Ever since Google has got more selective with what they will index, the model for profitable SEO changed from chucking up pages and hoping some of them are profitable, to where it makes sense to put more strategy into what you are willing to publish.

The Supplemental Index Hates Parasitic SEO:

Each site will only get so many pages indexed given a certain link authority. And each of those pages will rank based on the domain's authority score, and the authority of the individual page, but each page needs a minimum authority score to get indexed and stay out of the supplemental results - this is how Google is trying to fight off parasitic SEO.

Given that many people are leveraging trusted domains, it makes sense that if you have one that you leverage it in a way that makes sense. CNN will rank for a lot of queries, but it does not make sense for Google to return nothing but CNN. It is good for the health of Google to have some variety in their search results. This is why smaller sites can still compete with the bigger ones, Google needs to use the smaller sites to have variety and to have leverage over the larger sites...to keep the larger sites honest if they are too aggressive in leveraging their authority, or have holes that others are exploiting.

Extending a Profitable Website:

If you have a 100 page niche website you may be able to expand it out to 500 pages without seeing too much of a drop in revenue on those first 100 pages, but eventually you will see some drop off where the cost of additional content (via link authority that it pulls from other pages on your site) nearly matches the revenue potential of the new pages. And then at some point, especially if you are not doing good keyword research, have bad information architecture, create pages that compete with other pages on your site, are not actively participating in your market (gaining links and mindshare), or if you are expanding from a higher margin keyword set to a lower margin one, you may see revenues drop as you add more pages.

The solution to fix this problem is build editorial linkage data and stop adding pages unless they have a net positive profit potential.

What are the costs of content?

• the time and money that went into creating it

• link equity (and the potential to be indexed) that the page takes from other pages
• the mindshare and effort that could have been used doing something potentially more productive
• the time it takes to maintain the content
• if it is bad or off topic content, anything that causes people to unsubscribe, hurts conversion rates, or lowers your perceived value is a cost

How can a Page Create Profit?

• anything that leads people toward telling others about you (links or other word of mouth marketing) is a form of profit

• anything that makes more people pay attention to you or boosts the credibility of your site is a form of profit
• anything that thickens your margins, increases conversion rates, or increases lifetime value of a customer creates profit
• anything that reduces the amount of bad customers you have to deal with is a form of profit

Mixing Up Quality for Profit Potential:

I am still a firm believer in creating content of various quality levels and cost levels, using the authoritative content to get the lower quality content indexed, and using the lower quality content earnings to finance the higher quality ideas, but rather than thinking of each page as another chance to profit it helps to weigh the risks and rewards when mapping out a site and site structure.

Increasing Profit:

Rather than covering many fields broadly consider going deeper into the most profitable areas by

• creating more pages in the expensive niches

• making articles about the most profitable topics semantically correct with lots of variation and rich unique content
• highly representing the most valuable content in your navigational scheme and internal link structure
• creating self reinforcing authority pages in the most profitable verticals
• requesting visitors add content to the most valuable sections or give you feedback on what content ideas they would like to see covered in your most valuable sections
• If your site has more authority than you know what to do with consider adding a user generated content area to your site

Take Out the Trash:

If Google is only indexing a portion of your site make sure you make it easy for them to index your most important content. If you have an under-performing section on your site consider:

• deweighting it's integration in the site's navigational scheme and link structure

• placing more internal and external link weight on the higher performing sections
• if it does not have much profit potential and nobody is linking at it you may want to temporarily block Googlebot from indexing that section using robots.txt, or remove the weak content until you have more link authority and/or a better way to monetize it

I have seen many ad studies that empirically proved that the person doing the study did not collect enough data to publish their findings as irrefutable facts. While recently split testing my new and old landing pages I came across an example that collected far more data than many of these studies do:

Same ad title. Same ad copy. Same display URL. Same keyword. And yet one has 3x the CTR as the other.

If you collect enough small data samples you can prove whatever point you want to. And you may even believe you are being honest when you do so. Numbers don't lie, but they don't always tell the truth, either.

Want to know when your data is accurate? Create another ad in the split group that is an exact copy of one of the ads being tested. Once its variances go away with the other clone then the other split test data might be a bit more believable.

A long time ago I made a keyword research video which was WAY too long and came out a bit grany. I recently bought the latest copy of Camtasia Studio and am thinking about making a few short SEO videos. Here are some possible topic ideas:

• what are quality links

• what web directories are worthwhile
• link baiting and how do I appeal to web 2.0
• how to use SEO for Firefox
• how to do competitive research
• how to find the most profitable keywords
• how to write page titles and meta description tags
• how to do on the page optimization
• how to structure a website to be search engine friendly AND convert well
• how do I pick a niche
• how to evaluate the health of a website

So the question is... what topics would you like to see me make short tutorial videos about? I can't guarantee I will make them all, but I will try to make at least a few, and then listen to feedback to make a few more that are hopefully a bit better.

Google recently announced they are increasing user personalization. In the past they typically placed a turn off personalized results whenever your results were personalized, but now they do not disclose when they are personalizing the results, so you don't know when they changed, which sucks. To see non-personalized results you have to log out of your Google account.

Now instead of marking the results as personalized when they change them the results always say they are personalized.

It is kinda weird when you build a decent amount of authority from scratch because eventually people start treating your errors much differently. There are ups and downs to exposure. The biggest ups are

• You get far more credit than you deserve, so it is easy to maintain your market position. Some non-news is news because you mention it.

• If you do something good it is probably going to spread.
• You will get a lot of feedback.
• You get opportunities that you would never expect, and get to learn a lot by partnering with great people to work on amazing projects.
• You can help friends and family quit working for others and work for themselves to do things they are passionate about.

The biggest downs are

• You get far more credit than you deserve - this causes many people to stagnate, trading off of past reputation.

• You get used to doing well, so you have to learn something really cool or something amazing has to happen for you to get excited about work.
• If you get addicted to reach or authority you can let yourself change to where you identity becomes more representative of what others want you to be - even if it is not who you are.
• If you get bored and want to change what you do it is hard to change if you let your living costs scale with your income.
• Your average client shifts from people who are passionate to include many people who are not.
• It is impossible to write something that is interesting enough to be worth reading and accessible to everyone.
• People look to pull you out of context any way possible, especially if doing so can improve their market position or sense of self worth.
• You can get bogged down with menial tasks to where you stop learning unless you are aggressive at filtering out noise.

As far as my errors go, I can write a post about how important it is to write well, but at my core I am still a bad speller. About a year or so ago spelling errors started to matter much more than they did in the past. Many other errors have become more and more important as well.

More recently friends advise me to steer clear of controversy, stating things like things that got you where you are are not necessarily things you should continue to do. Largely they are probably correct, but it is a big shift in perspective to go from looking for cracks in statements and policies to being a person who just casually analyzes markets and is rewarded for their observations and ideas...especially if you like to view yourself as the underdog. :)

And now when I do anything risky I am guaranteed at least one sharp response. And everything you do is one more opportunity to look hypocritical. My sales letter claims that SEO is easy, and I think if you are passionate about your topic it is not hard to compete in just about any field. If you are passionate it is not hard to spread ideas because pure passion brings out creativity and it is easy to detect...people want to be associated with that. People want to feel important and want to associate with people who make them feel their ideas are important.

The issue with Dave Pasternack (which got me that response telling me that I need to grow up) is not that SEO is easy or hard, it is that it is hard to scale selling SEO services because most businesses need more than just SEO... they need overall business optimization. Most people are too arrogant or afraid or shortsighted or distrusting to consider that. What is worse is that many people intentionally commit fraud, and we have to be sheltered to protect our egos and livelihoods.

I just helped get a great friend's new site to the front page of Google's search results. Now their phone is ringing off the hook, but because they need to streamline their sales process and work on making more compelling offers that filter out bad prospects they are probably getting a bit more exposure than they want. Was it easy for them to rank? Absolutely. But now they need more. And they are learning quickly, but it is much easier to help them for free as a friend than to build their business as a client.

And then you know pieces of stories that you can't share. Some days multiple mainstream media outlets will contact you asking questions about how they can better optimize their sites. The same companies publish articles about how sketchy the entire field of SEO is, while cloaking links or content on their own sites, and few people see the absurdity of the claims. And if you say anything about it then people may see it as an unjust rant. And if you divulge too much you might end up costing someone their job. Everyone wants results, and accountability for risk and errors usually falls on someone who can't afford to bear the brunt of the outcome.

If you are profitable and show your results you are accused of showing off, all while closing market inefficiencies you found. If you do not show results then you are arrogant and talking out of your...

As a person who shares market inefficiencies you are going to offend some people. Right now I think many bloggers are getting paid crumbs compared to what they are worth, but if I post about that suddenly I am a chauvinistic pig that thinks mom bloggers are naive and stupid and blah blah blah.

I don't think it is bad to be naive. I still am about many things, and if you feel that saying some people may be naive is a bad thing then you need to grow up and stop viewing the world in a black and white picture that makes yourself feel important. Everyone is not equal. And if we were the world would be a terrible place to live.

My girlfriend actually likes how crass and kurt I am, but I am nowhere near as much so on this blog. Yet after reading what others say about me I often feel like I just pulled this move.

Everyone is a minority with a broken ego and wants to feel important. No matter what you do people will hate you. Some idiot recently started leaving racist comments under Jim Boykin's name.

Everyone has cracks in their identities and egos. And if a person stands up for the rights of others sometimes they end up trampling others to maintain their own authority. It is an underlying theme in Animal Farm. From my Cliff notes style poem about that book:

what you fought against
is what you became
still, you kept fighting
to protect your name

People link at definitive statements. If your content is vanilla nobody cares. People link at definitive statements. People pull your words out of context and make them more definitive such that they create a self promotional controversy. But then sometimes I do the same thing. Everyone does. There are far more words typed each day than attention to consume them. Somebody has to lose.

As you get more authority you are expected to be less and less risky. I recently got one of my sites mentioned in authoritative political blogs and noticed that SEO Book typically sends link sites nearly as much traffic as many of the top political blogs. Should I take less risk? How do you balance self confidence and perceived arrogance? Should you worry about offending a few people so much that it changes your identity and how much you enjoy doing what you do?