Recently I interviewed NickW. I asked him mostly about community building and ThreadWatch. His replies were mostly about the importance of being authentic, timely, and being different. Surprisingly Nick moderately used curse words, although he did work some into the content. :)

Thanks for the interview Nick.

A friend had a Google AdWords ad group waiting for review which was waiting for about a month. There was a glitch in the system to where the group did not get reviewed.

I called the Google customer support phone number (1 866 2 GOOGLE) and the Google employee told me ads should be showing by tomorrow, and they were on syndicated content sites in under 5 minutes.

I can't imagine how tedious it is reviewing all those ads, but they sure are quick on it when they throw your site at the top of the stack :)

Compare that with Verizon DSL customer service:

• Verizon charges me for a full DSL service even though they are down like 20% of the time.

• Verizon has sent people out to my house multiple times and still has crap service.
• Verizon has typically had over a half hour wait on the support phone line.
• Verizon has no option to call you back.
• Verizon randomly hangs up on you while you have been on the phone waiting for like 30 minutes.
• The only phone number with quick and useful customer service is the signup for a new account number. Out of sheer frustration when they waste my time this is the only number I call because I want to help cause attrition at their company and make their workers less efficient. Screw them.
• Two days ago I got told that I needed to talk to their consumer advocacy department and to call before 8 pm.
• Yesterday I called Verizon at about 5 pm. They transfered me through to consumer advocacy department, without giving me any sort of a wait time suggestion, even though I asked for one. I waited for about a half hour or so and then it randomly hung up on me.
• I called back a bit later and they told me to call before 4 pm, stating they were from New York taking Pennsylvania overflow, and that only sales reps are availiabe in the evening.

Yesterday driving around town I found the Verizon office. Next time their service sucks I am going directly to the local office.

AdSense has some competition coming. News.com posts Yahoo to launch blog ad network:

Yahoo is planning to launch on Wednesday an ad network for small Web publishers intended to strengthen its hand against rival Google, a source familiar with the plan told CNET News.com.
...
Yahoo's new service will differ from Google in that it will add human editorial judgment to the selection of ads for content pages. In comparison, Google's service relies on technology.

There are many fronts they can beat Google on:

• open revenue sharing policies

• unlike AdSense, they could actually enforce some legitimate quality standards - which may be likely if they put a bit more human interaction into the system
• more flexible, offering XML feeds or customizable ads instead of making people use arbitrary ad blocks
• Allow advertisers to run various ad copy lengths.
• Allow advertisers to pick what sites they want their ads to appear on or block.
• Better reporting of where ads are being displayed.

It looks like some people are already testing the new network. Earlier Oilman mentioned the Yahoo! context ads on Women's Finance, and looking around, they also appeared on Mom's Budget. I wonder what sort of revenue sharing Yahoo! is offering.

Yahoo! quickly needs to expand their inventory before they lose their partnership with MSN to avoid becoming a second tier pay per click engine.

I looked around and a few of the search related blogs, like Jeremy Zawodny, JenSense, and SE Roundtable were also displaying ads. Some of the publishing partner ads looked a bit botched. The ones on SE Roundtable were frequently off topic and cut off. I mean, how compelling is this ad:

Contraxx by Ecteon
Providing premium contract...

I know that as a user I probably would not click that, if I was the site owner I would be angry for wasting my screen space on that, and if I was paying for that advertisment I would be angry about that ad wasting my money. Why not just use shorter ad copy instead of cutting it off?

How can Yahoo! even think those chopped up ads are useful? Didn't they do some sort of testing on the system? How can an editor think that above six word ad is anything other than complete garbage?

Some chopped ads may send the wrong branding message and work to destroy brand value. Not good, IMHO.

I realize I am playing both sides of the fence here, but directories are getting a bad rap. Directories in and of themselves are not necissarily bad neighborhoods or whatever, but what some people call directories, and some of the stupid or greedy things that people are doing with directories are making them match the profiles of scraper sites and other sites search engines would not want to index.

Not too long ago a person launched no 2 or 3 but 5 different general directories using the same linkage data. Well that is probably an example of the types of things to avoid.

Some directories have 10,000 pages and only 300 listings. Duplicate content filters are not going to want to keep that site in the index.

Some directory owners build all their link popularity from other free directories and forum signature files. Some directories have no quality standards and do not even properly categorize the sites. Others fail in both categories: inbound link quality and outbound link quality.

Many directories sell sitewide pharmacy or debt consolidation links. In doing that they parse out a ton of their link popularity, which means less of their pages stay in the search index, the lower category pages have less value, and there is less reason for search engines to want to trust any link from that site. When you sell lots of off topic junk the site becomes ghettofied and the path the site must go down is chosen.

If you believe in the good link vs bad link algorithms some engines may have then it would make sense to steer clear from most the sites that excessively exhibit many of the above characteristics, but not all directories are built that way.

Many directory owners do not try to be unique and market their position with anything other than raw PageRank. The more a directory looks like a discount PageRank brokering service without quality standards the more likely search engines will be to want to discount the sites.

We the pundints, us with blogs, and spare times to chat on forums, need to have something to talk about. So we raise an issue up and the knock it down and then hunt on the prowl for the next issue to talk about.

Everything comes and goes in waves like that as the algorithms evolve.

When people talk about directories dying they are stating that algorithms are moving away from them more and more, but for a significant period of time the ROI on directory listings was absurdly great. Even if it drops off somewhat the search engines still have to trust something. In many industries outside of a DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory link there are less than a handful of sites worth trusting. How do search algorithms rank sites in those kinds of industries? They need to trust something.

Even if Google was not placing significant weighting on directory links I still would use many of them for how they work in the other search algorithms, but with that being said it may also be worth looking more into other sources of link popularity as the business model of junk general directories is dying.

I think the business models that will work the best longterm will be those that have a strong social position in their marketplace, those who can afford to advertise a ton, those who can get media coverage, or those that naturally pick up the random citation on random blogs and community driven sites that provide many random unrequested links. Not every business fits in those groups though. The end goal should be to figure out how to get in those groups, but until placed in those groups we do what we have to to get by :)

I wanted to interview Jim Boykin, from WeBuildPages a while ago, but some of my questions were evil and it took a while to get around to do the interview. I recently came up with a new list and asked Jim many SEO business related questions, in large part because he runs one of the few SEO companies that I feel comfortable refering leads to. At the recent WebmasterWorld conference I had not one, but two different people come up to me and thank me for refering them, which makes me feel great for recommending them.

In our interview Jim gives lots of good web design and link building tips, and he also confirmed the rumour that WeBuildPages will be entering the original content production market!

To me it seemed like that market was waiting for more competition, especially considering that some of the other networks that do it place competing ads on the same pages that webmasters pay to have create.

Read the full interview: Aaron Wall interviews Jim Boykin, founder of We Build Pages.