I used to work on a submarine, and one of the biggest design criteria for the sub was redundancy. Many businesses fail because they bank on one channel working forever. That is rarely the case.

Patrick Gavin recently offered an insightful post about keeping a spare website or two just in case an algorithm update whacks your site.

or at least most people in this thread think so. But then in other forum threads I have been referred to as a genius. I am glad someone believes in me more than I do ;)

If you find a good book (like A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) sometimes you are not paying for what is in the book, but also what biases or other information are not included in the book (as any author, business model, or information format carries biases).

I think one of the biggest reasons many people fail is they try to satisfy everyone. Average people suck. Experience is the best trainer, but people discounting the value of other things typically tend to start from the framework of thinking their time is worthless. And so it is. Everything is overpriced. Until you die.

Andy Hagans has a great post about getting a new domain indexed and ranked.

Now a new domain probably isn't any better than the other one we had, and I wanted the launch to go right, dang it. So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) -- Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)... Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

I wonder which friend gave him that trusted link ;)

The trend to ranking in Google is moving away from just get more more more more more more to getting less but higher quality links. After you get enough trusted links you will probably automatically pick up a few spammy links, but the value of actively building low quality links is diminishing daily (at least, if you care to rank well in Google).

Occasionally you will see people say that paying $300 for a link in the Yahoo! Directory is a rip off, and a couple years ago the economics leaned more toward getting many low trust links. But over the last few years there have been tons of bottom feeding business models which have sprung out of a link = a vote line of thinking to where Google needed to obfuscate the market and increase the cost of low cost links.

Indeed the concept of link = vote will still be sold for a great deal of time (similarly to how people still sell search engine submission software and services). Most of it is not honestly valuable, but if it is profitable and scalable and there is a market people will keep selling it.

Keep in mind that if many search spammers follow the same recipe then the relevancy algorithms might get rebaked, but for now

• for Google, with links less is more
• the cost of some trusted links (in terms of time, money, and/or editorial review processes) makes many of them prohibitively expensive for certain spam content models

In one of Matt's recent SEO videos he also mentioned the value of soft launching.

I believe that, in general, the attention span of most technologically enabled people is getting shorter by the day. In addition the increased number of content channels and communication associated with the web leads people to become more biased.
I have not done any research, so I may be wrong on those ideas, but this is what leads me to say that:

• Automated spam (email, blog comments, direct mail associated with registering for a trademark, etc) which may even look relevant forces you to judge things quicker.
• Search makes it easier to get "good enough" answers quickly.
• The web (and search) let you self select social groups with predefined similarities.
• There is a far greater number of news channels than there were just a few years ago.
• We tend to consume media that fullfills or reinforces our predefined worldview.
• RSS (and devices like Tivo) make it easy to consume media how and when you want to.
• Sites like YouTube make it easy to embed other's content within your site.
• Google Video now allows you to link to an exact second of a video in their collection.
• My shorter and more straightforward posts usually get more comments and more quality editorial links. I also notice many of the Digg homepage and Del.icio.us popular URLs are short and straightforward articles titled things like "10 ways to x".
• The increased number of social aggregation sites is making it easier for people to see what ideas spread, how they spread, and why they spread in near real time.
• My biased and/or controversial posts usually get more comments and more quality editorial links. (And thus are more easily found and locked into more self reinforcing positions.) Can you name a popular political blog that is not highly biased?
• As the amount of information on the web increases and search engines trust old content until new content proves its value the new content is forced to be of a higher quality than the old content to gain exposure. Being of higher quality generally means being more citation worthy. Which frequently means being more controversial.

If you have been on the web for a while have you found it easier or harder to meet people off the web that are outside your realm of trade? Have your media consumption habits become more or less biased since you started interacting on the web?

I am a big fan of usage data as an SEO and marketing mechanism (especially because usage data leads to editorial citations if the site is linkworthy), but I doubt usage data alone will fully replace linkage data anytime soon. Why? The web is but a small fraction of overall advertising market. With search companies controlling so little offline media you would doubt that they would want to let ads outside of their network have control over their relevancy, wouldn't you?

Why does Matt Cutts frequently obfuscate the policies on buying and selling links outside of AdWords? Because abusing links undermines Google's relevancy and Google does not get a cut of the action.

Google's current results are heavily biased toward informational resources. If Google was heavily reliant on usage data it would commercially bias their organic search results and make their paid ads seem less appealing.