The Stock Market Loves Every Dog for a Day

Recently Miva announced that they were dumping a partnership with Yahoo! in favor of distributing Google ads.

MIVA said in its papers that it will adopt Google advertisements on applications and sites managed by its subsidiary, MIVA Direct, which produces white-label toolbar and Web search. The deal, which will run for two years and has "broad termination rights," will begin within 30 days.

The market responded by bidding Miva's stock from $3.40 up to $4 a share. What does that mean to marketers?
If a small ad network makes more profit redistributing the ads of a large player than selling ads directly they probably don't have much value in their advertising product. This is why increasing the efficiency of your AdWords account by 10% is worth far more than trying to find under-priced clicks from 50 pay per click search engines you never heard of.

The second interesting thing worth noting from the market reaction to the Miva / Google partnership is that if changing from Yahoo! to Google increases the value of the company by 15% that shows how efficient Google's ad platform is compared to Yahoo!'s or that the stock market just loves Google...either way, it is going to keep smaller public companies favoring partnerships with Google over Yahoo!. It also shows the strong consolidating trend amongst ad networks. If Google is worth 15% more than Yahoo! then they are probably 40% or 50% more than Microsoft, and as monetization rate drops off there is no reason for anyone syndicating search and contextual ads to look far beyond the top few players.

The search market is also going to parallel the ad market. Google's ad network is so strong because they own so much of the search market. If you can get a few more high quality editorial links that will boost your authority in Google that is worth far more long-term than picking at the edges gathering hundreds of low quality links which may hurt the stability of your rankings.

Lots of money is being spent on new ad network start ups which largely duplicate one another. Networks that are able to deliver real tangible value and get enough media exposure to become synonymous with their ad or media type will thrive while most will fall to the fate of a Miva or a Looksmart...a legacy network with random bits and pieces which makes more redistributing someone else's ads rather than by innovating and selling their own ads.

Google is already getting a foothold in print, audio, and video ads. I just saw a Fat Joe Cadillac Escalade AdSense video ad on this page, pointing to a site called MyCadillacStory.com. That is pretty slick and streamlined for how new Google's video product is.
Fat Joe on Google AdSense video.

The race to create an ad network and buy distribution has changed to a race to create toolbars, applications, software, communities, and plugins that allow people to redistribute ads. Even some password applications (such as Roboform) have search built into them, and Google Custom Search Engine makes it easy for anyone to get paid syndicating Google results (or a biased subset of them).

Improper Use of the Link Rel Nofollow Attribute

SEO Question: Our site has an about us section which links to press coverage of our site. We are worried about bleeding PageRank, and are wondering if we should use nofollow on our links.

Answer: The worry about bleeding PageRank is probably a bit dated in nature. It is based upon thinking that you have a finite amount of PageRank, and that if you link out to other sites you are wasting your PageRank, but truth be told most good sites have both inbound links and outbound links. And you shouldn't be afraid of a few reciprocal links with large trusted media sites either...as reciprocation is part of the natural link structure of the web, and linking out to trusted sites helps associate your site with other high quality sites.

The goal of public relations is to get people to view your company the way you want it to be viewed, and to get people to talk about your topic and your company from your perspective using your language and metrics.

If you make the mainstream media, it generally has the following effects:

  • Improved credibility with the media, which makes it easier for the media to review your products / cite you / interview you again (if you show you were trusted in the past it is easier to trust you again).

  • increased trust with other link sources on the web - for example, the Wikipedia notability guidelines include "The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company or corporation itself."
  • When people who do not know your subject write about your subject they will likely trust many of the same sources that the media has (see Wikipedia mention above).
  • If few people in your market make the news when someone makes the news it may be considered linkworthy.
  • If the subject that causes you to make the news is a big deal many links will flow. When I made the Wall Street Journal that also got coverage on sites like Slashdot. I also mentioned it on my blog and even more people mentioned it.
  • Increased trust in the minds of consumers and many members of your market.
  • Increased mindshare and share of voice in your marketplace.

In addition to the above obvious side effects of media exposure you can also further leverage that exposure. Many media sites have strong domain related trust, and thus rank easily in the search results if they have even modest link equity pointed at them.

When people search for your company name which is a better set of search results:

yourcompanysite.com
yourcompanysucks.com
another conspiracy theory about your company
random (could be good or bad or competition)
random (could be good or bad or competition)

or

yourcompanysite.com
news article you helped promote
another news article you helped promote
yourcompanysucks.com
random (could be good or bad or competition)

In any case, you will likely have some results that are bad or out of your control, but if you link at pages that talk about you in a positive light you are helping those pages be fairly represented or overrepresented in the search results.

Consumers, consumer advocates, raged consumers, and journalists researching your company will research you and your company on Google. When people say nice things about you it helps to make it easy for others to find, and that also helps bury some of the negative stuff.

When you link to a news site you are mentioning it on your site because you trust it. When you use a nofollow to link to a news site you are saying you do not trust it. If you don't trust the people who are talking positively about you then it is going to be an uphill battle.

Defensible Traffic & Reliable Income Streams

A paradox to SEO and Internet marketing is that the less your sites need to rely on search engines the more search engines need to rely on your site, and the more reliable your rankings will be. Andy Hagans posted a quiz about defensible traffic sources, which is a way of testing how stable your income is. After you have a few years experience on the web, forward income stability becomes far more important than how much you are making from a project right now, especially as you transition from an SEO mentality to a CEO mentality.

Canary in the Coal Mine vs Boy Who Cried Wolf

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.

Leveraging Statistics to Dupe the Mainstream Media for Public Relations

From large scale stat providers right down to the smallest detail it is easy to take a statistic out of context and draw false conclusions from it.

Some examples:

Examples of bogus statistics and the value of evaluating stats out of context.

  • MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! - over-represents automated spam and does not account for the targeting and value of some of Yahoo!'s search traffic and vertical content. In addition the story about this conveniently separated the Yahoo! traffic into multiple smaller streams, and typically counts pageviews when many of Yahoo!'s products use AJAx.

  • Yahoo! has 25% of the search market - over-represents Yahoo! by counting searches on vertical properties and internal searches. Their actual volume is probably closer to 10%...it is amazing how quickly their marketshare has been eroding.
  • Looking at search marketshare by referral data to large websites - does not take into account algorithmic bias of some engines toward large or small websites.
  • Alexa data for my site - because it is an internet marketing blog, it is heavily overrepresented.
  • Lower conversion rate for leads after redesign - I redesigned a friend's site and made it easier for people to contact them or get price estimates. Originally their site was unattractive and it was hard to contact them or get a quote. After making it easier to do those the end conversion rate of the people who did those action items was slightly lower due to it being so much easier to do them.
  • Higher AdSense earnings per click or clickthrough rate on a finance site on Christmas eve - the people searching may be more desperate, and thus more willing to click on anything, and they may also search a disproportionately higher rate for higher value terms.
  • Seasonal bias - I have a seasonal site which I fixed broken links right around when it was going out of season. It did not make more, but fell less hard than it would have. When the seasons changed again the earnings shot through the roof.

Why do Bogus Stats Matter?

As a marketer it is important to realize how statistics can lie for two main reasons.

  1. so you are measuring the right stuff

  2. so you can present market data in a way that biases your story such that it is remarkable and easy to spread

1.) After Brian Clark rewrote my sales letter my number of ebook sales per day jumped up in the short term, but that was largely because

  • a trusted voice recommended it

  • other trusted voices echoed that trusted voice
  • a new audience got exposure to my site

A better measure of the effectiveness of the new sales letter would be to look if the percent, conversion rate, or number of affiliate sales goes up. An even better measure would be a Google AdWords A/B split test.

2.) The MySpace has more traffic than Yahoo! story was a way to promote the Hitwise statistic service. But you do not even need to collect a bunch of expensive market research data to create a piece of market research data that would easily spread. Simply cross reference a few free or cheap publicly accessible tools like Quantcast, Compete.com, Alexa, Technorati mentions by day, Google Trends, Spyfu, Key Compete, buy AdWords to track search volume, and the number of Google search results over time.

Statistics & Humor

It is easy to find errors or weird biases when you look for ideas connected to weird human actions. And if they are funny, the emotional responses will help them spread quickly. For example, you can use Google trends to research which country or city the most perverted country in the world.

Serious Statistics

When you cite stats from any trusted brand you leverage the strength of their brand.

Many statistics are nothing but self promotional public relations drivel. If you do a great job with your public relations then you can make reasonably believable stats sound factual, even if the collection method is biased. Leverage the bias or errors in some of the publicly available tools and then try to spread that information to the media. Once you get a trusted third party to buy off on it, you then use that exposure as leverage to make the data even more concrete and believable, and to get additional exposure.

Selling Stats to an Audience:

How hard would it be to make the Digg homepage with a title like An Analytical View of Digg's Growth or Digg Traffic to Pass AOL by January 2008, especially if you cited third party research that backed up your claims?

How hard is it to spread stories on blogs about how important bloggers are? If it has a few images and stats in it a story feels far more concrete and is easy to spread, especially if spreading it makes the messenger feel important / valuable.

When the Wall Street Journal Lies for Links

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?

Watch Aaron Russo's Freedom to Fascism Online for Free

Update: After reading Alan Greenspan's book I realize that not all central bankers are bad, but I still believe there are a lot of dirty people in international banking.

Learn how sleezy international bankers are. Freedom to Fascism is available online for free. Not as good as The Money Masters, but well worth a watch, especially if you are in debt or care about the concept of freedom.

Changing the World by Linking to Socially Friendly Sites

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 Elite Review - Warning: Some Testimonials Are Fake

Warning About SEO Elite Feedback

Please be careful when reading feedback about SEO Elite. I shockingly discovered that many of the below comments praising SEO Elite are fake. Read more about it here.

If my experience with someone posting fake testimonials to this page says anything else for the marketing used to push SEO Elite, I am not sure how much I would trust any of it.

Why I Don't Recommend SEO Elite

I used to recommend Brad Callen's SEO Elite, but due to evolving search algorithms placing more emphasis on site age and usage data I believe that (unless you are penalized or are right on the edge of being penalized) looking through a link profile does not have much value beyond just getting a quick glance at it. And you can do that free using the link explorer inside Bing's webmaster tools.

And if you do get penalized by a search engine, you might be able to get a ticket (as well as link data for your site) inside their webmaster tools sections, plus the online link data sources are great at helping you spot trends and patterns.

Services like Majestic SEO & Ahrefs also let you download link data for your site (while charging if you want data for 3rd party sites). SEOmoz offers a free one-month trial & their Open Site Explorer also offers link data.

The Best Market Analysis Tool:

I rank on the first page of Google's search results for SEO. I know the field inside and out.

SEO for Firefox is a free tool which allows you to view far more data than most of the desktop SEO tools. Download it here for free today.

SEO for Firefox offers everything you would want to know about links and site authority status outside of anchor text, and my friend Joost De Valk created a free SEO link analysis Firefox extension which shows anchor text and PageRank next to links.

Just spending 5 minutes installing those two extensions means you don't need to waste any time or money downloading and installing bulky software. Further, if you use the online link databases you can be certain you are pulling fresh data & they have loads of features in their interfaces (like seeing which links are brand new, many ways to look through anchor text profiles, tracking new links to competing sites, and so on).

Free Online Link Analysis Tools (No Download Required!)

Bing offers a free link explorer inside their webmaster tools.

Backlink Watch shows you the anchor text and PageRank of inbound links for free.

Jim Boykin offers a number of cool tools.

Free Downloadable Link Analysis Software:

Tattler and Backlink Analyzer both allow you to view backlink information for free. Tattler is quicker than any of the paid tools on the market. At the price of free it can save you anywhere from $150 to $225 when compared to software like Optilink or SEO Elite. If you want a bit more data than what is featured in Tattler you may want to give Backlink Analyzer a go. Here is a free video on how easy it is to use Backlink Analyzer:

The above mentioned tools were powered by Yahoo! Site Explorer, which has since went away. :( ... However Bing offers a replacement in the link explorer inside their webmaster tools.

Catching Up With Free Tools:

SEO Elite does have a few features that are not included in the free tools listed above, but about the only features I found useful are also available in free easy to use web based tools, like rank checker. SEO Elite later added at co-citation data, which is something many other tools like Link Tree or Hub Finder have been doing for years.

Stay Away from Bad Link Neighborhoods:

I also would recommend avoiding link exchange networks and the typically low quality links people get by using automated link software. Years after search engines started torching websites for getting links from crappy link exchange directories people were still selling access to them, in effect charging you money to get your site penalized. ;)

Google's Matt Cutts has confirmed that these types of links can hurt your website and prevent Google from even indexing it. Most the sites that participate in them are spammy. If you force your link building and get many low quality links it will be much harder to crack the top 10 rankings. If you want to do link building that will actually help you rank I recommend reading this post.

Why Affiliates Push SEO Elite so Hard:

Affiliates recommending SEO Elite with rave reviews make over $70 per sale to recommend it. If I would have just recommended it to you via an affiliate link and you would have bought it I would have another $70 in my pocket, but think of effective link building as the art of getting real editorial citations that send traffic your way.

Since quality links require real human editorial judgement, most software will not help you on that front. In fact, focusing on software that has you looking at the wrong things may make it harder for you to become a topical expert.

A couple years ago when the algorithms were less evolved this was useful software, but I wouldn't recommend buying it today.

Emulating Top Ranking Anomalies

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.

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