I took a while to post this because the AdWords data was too small of a sample set to trust as meaningful data, but from affiliate sales I now can say that the new SEO Book salesletter is a big success. Affilate conversion rates are up, last month I paid out twice as many affiliates as any prior month, and this month looks like it will be beating last month.

Here is the new sales letter and the old sales letter. You can read about the changes Brian Clark made here. I will soon do multivariant testing to further improve the salesletter and sales process.

Andy Hagans recently posted about his linkbait marathon strategy to rank his sites at the top of the search results. Brian Provost posted about his love for domaining. Domain names may play a big roll not only in anchor text, but also in overall domain credibility, linkability, and defensibility.

An Example of a Domain Waiting to Fall:

In spite of making over a thousand dollars a month, one of my unappealingly named domain names has cost itself significant credibility and links. Since it is an invisible cost it is hard to estimate how much it has cost, but I have a perfect example of showing how much it hurts.

One time I tried sponsoring an event and they said sure. They got my credit card details and then asked for the domain name. Once they saw the domain name they said sorry they couldn't accept my money. And this is a reputable content site in a field that is easy to like, but on a junky sounding domain name. Ouch.

Being Honest With Yourself:

If you have a quality legitimate content site, and people who typically sell reviews or links are unwilling to take your money you know it is time for a change.

Other Signs of Trust:

If people who need sponsorship are unwilling to take my money imagine how much a bad domain name suppresses my click-through rate in the search results, and how many other links it cost me. If and when relevancy moves toward an attention based metric I am screwed if my house is built on a cheesy domain name that looks spammy.

Domain Buyer's Pricing Tips:

You can sometimes capture emerging field names cheaply, but you are probably going to have to spend at least a few grand to get a good name if you are in an established field.

If you are new to domaining, and can't afford a great .com there are still a lot of great .org and .net names out there available for $1,000 to $10,000.

Is a 301 Redirect Risky?

I will eventually 301 redirect my high ranking ugly domain name to the undeveloped MyKeywords.org domain that I just spent $8,000 buying. Short term I will probably see some drop in traffic, but long-term it is going to be far less risky to create an leverage what looks like a real resource and a real brand.

If you do something like this, make sure you have enough other passive income streams to afford the risk, and keep developing links to the new domain name. Keep that old trusted domain registered and redirecting for many years into the future. If you lose it you will probably lose a large portion of your link authority.

There is No Value in Being Anonymous:

You can spend the money your site is making as a passive income source, but if you believe in what you are doing, and have money in the bank, there is no reason to use a bad domain name. It is like writing nameless.

You can get a decent design for few thousand dollars, or a design modification for a few hundred. You can get good content for $50 a page or less. You can move a CMS for a low price too. The cost of moving and re-branding a non-brand site are negligible compared to the potential upside.

If you ever decide to sell, you are not going to get much out of my-ugly-do-mainz.biz, but if you create a real brand on an undeveloped strong domain name you will be able to sell it for a premium far in excess of the domain name cost.

Google works so well because they are scalable, but they are not adverse to paying people to review content quality, because they love human computation, just see their Google Image Labeler game. What if Google came up with ways to determine which users were real and trustworthy, and could give those users incentive to edit the search results for Google? And what if Google could give a similar incentive to advertisers and legitimate publishers?

What if just by reading this you are helping Google trust this site more?

Attention Data:

Google already is the market leader in tracking attention data on the active portions of the web. What if Google integrated attention data into their algorithm and to offset that decide to lower the quantity of links they would count in any time period or the weight they would put on them? What would that do to the value of link baiting? How can Google move away from links?

WebmasterWorld and Threadwatch both recently had great posts about a recent Google patent application about removing documents based on the actions of trusted users.

Google's Own Web Graph:

Google is setting up an alternate proprietary web graph outside of linkage data. Sure any single point of attention data may be gamed, but they are likely far more reliable when you triangulate them. And if a few data points fall outside of expected ranges for the associated site profile pay to have the data reviewed. Based on that review demote spam or further refine the relevancy algorithms.

A Complete Feedback Cycle:

Google is the perfect shopping mall. Google...

• verifies the legitimacy of user accounts by looking at their history, comparing them to other users, and challenging them with captchas.

• tracks click-through rates and user activity, associated with user accounts and IP addresses.
• hosts a bunch of web content, which is syndicated on many channels, and can further be used to understand the topical interests of the account holders and reach of publishers.
• asks for searcher feedback on advertisements
• allows people to note URLs using Google notebooks
• tracks feedback after conversions
• puts themselves in the middle of transactions with Google Checkout

Why wouldn't they be open to using those and other forms of feedback to help shape relevancy?

Opening up AdWords to display content partner URLs is probably a pretty good example of them adding an advertiser feature for improvement of organic relevancy scores. If advertisers think a site is garbage and Google knows that most of that site's traffic only comes from search engines it would pretty easy to demote that site. AdSense publishers also have created blacklists.

Popularity vs Personal Relevance:

Google can triangulate all these data points to see beyond just how much hype any idea creates. They can understand user satisfaction and brand loyalty, which are far more important than just how much short term hype an idea can generate.

If 100 searchers with somewhat similar profiles to mine are loyal to brands x, y, and z then I am going to see them more often, even if those sites are not well integrated into the web as a whole.

Digital Identities:

Bill Slawski recently posted about Google's Agent Rank patent, and there is a push to create a distributed login system called OpenID. Google may not need a single login to track everyone. All they have to do is get a large representative sample of legitimate web users to get a pretty good idea of what is important.

As Bob Massa said, search engines follow people.

Personalization is not going to be what makes SEO harder. It is going to be linguistic profiling, attention profiling, community interaction, and layered user feedback that make it harder to promote garbage and easier to promote quality sites. I still see spammy link building working today, but I don't see it staying that way 2 years out.

With many companies offering free keyword research tools I recently created a keyword list cleaner that can be used to help you format keyword data into a usable format. Use the SEO Book keyword list cleaner, grab the source code if you like it, or read here for background on the tool.

A large part of making business successful is leveraging your authority and using nepotism to extend your sphere of influence. If things look a bit circular in nature that is because they are. Nearly everything you consume has a self promotional bias, but is that any reason to complain? Wouldn't be even scarier if the things you enjoyed and associated with were self destructing?

Examples of Self Promotional Bias in the Media:

If a politician pushes bogus laws (that they know will never be passed) for self promotion and news coverage then why wouldn't the media companies that grant that exposure also grant themselves some leeway? Do you think a news company owned by GE is going to publish a cover story about pollution by GE? Do you think Fox News will stand up against their big advertisers (even when their advertisers are responsible for causing cancer)? Of course not.

The bigger something gets the more hidden stakeholders it has to appeal to. Very rarely do owners get the opportunity to speak honestly about large companies. In many cases they are obligated not to in order to maximize shareholder value. I have had VCs offer to invest in me multiple times but have refused time and time again because I don't want hidden stakeholders controlling my actions.

People discouraging institutional analysis may say Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is a conspiracy theory, but why would it be? What business isn't biased toward their own self interests? Self preservation is a core goal of any institution.

Broken Egos:

Many junk products exist with demand driven by hype, spam, and scammy multi-level marketing, but many
business models exists because we as consumers have holes in our egos and want to lie to ourselves to justify our own flaws and actions.

As technology replaces the roles of many workers while making communication cheaper and easier, people have to do more to earn a living and it is harder to create new ideas, so we have to do more cause driven things to feel purpose and meaning in life.

We want to believe that ethanol
is providing cleaner fuel even if creating it takes more energy than it creates.

As for the environmental impact, well, where do we begin? As an oxygenate, ethanol increases the level of nitrous oxides in the atmosphere and thus causes smog. The scientific literature is also divided about whether the energy inputs required to produce ethanol actually exceed its energy output. It takes fertilizer to grow the corn, and fuel to ship and process it, and so forth. Even the most optimistic estimate says ethanol's net energy output is a marginal improvement of only 1.3 to one. For purposes of comparison, energy outputs from gasoline exceed inputs by an estimated 10 to one.

Bias in Consumption:

Why is Fox News so profitable? Because it isn't really news. It is biased entertainment sold as news:

A new study based on a series of seven US polls conducted from January through September of this year reveals that before and after the Iraq war, a majority of Americans have had significant misperceptions and these are highly related to support for the war in Iraq.

The polling, conducted by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks, also reveals that the frequency of these misperceptions varies significantly according to individuals' primary source of news. Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely.

Just like how we want to believe certain lies to make ourselves feel good, we also consume things
that reinforce our identities and worldviews.

How many decidedly centrist political blogs are successful compared to the number of strong democrat and strong republican blogs? It is easier to trust things that are easy to relate to, and trust has more value than objectivity.

I probably read just about every blog post that links to my site because I want to know why people are
talking about me. Is that a self serving bias? Absolutely. But why wouldn't I have that bias?

Changing Someone Else's Worldview:

It is much easier to sell someone something they want than to try to change their worldview.

An SEO thought they were going to change the image of SEOs on Digg by writing a letter about SEO. After getting many votes it was promptly removed from the Digg.com homepage.

It is even easy for a well rounded guy like Scott Karp to view SEO in a negative light after seeing so much negative coverage of the topic. Scott was more receptive to feedback than Digg because he only needs to change his opinion, he doesn't have to go against the group think consensus on Digg to change his content.

It is easy to be popular as a politician in the US by hating terrorists, gays, and gay terrorists. It is easy to be popular on Digg by hating SEOs. Neither of those mean that the blind hate is correct or has any value (other than realizing it creates a market that is easy to exploit - because as a market they are targeted and already letting others exploit them).

Many business owners create business models that explicitly are designed to take advantage of the blind faith, bigotry, ignorance, and hypocrisy core to many popular religions, or other large self-serving authority structures.

Fighting Noise:

As markets mature, market leaders have less time to learn (because they are so overwhelmed with things to do). Given that publishing costs have dropped to zero and web business models are so scalable, is it any wonder that market leaders tend to read less and do more testing on their own (especially if they became a market leader as a side effect of learning)?

Aaron Pratt has recently whined about the circular linking patterns of SEO elites, even having a guest post by Michael Goldberg, but a comment on that post by Ahmed Bilal was spot on:

In any such environment the good will rise and then naturally protect themselves by strengthening their following (herd). If you want to get to the top (topple them, beat them, match them, whatever), you have to build your own following, your own herd.

What are we doing about this right now? Are you actively finding, reading and linking to one new SEO blog a day?

If you want to be read, then you have to be interesting and you have to attract attention. That's the way it works best - asking for attention or saying that you deserve it won't help.

And yet on my recent blog post about the recent Google (update algo tweak refresh whatever) Aaron Pratt said this:

I am not seeing any loss/gain of earnings in Adsense which leads me to believe their is nothing going on.

Being a good SEO is about noticing patterns beyond your own experiences and surrounding yourself with others who can do the same.

Notice that I didn't outright call the latest Google Update an update, because Google heavily controls that language and wants to obfuscate examination of their changes (wait for the official word from Google on the data push / update / refresh / etc). Just how Google controls their update language, their self promotional bias and control of search related language is largely responsible for the public perception of SEO.

My Experiences With Authority:

Less than 5 years ago I got kicked out of the military. Since then:

• I have been flown to a college and asked if I want to become a professor, but I think I wanted far more money than they wanted to pay. Since then I have created numerous passive income streams that far exceed what they would have paid.

• I have had multiple VCs want to by a stake in my businesses, but turned them down.
• I have been offered to get published by a major publishing house, but turned it down because it would have screwed up my business model. There is no business model in getting published unless you are publishing a thinly disguised advertisement or need the publisher for credibility.
• I have been mentioned in the mainstream media numerous times. Not typically for the stuff I know best, but more for getting sued and for being the person who spent $8 registering BlackHatSeo.com. I have had done some long interviews that have never seen the light of day because I was far too honest.

Those were all opportunities at traditional forms of authority, and generally I turned them down because they were not worth the cost. The point here is that generally I am not a fan of most authorities.

Becoming an Authority:

If you are new to the market you do have biases against you: capital, market knowledge, relationships and attention. But you also have the advantage of being able to take the time to create really cool stuff and do lots of tests because people are not expecting you to do lots of things every day, and you can learn from mistakes of those who entered the market before you.

To get market recognition in a saturated market you have to come up with new, interesting, or innovative things. And if you can't do those you have to at least cause human emotions...do things that appeal to people and make people feel love or hate. Look how new SEOMoz is and they are already on the 1st page of Google for SEO and got a ton of media coverage.

If bias toward known authorities is something that is a common flaw with humans and all social structures there is little value in complaining about it. Instead accept it for what it is and let it feed into your marketing. Sure the Good Old Boy's club sucks, but if you don't offer solutions, then complaints about flaws in human nature are void of meaning.

Via (RCJordan (WMW))

"Resource" is an encomium bestowed only by users; "authority" is bestowed only by previously recognized authorities. Anyone who calls himself either one, is just an ego with vocal chords.