyright, the only way someone is going to beat them is if they come up with a way to make it faster and easier for us to consume information and feed our egos. It is going to be hard to create something sustainable and scaled that does that, largely because scale undermines most communities, and no company will be able to collect as much data as Google does right now without running into legal issues.

I am off to fly in a few hours and haven't packed yet. If you are going to the Domain Roundtable I hope to see you there soon.

Why Are CPC Prices so High?

In some markets $5 a click is cheap. Conversion rates are going up. Well run internet businesses have low overhead and are getting bigger cuts from merchants as their businesses scale. Domain Name Wire posted that throughout the first half of this year CreditCards.com earned $4.64 per visitor:

Internet Real Estate Group sold the domain to Click Success in 2004 for 'only' $2.75M. Daniel H. Smith pocketed $97.7M from the sale to an Austin Ventures-backed group in 2006. The purchase by the group in 2006 from Click Success was financed partially with debt from American Capital Strategies (NASDAQ: ACAS).

CreditCards.com's S-1 filing is a treasure trove of information about the company's traffic (they actually have more than one domain driving traffic) and earnings per visitor. In the first half of this year, the company received 5.899M visitors and earned $4.64 per visitor. The traffic was up only slightly from the same period last year, but revenue per visitor increased 46%:

Don't Trust Google Webmaster Central (or, Is Buying a Web Business Considered Spam?)

Google has long hated publicly on people buying or selling links. Some of the better SEOs have moved beyond just getting a link here or there and have moved into acquiring trusted properties, improved them, scaling them, and marketing them. Google hates the practice though because they would prefer to have crusty dated content or incomplete blog posts ranking, such that anyone searching with a commercial interest is more drawn toward their Google AdWords program.

It is only a matter of time until Google tries to call buying websites and web based businesses a form of spam. They may not do it publicly yet, but it is well known in the SEO underground that they do it privately. It is just something they don't talk about.

Should Google be allowed to profile webmasters and ban them specifically because they are SEOs, even if their content quality is higher than that of the top ranking site? If so, then how can they justify rewriting their relevancy algorithms to feature YouTube more frequently in their search results after they bought the site?

Web Design Scholarship

CollegeScholarships.org recently launched a web design scholarship, offering students interested in web design a chance to win $5,000 for designing a Wordpress template for a scholarship site.

I wasn't going to mention it here (figuring I have mentioned that site too many times recently with covering the 301 redirect from the old site, eh?), but I know many designers read this site, and so far there are only 2 entrants. The scholarship was going to close on the 13th of August, but I asked Daniel to extend the submission deadline to the 18th, and he was up for that, so there is about a week left before the submission deadline. The winner will still be announced on August 20th.

If you are a student into web design please apply! If you know people who may be interested in it please pass the word on.

Google Caught Selling High PageRank Links, Again & Again

Google is buying marketshare for Google Checkout by profiling merchants who use it, and giving them free high PageRank links from Google sites.

The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog. Not only does that post provide direct links, one one of the links is a deep link with targeted anchor text.
The blog post about GolfBalls.com contains the following passage:

In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.

They talk about searching for an item, and instead point that link at a product page on GolfBalls.com. That is like me telling you to search Google for something then dropping an eBay affiliate link in the post.

If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying I would do it differently than Google is doing it. I would just like to remind Google engineers that they would call me as a spammer if I did the same things they do to make their business model work.

This is a mistake Google has made many times in the past.

How can Google ask webmasters to police paid links then do that kind of crap? What a bunch of hypocritical garbage.

General News is a Worthless Commodity

I get cold called about twice a month pitching a newspaper subscription, but as we are able to subscribe to specific channels, generalist news lose relevancy, and loses profitability.

The NYT is rumored to be dropping its paid content wall. As generalist publishing moves toward free it still will not be enough to create strong sustainable profits:

"The New York Times is a strong and respected brand however the type of content they are writing about [in columns] is available everywhere," Borrell explains. "Their niche is strong writing and this is not a strong enough niche to charge readers for."

As long as news is just data, those profits are going to move to the aggregators who can cut deals with any publisher and dump any they dislike. Not surprising to see Google turning Google News into a destination, such that they can learn more about the news business and gain more leverage over anyone in that space.

What types of publishing business models will stay profitable?

  • Niche Industry Leaders Publishers in fields with few competitors, or content which is so good (good as in one or more of the following: evokes emotional response, overtly biased to match user bias, focused, consistent) that people chose to subscribe to that channel as a proxy for that entire industry. If you have your own distribution and a large following you don't need search engines to sell stuff or influence markets.

  • Honesty in Fraud Markets The AdSense business model is undermining the credibility of information. If you are serving customers making big purchases or customers who have been taken advantage of, many will want to pay a premium for peace of mind.
  • Conversion Experts If you can pay more for traffic than anyone else you can't lose. There will always be an arbitrage option available for you. Get enough leverage and get a fatter margin, which allows you to recruit and teach a pool of affiliates to make you money. If you can write content that converts you will get paid more per word. Google pushes CPA ads and today Yahoo! today just announced their traffic quality center.

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