Back in September I posted that I thought it was somewhat sketchy for Google to recommend there photo search when a person searched for Istockphoto and got flamed for it. Recently Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, said similar. Because of Blake's market position, the exact same story was credible, important, spread, and is something Matt Cutts needed to make multiple blog posts about.

Based on the credibility and market position of an author certain stories may be important, or may be worthless. Even completely true stories may still cut at your credibility if you don't later reference them again to remind the dismissive parties of how their thought process changed over time.

The media is largely owned by conglomerates tied to banks, geared toward selling ads and their business agendas, manipulated every day, but most authorities would like people to blindly trust the media as a representation of truth, even as that same media wraps self serving messages in a self-aggrandizing article that dismisses their competition.

Search is also a topic that is easy to love, but SEO has been painted as a scourge on the web. Any authority or authority based system has to pretend that they hate market manipulators to justify their own legitimacy, market position, and how they got where they are.

SEO is largely based on speculation and predicting market trends that most people do not see, so it is easy to be seen as having little credibility, so long as your brand is focused on SEO, even if you are 100% correct. At least one board member of a major search engine has called me for investing advice, though I guess it would be a bad idea to blog any specifics on that.

It is quite ironic that the main reason this site was worthy of press attention is because I was sued by an unethical business, and I can even get interviews published in the London Times as an expert on Black Hat SEO largely because I own the matching domain. But even after about an hour of talking, showing highlights of how search engines pay for much of the spam, and how they don't stop paying for it even after they catch it, all I could get was a few sweet soundbytes like:

"Who is and who isn't a black hat is dependent on what Google says is black hat," said Wall. "They would certainly class me as a black hat."

Nice.

And then you remember that stories need to sell ads. To do that they exposure. To do that they have to be controversial. They have to be pitched, sold, and then the matching facts have to be collected. Rarely is there ever enough column space to risk challenging conventional wisdom if you can be controversial and conventional at the same time.

Knowing that the whole polarized black hat vs white hat garbage was going to get more and more self serving press was probably smart marketing, but is it SEO? And, if a site that cost me a half a day and under $100 gets me featured as content in the London Times (with an HTML link) is that efficient marketing?

A year and a half ago I predicted that Google would eventually create an automated commodities trading platform where they could leverage their pure data. Since then Google has leveraged their market position and used predatory pricing to become a large payment processor. Just about anything without a brand will eventually be commoditized by cheaper communications, search, more efficient markets, and other forms of automation that are good enough. Google has already won the web. Don't be surprised if you see Google Checkout offline in 2008.

The WSJ recently published an article that called blogs parasitic trash:

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

But actions speak louder than words. That same WSJ reported on an unconfirmed TechCrunch rumor about the YouTube acquisition by Google.
They also mention the lack of overlap provided by self selection bias:

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

But the web also makes it easy to reference past facts and changes in bias or perspective over time, which is something they are afraid of.

Any attempt by authority to make things seem universally right or wrong / white or black amounts to a self-serving attempt to stay relevant. If they believe their lie enough hopefully they can convince others to do the same.

Professionals do things for money. Amateurs do things because they are genuinely interested. Who would you rather trust?

A bit of a do-gooder tip here, but when a main story gets cited by bloggers many of us tend to link at the same mainstream media source, thus voting for that source as the best article on that topic, when it is often the first perspective we found, but not the best.

When considering who to link to, it is worth it to take a minute or three to do a few news searches and blog searches to find better articles from sources that are more trustworthy than the mainstream media.

Why Research Many Sources?

At the very least you learn how similar various sources are, how influenced they are by public relations, and learn a bit of background on the topic. At the best this will not only make you more educated, but will also help you shape the web, and what articles others will cite going forward, which is especially important when you consider how concentrated and deceptive the media is (like firing their workers for being honest) and how much fraud there is in business.

Right now some sleazy agricorp companies are creating self destructing seeds, using rBGH in cows (which provides exactly no benefit at all to consumers), and at the same time the FDA is mulling the idea of selling cloned meat (without requiring labeling).

How to Find Other Sources:

• Check out a few of your favorite blogs or alternative media sites on the subject.

• Check meme trackers such as Techmeme, Megite, and Tailrank to look for others talking about the subject. Technorati also offers topical meme tools and blog tags.
• Search Google News, Yahoo! News, Topix, and other popular news sites.
• Search major search engines for a key quote from the article wrapped in quotes to see who is syndicating the story and who has quoted it.
• Create a Google Custom Search Engine which you seed with sites you personally trust. Search it for their past takes on keywords related to the theme of the story.
• Check out social news and bookmarking sites to find related stories and trusted sources, either directly or recursively. Start with Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and Del.icio.us.
• Look at the Wikipedia page on the topic. If the topic is controversial ensure you also look at talk pages about the topic.
• Find related topics and keywords using keyword suggestion tools.
• See which bloggers are linking to the article in question by searching Google Blogsearch and Technorati. For example, to see who has recently linked at the SEO for Firefox extension download page I would search Google Blogsearch using link:http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html and search Technorati for tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html. Those may give you other sources which may be worth citing, and some other people discussing the same story may also be linking at other sources. It should also tell the story from a different angle or perspective unless the bloggers are parrots.

Change the Web & Change the World:

With each word you read or write, each sentence, each page, and each link, each of us are helping to shape the web every day. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

SEO Question: A top ranked competitor of mine has a few good links, and many low quality links. I don't think they should be ranking, but they are. Should I duplicate what they are doing?

SEO Answer: As an SEO I think you can learn more from seeing top ranked results that should not be ranking where they are than from sites you expect to rank, but far too many people desire to emulate those rankings without building the necessary criteria to rank.

Sure it makes sense to look at high ranking sites which shouldn't be ranking, and try to get some of their best links, but it is probably not worth replicating everything they are doing (including all of their reciprocal links and low quality links). You can't replicate their age with a new site (and there may be other criteria that you do not see and thus can not replicate), if your link profiles are too well aligned their site will probably get filtered out of the search results, and if their rankings are not stable you have little to gain by replicating what they are doing.

A friend of mine tried to get me to do a $750 per month ad buy on a ghetto top ranked site. I said no to them. The next month the ghetto site dropped off in the search results and our ranking is already higher than theirs (on a similar spend) by going after higher quality links.

It is far more valuable to notice the trends as to where the algorithms are headed and push in that direction. Find the sites that are ranked which should be, and where possible, try to make your site profile align with those sites.

So we finished up at Elite Retreat yesterday. It was a bunch of fun and I think it went amazingly well. Today I am flying out at 6 AM, and thus am sleeping on the plane flight (twice in 4 days). I am moving into my new place today, and will be trying to be as lazy as possible for the rest of the year, so this blog may go without any new posts. As a 16 year old kid it was not uncommon for me to make $150 to $200 a day selling baseball cards on the weekend. When I think of how small that marketplace was, how naive and ignorant to business and marketing I was back then, how much I have learned about search and marketing since then, and then compare my income to the size of opportunity the web offers, it seems silly that I don't put a bit more effort into blowing up a large bank account.

Next year I intend to heavily dip into the arbitrage and affiliate markets. I want to shy away from reading so much about search and put much more effort into manipulating many many many more search results.

I also intend to create a site or two which is the equivalent of this site, but in different marketplaces. I am getting somewhat burned out on this site because I get the same things over and over again, and part of that fault is that for many, the attraction of SEO is the idea of creating value out of nothing, but most of us who are making money from SEO do so because we couple it with other knowledge, and / or work hard. The other part of the problem is that if I am not learning fast I feel I am dying, and it is hard to answer hundreds of daily emails, track the markets, go to conferences, stay in decent shape, save time to read and learn, while still launching other sites and ideas.

Some of the more annoying things that make me cringe

• random instant messages from people I don't know who immediately try to extract value from me or pitch me outsourcing services

• the emails that start with something like bought your book and was too lazy to read it. teach me everything about SEO.
• emails from people who got scammed by some packaged solution provider that starts there service calls by asking the all important question how much room do you have on your credit card
• the emails that tell me that I must be a scammer and the only way I am not is if I give the emailer my ebook for free
• the scumbags who buy my ebook and then do a chargeback (costing me their $10 more than their order price) when it is probably easier and quicker just to ask for a refund
• the emails that start with something like bought your ebook. have not read it. want a consult RIGHT NOW. or can I schedule my 15 minute consult for 4 am Saturday 3 weeks out so I can ask you to wake weird hours, blow you off, and then ask you to schedule it again.
• Emails from greedy business people who expect me to give them multi million dollar rankings for a couple thousand dollars. I love telling these people exactly what I think of them.
• the automated blog comments that mention the Holocaust
• politicians that try to undermine free markets and free speech under the guise of saving the children (while dropping bombs on thousands of them in other countries to try to gain control of their oil supplies)
• a government that outsources the printing of its own currency and goes in debt just to issue it (allegedly to help maintain its value) which is compelled to try to legislate religious and moral values. If you can't be trusted to maintain the value of your own currency then what other values can you be trusted to maintain?
• prentending that wealth is created independantly of poverty and inequality
• politicians and media companies that lie about global warming and push us to live under blind faith or a love of material things at the expense of our future
• being shallow and materialistic
• realizing how far away I am from my potential and how the world deserves so much better from me
• realizing that when I see deep faults in others, it is just a reflection of my own flaws that I am unhappy with
• when I let little things or little people get to me and control my emotions and cause me to do stupid or self destructive things

If I can tell a person what I think of them in 3 words there is no reason to type 6 emails. I will do my best to be as happy as possible, and, where necessary, be more crass and curt to people who make me cringe.

People and things that make me smile

• Giovanna

• thinking of California and a snow free winter
• learning
• laughing
• working out
• Radiohead and other good music
• partnering with many great business friends
• thinking of all the cool things people have done to help me out
• thinking of all the cool tips and tricks friends have taught me
• reading feedback from and meeting people who say I have helped them
• knowing that lots of cool people read this blog and leave comments that help teach me, in spite of me typing pure drivl from time to time