The third reason we really like [eNom] is because the data, right. Almost 10% of the entire web hits our servers. At least 10 million domains. In a world like the web, where everybody is everywhere, trying to figure out what people are doing, particularly in the longtail this is a really exciting source of data.
If the domain name data leakage from eNom & BulkRegister is "exciting" for him that means sharing it must be "not exiting" for their customers.
One more from the "competing against yourself" series. ;)
This video is a review of one of our online SEO tools - the keyword list comparison tool, which makes it easy to compare up to 10 keyword lists against each other. This can be used to help determine the quality of keyword data sources, to pool data into a handy unified list, or to help understand the overlap in keyword strategy from competing sites when using competitive research tools.
You have to look strong. Start with a nice manly high & tight haircut livestrong.com/business_barber/
You have to be strong. Drink propane. 3 times daily. livestrong.com/propane/
You have to bulk up. Not steroids! Feed the search engines their own search results. livestrong.com/business-don-and-tennas-hair-place_563-326-2277/
I think Google is gettingthemessage on what the search results would look like in a couple years if they let the above continue.
Sure they own the search category, but if they let the rot set in too much then people will shift to other modes of discovery. Google realizes that search may splinter - its why they bought Youtube, why the offer a mobile operating system, etc.
When Google enters a field sometimes they do so quietly, but when they decide they want to own something there is nothing quiet about their approach. They are not content to pick one niche and one model (the way that Netflix does):
Google keeps fighting on multiple fronts. Like boxing a glacier, over time they just wear the market down.
“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder.
...
“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says.
They want Youtube to be like television, because the TV ad market is far larger than the web ad market, and they already own search. They are desperately searching for new markets for avenues to grow.
It’s the “first one is free” approach that a drug dealer uses, and it’s not a “free” play, it’s a “we are the new railroad” play. For one-tenth the amount they paid for that crappy old codec, they could have paid Firefox’s licensing fees in perpetuity, if being a sugar daddy is what they want. They don’t want it. This is a “in your face, Apple” play, and a monopoly play.
And in addition to owning Youtube, tons of dark fiber, and their video codec, Google announced their Google TV effort. The person who controls the set top box has the market data.
The success of Google TV will come down to one thing….PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV ? Like Google said, there are 4 billion TVs and growing and the US TV Ad market is $70 BILLION. There is a lot at stake if Google TV takes off. How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does.
but if Google is passively monitoring the network they are far better than a guide. It becomes easy for them to see when their recommendations were not relevant & adjust. And if a network screws them multiple times they can always provide a dampening factor in their rankings.
Google will do what it does, and that’s insinuate itself between information and the user. And the fretting will be minimal.
As for the impact of Google TV, this has the potential to challenge the TV hegemony. By blurring the lines between TV and the Internet, Google TV has the potential to destroy classifications of content. No more “TV shows,” just “content.” No more “Web videos,” just “content.” And, once the distinctions are completely undermined, then direct distribution via the Internet becomes more viable. Google TV could replace Big TV as the aggregator, then it just becomes a matter of who offers the fattest pipes.
Once Google has the aggregate usage data they can use it any way they like. The concept applies to any market. Economies of scale advantages breed more economies of scale. Apple and Amazon want to have proprietary ebook formats? Fine. Google will assist publishers in creating the default common e-book format.
It is not just regular algorithm updates that can whack your traffic. A couple years out these additional content formats will be a big issue for many web publishers because if Google gets a significant sample size & market leverage in any of these parallel markets then some of these other content formats will start bleeding into the search results. And that (along with market competition) can quickly drive margins into negative territory for many publishing business models.
"People that pay for things never complain. It's the guy you give something to that you can't please." ~Will Rogers
and I think it is true on so many levels. If you want real feedback from someone ask them to put their money where their mouth is. Few will, and so most free feedback is garbage.
But when you pay for something you are giving a much stronger/cleaner signal, which is easy to trust & value.
What a lot of SEO professionals don't realize is that when they rent text links many of them are paying for their own demise. If you go through a central link broker that operates at scale you are telling them:
what areas your business is focused on
what keywords are important to you
what links you are buying
how much you think you will make from the marketing
That is fine if you are a huge company with tons of other quality signals which can't be replicated. But if you are a smaller company, what happens when that link broker is also a web publisher? Hmm... xyz is spending $5,000 a month with us to promote that site...well they must be making some good money off it - lets clone it. ;)
The equivalent to trusting most your link buying to a single link broker would be doing a public export of all your bids and conversion data for PPC. You wouldn't stay profitable very long with that strategy, and if you share your link purchase data with some of the shadier (and more well known) link brokers you can expect the same result.
A friend of mine recently mentioned buying some links and then seeing a number of sites pop up which seemed suspiciously associated with people who work behind the scenes at their link broker. Oooops!
Buying links from a central network is not only risky from a Google risk management perspective, but also from a "thanks for the data, fool" perspective.
Now that newspapers are looking to sell SEO services, Google is rumored to be out and about asking them to remove links:
We understand that newspapers are currently being contacted by Google and being asked to remove links (especially those placed after the articles have been written – ie comment links and links that are placed for payment in articles weeks or months after it had gone live). As a company, we have been aware that placing links in articles once they have picked up PR is not an uncommon practice in the industry, and we also knew that it would probably come to no good which is why we stayed well away. However, we do have some legitimate links on these sites that were placed as part of a press release or an interview and these are slowly being removed through no fault of our own. So much for all the hard work eh?
Google is warning newspapers from linking out and is warning webmasters not to do guest posts. It turns out that any and every link is a bad link in their warped mental model of the web. :D
The random surfer must be quite inebriated. And lost.
The good news is that as Google's view of reality is increasingly warped & their guidelines reflect reality less and less they create a greater opportunity for some competing company to come along and build something better. And for any professional SEO who reads between the lines there is value in Google misleading the rest of the herd.
About a decade ago Sergey Brin stated they didn't believe in spam. A decade later they don't believe in the media and don't believe in links. What happened?
I was recently talking to Chris from Warlock Media, and he mentioned a blog post where he wrote "There are more sharks and less fish these days and the trend looks to continue for many years to come." I think as winners accumulate capital and markets consolidate being involved as a person well known in online marketing will become less enjoyable. I explained some of my thoughts on that front in the most recent Ruud questions interview.
This is part of the reason I love the publisher model so much more than the consultant model. Our SEO Book customers are great, but we have to sort through a lot of hate from the bottom 90% to attract a lot of the top 10%ers. My wife is a top 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%er, and we recently did an interview with Boardroom Couple.
The backfill content business model has had a great run over the past 5 years, but with today's announcement of Yahoo! acquiring Associated Content, it certainly feels like it is getting toward the beginning of the end for that model for most folks.
Demand Media has grown eHow aggressively & struck partnerships with the likes of USA Today, and has recently been in the news about looking to do an ~ $1.5 billion IPO. If you look at Richard Rosenblatt's past sales you will see that he is quite good at selling right at the top.
Former Googler Tim Armstrong rebuilt Aol around their internal SEED platform which targets content at longtail arbitrage opportunities & leverages their premium Google ad feed.
Associated Content struck deals with companies like Thomson Reuters, Cox Newspapers, Hachette Filipacchi and USA Today. And they just landed a $90 million payday in the sale to Yahoo!
Yahoo! still has north of 10% search marketshare and can probe new & trending content ideas in real-time, while also using their huge distribution to market the new features. The fast data and instant distribution likely double the value of the business model for them. Take average content, tie it to a trusted brand, and immediately give it huge distribution and you have a winning formula. Assuming Yahoo! does a good job of integration this is probably one of their better acquisitions.
About a year ago a friend told me he bought some Yahoo! stock and I told him I thought he was nuts, but if I saw signs of decent integration of this content then I think they just increased their longevity of their company probably by a decade or more. And the part of this model which works great is that they view this content not as a replacement for their premium content, but as a backfill for the keywords they would like to target which don't have enough demand to pay for premium content creation. Some of the smarter independent webmasters have long understood that part of publishing profitably online means having featured content which loses money but builds awareness, and a second bucket of content which leverages that reputation to profit. That understanding is where the term "linkbait" came from, but now the big companies are playing the same game.
Here is a list of Aol properties, and as soon as they show strong profit growth you can bet they will use their stock to purchase more sites
You could put up similar network maps for the likes of Expedia, BankRate, Yahoo! subdomains, Monster.com, etc. etc. etc.
If Google continues to keep the algorithm fairly similar over the next couple years (ie: overall domain authority = relevancy panacea) it is pretty obvious what is going to happen to a lot of online categories. They will get watered down search by search as these publishing companies reinvest profits into creating a second, third, or fifth site in profitable categories.
If many people are using the same approach that will often create opportunities for other approaches. The good news for the average webmaster is that as the bland one size fits all approach (based on domain authority) gains momentum is that it will likely force Google to adjust. And it will make people become more loyal to great sites when they find them. As such general purpose sites grow I almost think it adds value to sites which look a bit unpolished and look like they are created from am amateur hobbyist. Thoughts? What say you?
"I just have one question. Are the Overture results on top an April Fool's Day joke, or is that for real? ;) "
Since then Google has put ads above their organic search results, done selective self-serving within their "organic" results, and built a business that is pulling in over $20 billion a year. It turns out aggressively carpet-bombing the web with ads is no joke. :D
articles that once contained great links - no longer link to story targets.
On the web ideas (and business models) spread quickly. So as companies learn that Google encourages and pays you to pollute the web with garbage that is what many people will do. Google goes so far as to explicitly state what not to do, and many people view that as a checklist of opportunities, as it wouldn't be on that list unless it worked. ;)
The lack of community and camaraderie within the SEO industry both remarkable & unsurprising give that the SEO industry is a bit of a canary in the coal mine in terms of adopting new best practices (or worst practices, in some cases).
Just yesterday I read a blog post listing me amongst a list of resources where everything recommended had a link - except for our site. The lack of link was so bizarrely out of place that they literally had to explain why they didn't link to our site. Crazy stuff, especially from an SEO "professional" who claims to like and value your work!
As attention becomes more scarce, many people are willing to do anything to get a bit of it.
This triple occurrence of Optimization by Proxy creates a self-reinforcing cycle where the made-for-adsense website owners are rewarded with cold hard cash for their efforts. What's worse, this cash flow has been effectively subtracted from the potential gains of legitimate content producers. One can say that the existence of Google search/adsense/adwords makes all this commerce possible in the first place, but this does not make the downward spiral of inefficiency disappear.
What is even more strange about the above quoted article is that a Google search-quality engineer submitted it to Hacker News using "Sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content" as the title & wrote the following:
All of the fascinating things about signals are confidential for all of the reasons listed in the article, and Google has been sued so many times by sites that think they should rank better than they do that I can't really give examples.
I think it's safe to say though that there are a lot of people worried about and thinking hard about what the web is turning into and how to rank it appropriately.
Most of the content is no longer written by devoted hobbyists, people no longer link as often to things they like, and much of the content on the front pages of reddit, digg (and sometimes even hackernews) was put there by people trying to make your search results worse.
Given that Google pays for the creation of content and is the most profitable distribution channel for many webmasters, few businesses have anywhere near Google's influence on "what the web is turning into."
The smaller the corpus of voters there are the fewer people you need to influence to manipulate the search results. And so stuff like this becomes popular:
But if you have a live and flourishing link graph then efforts of spammy delight won't be able to compete anywhere near as well against the best sites. The problem is the best sites often remain in obscurity & even when they spread through social networks most of those links use nofollow.
The powerful element of links is that they give search an informational bias. Most other forms of user feedback (even awareness) are to some degree driven by ad budget, which would give the results a commercial bias that would cut Google's AdWords revenues.
Years ago on porn search Matt Cutts stated "One thing to consider is that our rankings (because of PageRank and the link structure of the web) often lean more toward information sites. You usually have to look a little more deliberately to find porn on Google." And last year a Google search engineer on Reddit stated: "Incredibly, we take an active role in ignoring porn search. As in, we neither care nor not care about whether our changes affect the search for porn. I'm quite impressed myself at how good it is given this, and sometimes I wonder how much better it could be..."
Yes any new webmaster can quickly rank any trashy content in Google - not on their own site - but on one owned and controlled by a Google arbitrage partner like Demand Media.
Google engineers focused on making their own jobs easier (by making links harder to get) rather than encouraging and promoting the advancement of the corpus of content & links/votes they rely on. The fundamental question for search is if the ecosystem is healthier with many micro-parasites or fewer macro-parasites. I always promote diversity as a good thing, but capitalism typically promotes homogenization to increase yields. That will work for Google right up until...
some of the large arbitrage players form their own ad network, or sign an exclusive deal with Bing
quality publishers pull out of search and people prefer to ask their own communities what is good rather than searching to find bland 3rd grade answers wrapped in AdSense
...at which point Google will start promoting other sites & building a new model. Or they will become irrelevant.
But Google is not required to go through that pain.
They could undo the years of FUD that destroyed the link graph by stating the importance of outbound links, and then putting a bit of weight on it. It is something that was hinted at in the past, but the focus on making links harder to get has undermined the utility of using links as *the* measuring stick for quality because "people no longer link as often to things they like."
