Interview With Anita Campbell in ~ 1 Hour :)

Hi Everyone
Anita Campbell will be interviewing me on her Small Business Radio program in ~ 1 hour & 15 minutes, at 1:30 PM Eastern.

I was on Small Business Trends Radio

Paid Content: the New Paid Link

Paid Links Are Spam

Buying links is considered spammy by Google because it is a ranking short cut which subverts search relevancy algorithms.

And so Google considers it a black hat SEO practice.

Links are somewhat hard to scale because (outside of those who create a network of spam) it is time intensive to find the right sites, negotiate a price, and then ensure appropriate placement. It requires interacting with many webmasters & going through a lot of rejections to get a few yes responses. Due to scale limitations, paid links typically only exert a slight influence on core industry keywords and common variations, limiting any potential relevancy damage.

Further, when a person buys a link, the relevancy is almost always guaranteed (as one would go broke fast if they rented links targeting irrelevant keywords).

Even still, Google hates paid links because they can lower result diversity & bias the organic search results away from being informational and towards being commercial (which in turn means that Google AdWords ads get fewer clicks).

Policing Paid Links

To make link building efforts easier to police, Google created nofollow, which aimed to disrupt the flow of link equity across certain links. Initially the alleged purpose was blocking comment spam. And then after it was in place, comment spam never went away, but the role of rel=nofollow quickly expanded to be a cure-all to be placed on any paid link.

Google encouraged spam reports that highlight paid links. SEO blogs highlighted people that were buying links. Firms like Text Link Ads were eradicated from the Google index. And all was well in GoogleLand.

...Until...

The Rise of Content Farms

Over the past few years people realized that Google had dialed up the weight on domain authority & that links are now much harder to get. So companies started placing lead generation forms on trusted sites & firms like Demand Media purchased highly trusted websites like eHow (which already had a ton of links in place from back when links were easier to obtain).

Demand Media then automated and streamlined the content production process and poured content into eHow until the rate of returns on new content and growth rate started to slow.

This type of strategy attacks the longtail of search, and given how many unique search queries there are each day, that amounts to a lot of opportunity!

Corporate Content Farming: The Art of Informationless Information

Anyone who has watched The Meatrix is likely afraid of factory farms. The content created by these content farms isn't much better. When I highlighted how bad one of the pieces was their solution was to delete it and hide it from site, then write a memo about how they do "quality" content at scale.

That scale part is no joke - Demand Media brought in over $200 million last year. And I suppose if they put the word "low" in front of quality, it wouldn't be a joke either.

Abusing Nofollow

These same authoritative websites which managed to create content for $10 to $15 a page (or sometimes $0 auto-generated pages) then leveraged nofollow on *all* outbound links, so that they would not vote for anyone, even if their content was only a thin watered down rewrite of 3rd party content sources:

eHow is a content publisher known for “How To..” articles. Lately, it seems eHow visits other websites, scrapes their instructional content (on whatever topic), and republishes it as a How To article on eHow. Sometimes the entire step-by-step process is “copied” for the eHow article. I’ve noticed a few times this week, how eHow articles are basically copies of existing content from other sites, worse than Wikipedia rewrites. That’s pretty much “scraping”, even if done by poorly-paid human workers.

So now companies are building a wide range of "content" business models ranging from auto-generated content to semi-autogenerated mash-ups to poorly crafted manual rewrites (as mentioned above).

Content Scraping & Recycling as a Legitimate Business?

Even search engines are becoming general purpose scrapers, snagging third party content, mixing it together, wrapping it in ads, and pushing it into the index of other search engines.

The result?

Ask.com's share of search traffic rose 21% last month alone!

The Information Age

We are no longer in an “Information Age.” We are in the Age of Noise. Falsehoods, half-truths, talking points, out-of-context video edits, plagiarism, rewriting of history (U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, for example), flip-flops, ignoring facts (Cheney and torture for example), neatly packaged code words and phrases, media ratings focus, dysfunctional government (fillibusters have more than doubled, but most don’t realize Republicans are blocking everything), mainstreaming fringe causes….I could go on and on. Is it any wonder why so many who are struggling with kids, jobs, rising medical costs, etcetera have such a tough time wading through all the crap? - source

Paranoid About Links

As building up your own profile has grown harder (since links are harder to get) many new web 2.0 websites provide free outbound links to help encourage participation and get links back into their websites. But then after they reach a critical mass they claim that spam is an issue and strip away the links by using nofollow, stealing that hard work people did to build up the network, offering nothing in return for it!

Google's fear of links is *so out of hand* that an SEO simply mentioning that a person can get a link from their own profile page on a social site is enough to have Matt Cutts go out of his way to push the social media site to remove the opportunity. If you put a lot of work building up a social profile Google doesn't want you to benefit from that work, but it is fine if that network does:

If Google is the one who wants that web link nofollowed because some twitter profile pages may be automated bots or spammers, then it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity, by a method other than demanding that other websites and social networks change the ways they do business to help Google stop links being used as a form of currency and to manipulate their algorithm – an issue Google and Google alone created and profited from.

Any Form of Payment = Not Trustworthy

A few years back a well known SEO joined our training program, read our tip about using self-hosted affiliate programs as a link building tool, and then promptly outed us directly to Matt Cutts, in a video, and on their blog. Google quickly blocked our affiliate program from passing link juice. Later a Google engineer publicly stated affiliate links should count.

Since then affiliate links have been a gray area (it works for some companies and doesn't work for others, based on 100% arbitrary choices inside Google). Looking for clarification on the issue, Eric Enge recently asked Matt Cutts: "If Googlebot sees an affiliate link out there, does it treat that link as an endorsement or an ad?"

Matt Cutts responded with: "Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement."

So links which are driven by payment should not count as endorsements, even if the affiliate does endorse & believe in the product. The fact that there is a monetary relationship there means the link *should not count*

The Elephant in the Room at the GooglePlex

Ignoring links for a moment, lets get back to the the content mill content business model. It was fine that Demand Media bought trusted (well linked) sites like eHow for their trust to pour low-end content into, even though those pre-existing links were bought by the new owner.

And here is where the content mill business model gets really shady, in terms of "what is good for the user" ... Demand Media is now licensing backfill content to be hosted on USAToday.com on a revenue share basis. Describing the relationship, Dave Panos, Demand Media's CMO said "It's an opportunity for us to get in front of the audience that's already congregating around very well-known brands."

But you won't find that content on the USAToday.com homepage.

When he said "already congregating around very well-known brands" what he meant was "will rank well on Google." And so, what we have is a paid content partnership which subverts search relevancy algorithms.

If affiliate links shouldn't count, then why would affiliate content?

If Google doesn't stop it from day 1 then the media companies are going to quickly become addicted to the risk-free money like crack. And if Google tries to stop it *after* it is in place then they are going to find themselves lambasted in the media with talks of anti-trust concerns.

Something to think about before heading too far down that path.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood...

How is a content exchange network any different than a link exchange network? The intent is exactly the same, even if the mechanics and payment terms differ slightly.

If a paid link that subverts search relevancy algorithms shouldn't count on the web graph, then why should Google trust paid content that subverts search relevancy algorithms?

Will the search results start filling up with similar sounding misinformed content ranking for 1 then 3 then 8 of the top 10 search results? Do the search results slowly get dumbed down 1 article and 1 topic at a time?

This trend *will* harm both the accuracy and diversity of content ranking in the search results. And it will grow progressively worse as people begin to quote the misinformed garbage on other websites (because hey, if it ranks in Google and is on USA Today it is *probably* true). Or is it?

Some questions worth thinking about:

  • Google is willing to truth police SEOs. Will they do the same for media outlets publishing backfill "content"?
  • How will Google be able to filter out the Demand Media content without filtering out the rest of the media sites?
  • Does Google care if the quality & diversity of the search results is diminished, even if/when most searchers will not be savvy enough to recognize it? I guess it depends on who has the last word on the issues inside Google, because most garbitrage content is wrapped in AdSense ads.

Beauty is Rare - Elusive so it Can be Easily Sold

A couple years ago my wife and I had our big wedding in the Philippines (we even had the mayor of Manila show up). She was so beautiful that day. And lucky for me she is just as beautiful when she wakes up each day. :D

But she can be hard on herself and if she gains a single pound she worries. Truth is I am the chubby one who needs to drop weight.

Beauty (and the perception of it) is a wonder commodity to sell because there is no limit. Almost everyone could be in better shape or be stronger or eat healthier or not have this or that birthmark or the odd finger that bends backwards.

We are imperfect beings by our very nature.

We get sick.

We break.

And we all fight the battle of aging one day at a time - every single day!

But no matter where you go, whatever is rare is typically considered desirable & beautiful. This is not done as an accident, but as a way to generate profits. If the human condition is flawed (and can't be fixed) then the person selling a bogus solution to that problem is going to make a lot more money than a person who sells something which is actually attainable.

And so we live in a world where we treat symptoms, rather than problems. Anything to make the numbers look good and make the sale. From there you are on your own! If you feel bad, we can give you more drugs!

Spending too much time at the computer and eating unhealthy has made me a bit too chubby. No good in obese America! But did you know that in the certain times & cultures being fat was considered a sign of beauty, like when few people could afford to be fat! ;)

There is too much high fructose corn syrup in the typical American diet for obesity to be considered beautiful:

"Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic," Avena said.

The new research complements previous work led by Hoebel and Avena demonstrating that sucrose can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse.

In the United States many girls not only label anorexia as beauty, but some go to tanning salons so they can darken their skin to look beautiful, at least until they get older:

Long-term exposure to artificial sources of ultraviolet rays like tanning beds (or to the sun's natural rays) increases both men and women's risk of developing skin cancer. In addition, exposure to tanning salon rays increases damage caused by sunlight because ultraviolet light actually thins the skin, making it less able to heal. Women who use tanning beds more than once a month are 55 percent more likely to develop malignant melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer.

A service which has no lasting positive tangible value AND certainly has a lasting negative tangible risk can grow to become a multi-billion Dollar industry

Anything to be beautiful! This is what beautiful people do. I want to beautiful.

The above never really made sense to me and always felt a wee bit scammy. There was an odd odor to it, but it was hard to appreciate how scammy it was, until...

When it really hit home for me was when my wife and I were in the Philippines. Many of the department stores sell skin whitening soap! Having a lighter skin tone is supposed to be a sign that you are from a wealthier family. And since wealth is concentrated that is rare. And so that is what is considered beautiful. :D

DIY SEO Software Reviews

Is DIY SEO any good? Does it work?

When I got to look at DIY SEO my first thought was: good structure & layout, lets see what is under the hood. But then after opening up the hood I found a car with no engine.

On a score of usability I would give the site a 9 or a 10, but in terms of utility it would be lucky to score as high as a 2 or a 3.

Google AdWords: The Cheapest SEM Strategy for Small & Local Businesses

Maybe there are some small businesses out there who are content being obscure, or who only want to rank for their own business name plus maybe 1 or 2 longtail keywords. But for those businesses I suggest bypassing SEO and buying a few Google AdWords ads.

  • Low traffic keywords are typically cheap to buy search ads on - because you only pay by the click. If few people are searching for something then there will be few clicks to buy.
  • Not only are such markets small, but due to their small size they are also heavily fragmented, making the AdWords traffic even cheaper.
  • If few people are searching for your brand then you can likely spend $25 a month on AdWords and ignore learning SEO.

A Legitimate SEO Strategy Requires Investment

With a paid search campaign, you can use Google AdWords to instantly buy search traffic and gain new customers. SEO is a drawn out strategy & typically requires a much deeper initial investment.

There is little value in investing in SEO unless your goal is to dominate your market, and there is sufficient market scale to justify investing thousands of Dollars (and far more when you consider the value of your time). After all, a single link from Business.com or the Yahoo! Directory will run you $299, and 2 links hardly makes for an effective SEO strategy - but they will set you back $600 a year.

And you don't get those links any cheaper just because your business is small. ;)

Why Does DIY SEO Offer Such a Weak SEO Solution?

When looking at DIY SEO it took me a while to think it through, because I kept thinking "something is missing." Why did they raise funding to build THAT? But then I thought it through. DIY SEO was designed by marketers looking to sell something that would be easy to sell at scale - it was not created out of passion to solve a real problem with the desire to help make a difference in people's lives.

The difference is not subtle.

After all, Andy is the guy who had time to build out hundreds of thin affiliate sites, while being too lazy (and lacking the concern needed) to fix his SEO blog for months while it installed malware on anyone who visited his site. That blog had the tagline Livin' the dream, but that is for him though...you can live with malware. He doesn't care.

Could you imagine a reputable SEO site like Search Engine Land, SEO Book, SEOmoz, or Search Engine Journal delivering malware for months without any care or concern? I can't.

SEO Consulting is Expensive

SEO is both time consuming and expensive. Neither Andy or Patrick offer consulting services because they value their time too much to actually dig into client websites and provide useful, relevant, honest, and effective feedback. Patrick states this on his blog

And as Andy's site states: he no longer sells consulting, and he does not want you to email him

DIY SEO was designed as a high margin automated solution which is so automated that it wouldn't require much feedback or interaction with customers.

But there is one big problem with that strategy...

SEO is *NOT* a Mechanical Process

For anyone looking to seriously compete on the web the DIY SEO tool/system is inadequate, and potentially even harmful. Why?

In SEO, a lot of the potential profit comes from knowing your market well, leveraging new technologies & distribution channels to gain market share, and putting a new spin on old marketing ideas. But they tried to make SEO too black and white...far too mechanical. Anywhere where critical thought & analysis can add value to your SEO strategy, you can count on none of it being done with DIY SEO, just some predetermined path which doesn't really account for everything that makes your business and your market unique.

In an age where the algorithms keep advancing faster and subjective things like branding start playing a role in the search results, mechanical doesn't cut it.

DIY SEO is too prescriptive and limited in nature, and it is a backward looking product. What the phrase "for the rest of us" actually means is "good enough to rank on page 5 of the search results, where you will get virtually no search traffic and make no money."

Paint by Number SEO: An SEO Failure Case Study

Google doesn't always respond to marketing efforts in a predictable way. Consider what happened when Patrick purchased SearchEngineOptimization.net for over $60,000.

At the end of last year he tried to do a 301 redirect to get it to rank, but when it didn't work he asked Matt Cutts about it:

Google's spam czar Matt Cutts never responded (of course), but Patrick ended up having to remove that redirect. Months later that $60,000+ domain name was a "coming soon" page.

And now that the redirect has been removed the original redirected site does not rank as well as it did in the past. So that was certainly a lose / lose scenario.

And the worst part is, when he mentioned the strategy people warned him about what would happen right up front:

He would have been better off donating that money to charity!

Advanced SEO? Or Simpleton SEO?

I don't want to share too many examples of how/why/where their program falls short, but to pick a rather glaring one...

Links are the backbone of an effective SEO strategy. Patrick Gavin built from scratch the #1 link broker on the web - Text Link Ads. A few years back he sold that company for over $30 million. Since then links have only increased in importance while becoming harder to get, but if you check out the advice on links in DIY SEO (or at least when I recently checked it out), one of the "advanced" SEO tips was to ensure that you are not engaging in any link buying or selling.

The advanced tips were not sharing safe & effective link buying techniques. Nope.

The advice was to ensure you were not engaging in link buying or selling.

And, of course, on their own websites they don't follow their own advice.

What Do Effective SEO Campaigns Consist of?

I have no desire to out any of their specific websites (hey I have some crappy ones too), but when you look at the EFFECTIVE strategies that you see Andy and Patrick use in their own publishing efforts, at a minimum they contain strategies like:

  • buying old websites
  • buying strong domain names
  • selectively buying links
  • providing a bit of grease to certain About.com guides for coverage of new 1 page sites
  • nepotistically cross linking sites
  • launching top 100 linkbait lists about trending popular topics
  • building social media accounts to promote those lists
  • buying out some blogs to further seed giving legitimate looking coverage to those lists
  • launching egobait lists of topics like the top 100 ambidextrous hermaphrodite bloggers (complete with running an automated email script to alert people of the "award" they have won, with some people winning multiple awards in the same day - congrats again Nancy P. from Texas on your multiple meaningless awards + thanks for the links...your email address is now in the database, and you will win many more awards as they build out their portfolio of websites!!!!)

... all the clever bits of marketing that go into REAL SEO campaigns that compete on the competitive commercial web ... well that stuff is NOT part of the DIY SEO program.

And it likely won't EVER be, because it isn't paint by number.

Better Small Business SEO Solutions

Want an effective guide to small business SEO? Check out Matt McGee's small business SEO guide. It will give you more than the above program while only setting you back $25.

There are numerous free guides worth recommending as well. Both Bing and Google offer SEO starter guides. We created this one for non-profits, this one for bloggers, and this one for general business websites. SeoMoz offers a pretty good one too.

Interview of Tedster from WebmasterWorld

If you have been in the SEO field for any serious length of time you have probably come across (and benefited from) some of Tedster's work - either directly, or indirectly from others who have repackaged his contributions as their own. He is perhaps a bit modest, but there are few people in the industry as universally well respected as he is. I have been meaning to interview him for a while now, and he is going to be speaking at Pubcon South on April 14th in Dallas, so I figured now was as good a time as any :)

How long have you been an SEO, and how did you get into the field?

I started building websites in 1995 and the word SEO hadn't been invented. I came from a background in retail marketing, rather than technology or graphic design. So my orientation wasn't just "have I have built a good site?", but also "are enough people finding my site?"

The best method for bringing in traffic seemed to be the search engines, so I began discussing this kind of marketing with other people I found who had the same focus. Ah, the good old days, right? We were so basic and innocently focused, you know?

If you could list a few key documents that helped you develop your understanding of search, which would be the most important ones?

Here are a few documents that acted as major watersheds for me:

Is PageRank still crucial? Or have other things replaced it in terms of importance?

What PageRank is measuring (or attempting to measure) is still very critical — both the quality and number of other web pages that link to the given page. We don't need to worship those public PR numbers, but we definitely do need quality back-links (and quality internal linking) to rank well on competitive queries.

There appears to be something parallel to PR that is emerging from social media — some metric that uses the model of influencers or thought leaders. But even with that in the mix, ranking would still depend on links, but they would be modified a bit by "followers", "friends", since many social sites are cautious with do-follow links.

Lets play: I have got a penalty - SEO edition. Position 6, -30, 999, etc. Are these just bogus excuses from poor SEOs who have no job calling themselves SEOs, or are they legitimate filters & penalties?

If the page never ranked well, then yes - it could well be a bogus excuse by someone whose only claim to being an SEO is that they read an e-book and bought some rank tracking software. However, Google definitely has used very obvious numeric demotions for pages that used to rank at the top.

The original -30 penalty is an example that nailed even domain name "navigational" searches. It affected some sites that did very aggressive link and 301 redirect manipulation.

What was originally called the -950 (end of results) penalty, while never an exact number, most definitely sent some very well ranked pages down into the very deep pages. Those websites were often optimized by very solid SEO people, but then Google came along and decided that the methods were no longer OK.

In recent months, those exact number penalties seem to have slipped away, replaced something a bit more "floating" and less transparent. My guess is that a negative percentage is applied to the final run re-ranking, rather than subtracting a fixed number. Google's patent for Phrase-based Indexing does mention both possible approaches.

But even using percentages rather than a fixed number, when a top-ranked page runs afoul of some spam prevention filter, it can still tank pretty far. We just can't read the exact problem from the exact number of positions lost anymore.

Do you see Google as having many false positives when they whack websites?

Yes, unfortunately I do. From what I see, Google tends to build an algorithm or heuristic that gathers up all the URLs that seem to follow their "spam pattern du jour" — and then they all get whacked in one big sweep. Then the reconsideration requests and the forum or blog complaints start flying and soon Google changes some factor in that filter. Viola! Some of the dolphins get released from the tuna net.

One very public case was discussed on Google Groups, where an innocent page lost its ranking because a "too much white space" filter that misread the effect of an iframe!

Google's John Mueller fixed the issue manually by placing a flag on that one site to trigger a human inspection if it ever got whacked in the future. I'd assume that the particular filter was tweaked soon after, although there was no official word.

How many false positives does it take to add up to "many"? I'd guess that collateral damage is a single digit percentage at most — probably well under 5% of all filtered pages, and possibly less than 1%. It still hurts in a big way when it hits YOUR meticulously clean website. And even a penalty that incorrectly nails one site out of 300 can still affect quite a lot over the entire web.

How often when rankings tank do you think it is do to an algorithmic issue versus how often it is via an editorial issue with search employees?

When there are lots of similar complaints at the same time, then it's often a change in some algorithm factor. But if it's just one site, and that site hasn't done something radically new and different in recent times, then it's more likely the ranking change came from a human editorial review.

Human editors are continually doing quality review on the high volume, big money search results. It can easily happen that something gets noticed that wasn't seen before and that slipped through the machine part of the algorithm for a long time.

That said, it is scary how often sites DO make drastic errors and don't realize it. You see things like:

  • nofollow robots meta tags getting imported from the development server
  • robots.txt and .htaccess configurations gone way wrong
  • hacked servers that are hosting cloaked parasite content

Google did a big favor for honest webmasters with their "Fetch as googlebot" tool. Sometimes it's the easiest way to catch what those hacker criminals are doing.

When does it make sense for an SEO to decide to grovel to Google for forgiveness, and when should they try to fix it themselves and wait out an algorithmic response?

If you know what you've been doing that tripped the penalty, fix it and submit the Reconsideration Request. If you don't know, then work on it — and if you can't find a danged thing wrong, try the Google Webmaster Forums first, then a Request. When income depends on it, I say "grovel".

I don't really consider it groveling, in fact. The Reconsideration Request is one way Google acknowledges that their ranking system can do bad things to good websites.

I've never seen a case where a request created a problem for the website involved. It may not do any good, but I've never seen it do harm. I even know of a case where the first response was essentially "your site will never rank again" — but later on, it still did. There's always hope, unless your sites are really worthless spam.

Many SEOs theorize that sometimes Google has a bit of a 2-tier justice system where bigger sites get away with murder and smaller sites get the oppressive thumb. Do you agree with that? If no, please explain why you think it is an inaccurate view. If yes, do you see it as something Google will eventually address?

I'd say there is something like that going on — it comes mostly because Google's primary focus is on the end user experience. Even-handed fairness to all websites is on the table, but it's a secondary concern.

The end user often expects to see such and such an authority in the results, especially when it's been there in the past. So Google itself looks broken to a lot of people if that site gets penalized. They are between a rock and a hard place now.

What may happen goes something like this: an A-list website gets penalized, but they can repair their spam tactics and get released from their penalty a lot faster than some less prominent website would. It does seem that some penalties get released only on a certain time frame, but you don't see those time frames applied to an A-list.

This may even be an effect of some algorithm factor. If you watch the flow of data between the various Google IP addresses, you may see this: There are times when the domain roots from certain high value websites go missing and then come back. Several data center watchers I know feel that this is evidence for some kind of white-list.

If there is a white-list, then it requires a history of trust plus a strong business presence to get included. So it might make also sense that forgiveness can come quickly.

As a practical matter, for major sites there can easily be no one person who knows everything that is going on in all the business units who touch the website.

Someone down the org chart may hire an "SEO company" that pulls some funny business and Google may seem to turn a blind eye to it, because the site is so strong and so important to Google's end user. They may also just ignore those spam signals rather than penalize them.

Large authority site content mills are all the rage in early 2010. Will they still be an effective business model in 2013?

It's tough to see how this could be quickly and effectively reined in, at least not by algorithm. I assume that this kind of empty filler content is not very useful for visitors — it certainly isn't for me. So I also assume it must be on Google's radar.

I'd say there's a certain parallel to the paid links war, and Google's first skirmishes in that arena gave then a few black eyes. So I expect any address to the cheap content mills to be taken slowly, and mostly by human editorial review.

The problem here is that every provider of freelance content is NOT providing junk - though some are. As far as I know, there is no current semantic processing that can sort out the two.

Given that free forums have a fairly low barrier to entry there are perhaps false alarms every day on ringing in the next major update or some such. How do you know when change is the real deal? Do you passively track a lot of data? And what makes you so good at taking a sea of tidbits and sort of mesh them into a working theme?

I do watch a lot of data, although not nearly to the degree that I used to. Trying to reverse engineer the rankings is not as fruitful as it used to be —especially now that certain positions below the top three seem to be "audition spots" rather than actually earned rankings.

It helps to have a lot of private communications — both with other trusted SEOs and also with people who post on the forums. When I combine that kind of input with my study of the patents and other Google communications, usually patterns start to stand out.

When you say "audition spots" how does that differ from "actually earned rankings"? Should webmasters worry if their rankings bounce around a bit? How long does it typically take to stabilize? Are there any early signs of an audition going good or bad? Should webmasters try to adjust mid-stream, and if so, what precautions should they take?

At least in some verticals, Google seems to be using the bottom of page 1 to give promising pages a "trial" to see how they perform. The criteria for passing these trials or "auditions" are not very clear, but something about the page looks good to Google, and so they give it a shot.

So if a page suddenly pops to a first page ranking from somewhere deep, that's certainly a good sign. But it doesn't mean that the new ranking is stable. If a page has recently jumped way up, it may also go back down. I wouldn't suggest doing anything drastic in such situations, and I wouldn't overestimate that new ranking, either. It may only be shown to certain users and not others. As always, solid new backlinks can help - especially if they are coming from an area of the web that was previously not heard from in the backlink profile. But I wouldn't play around with on-page or on-site factors at a time like that.

There's also a situation where a page seems to have earned a lot of recent backlinks but there's something about those links that smells a bit unnatural. In cases like that, I've seen the page get a page one position for just certain hours out of the day. But again, it's the total backlink profile and its diversity that I think is in play. If you've done some recent "link building" but it's all one type, or the anchor text is too obviously manipulated, then look around for some other kinds of places to attract some diversity in future backlinks.

On large & open forums lots of people tend to have vastly different experience sets, knowledge sets, and even perhaps motives. How important is your background knowledge of individuals in determining how to add their input into your working theme? Who are some of the people you trust the most in the search space?

I try never to be prejudiced by someone's recent entry into the field. Sometimes a very new person makes a key observation, even if they can't interpret it correctly.

There is a kind of "soft SEO" knowledge that is rampant today and it isn't going to go away. It's a mythology mill and it's important not to base a business decision on SEO mythology. So, I trust hands on people more than manager types and front people for businesses. If you don't walk the walk, then for me your talk is highly suspect.

I pay attention to how people use technical vocabulary — do they say URL when they mean domain name? Do they say tag when they mean element or attribute? Not that we don't all use verbal shortcuts, but when a pattern of technical precision becomes clear, then I listen more closely.

I have long trusted people who do not have prominent "names" as well as some who do. But I also trust people more within their area of focus, and not necessarily when they offer opinions in some other area.

I hate to make a list, because I know someone is going to get left out accidentally. Let's just say "the usual suspects." But as an example, if Bruce Clay says he's tested something and discovered "X", you can be pretty sure that he's not blowing sunshine.

Someone who doesn't have huge name recognition, but who I appreciate very much is Dave Harry (thegypsy). That's partly because he pays attention to Phrase-based Indexing and other information retrieval topics that I also watch. I used to feel like a lone explorer in those areas before I discovered Dave's contributions.

What is the biggest thing about Google where you later found out you were a bit off, but were pretty certain you were right?

That's easy! Using the rel="nofollow" attribute for PR sculpting. Google made that method ineffective long before I stopped advocating it. I think I actually blushed when I read the comment from Matt Cutts that the change had been in place for over a year.

What is the biggest thing about Google where you were right on it, but people didn't believe until months or years later?

The reality of the poorly named "minus 950" penalty. I didn't name it, by the way. It just sort of evolved from the greater community, even though I kept trying for "EOR" or "End Of Results.

At PubCon South I believe you are speaking on information architecture. How important is site structure to an effective SEO strategy? Do you see it gaining or losing importance going forward?

It is hugely important - both for search engines and for human visitors.

Information Architecture (IA) has also been one the least well understood areas in website development. IA actually begins BEFORE the technical site structure is set up. Once you know the marketing purpose of the site, precisely and in granular detail, then IA is next.

IA involves taking all the planned content and putting it into buckets. There are many different ways to bucket any pile of content. Some approaches are built on rather personal idiosyncrasies, and other types can be more universally approachable. Even if you are planning a very elaborate, user tagged "faceted navigation" system, you still need to decide on a default set of content buckets.

That initial bucketing process then flows into deciding the main menu structure. Nest you choose the menu labels, and this is the stage where you fix the actual menu labels and fold in keyword research. But if a site is built on inflexible keyword targets from the start, then it can often be a confusing mess for a visitor to navigate.

As traffic data grows in importance for search ranking, I do see Information Architecture finally coming into its own. However, the value for the human visitor has always clearly visible on the bottom line.

What are some of the biggest issues & errors you see people make when setting up their IA?

There are two big pitfalls I run into all the time:

  • Throwing too many choices at the visitor. Macy's doesn’t put everything they sell in their display windows, and neither should a website.
  • Using the internal organization of the business as the way to organize the website. That includes merely exporting a catalog to a web interface.

How would you compare PubCon South against other conferences you have attended in the past?

PubCon South is a more intimate venue than, say Vegas. That means less distraction and more in-depth networking. Even though people do attend from all over the world, there is a strong regional attendance that also gives the conference a different flavor — one that I find a very healthy change of pace.

In addition, PubCon has introduced a new format — the Spotlight Session. One entire track is made completely of Spotlight Sessions with just one or two presenters, rather than an entire panel. These are much more interactive and allow us to really stretch out on key topics.

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Thanks Tedster! If you want to see Tedster speak he will be at Pubcon Dallas on the 14th, and if you want to learn about working with him please check out Converseon. You can also read his latest musings on search and SEO by looking into the Google forums on WebmasterWorld. A few months back Tedster also did an interview with Stuntdubl.

TopSEOs.com - A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service

Who is going to pay to tell people that they are good enough and their lives are fine as they are? A fundamental truth of advertising is that advertising the truth usually isn't very profitable - which is why there is lead generation, affiliate programs, public relations, negative billing options, small print, bogus medical research, and so on... ;)

Ever wonder how an SEO professional can charge first world rates to do third rate, third world work and still get a top rating from a heavily advertised SEO rating website? Edward Lewis has the lowdown on Top SEOs, including TopSEOs complaints.

[edit: above links removed, as Edward sold his site at some point & then the person who bought it later sold it to TopSEOs, so the above links would have led to lead generation forms for some unsavory SEO folks.]

A big part of the problem with the affiliate business model is when people offer fake rankings / ratings and only promote whoever pays them the most. The person/company which can afford to pay the most for leads often can only afford to because there is hidden risk or hidden cost in the service, or because they don't deliver on their promises. An analogy here is those AAA rated mortgage backed securities where an S&P employee explained, "We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it."

The biggest brands don't pay as much per lead because they don't have to. They invest in brand and quality of customer service. The best service-based companies don't need to pay cut-rate ad prices to advertise. The best SEO companies have far more demand for their time than time to pay to hunt for customers.

I remember back in 2006 when one of the currently "top rated SEOs" did work for my wife's website (before she met me). That SEO firm did nothing but outsource overseas irrelevant reciprocal link exchanges and her website *would not rank* for any semi-competitive keywords until *after* the reciprocal links page was removed from her site. After we took down those reciprocal links and built some quality links the site started to rank. We changed the FTP details as well because that guy's services were not only not worth paying for...the reciprocal links were proved to be damaging, and we didn't want him to put them back up. And in spite of not doing any services for months (and certainly no services worth paying for), this person wanted to ensure they got paid for 12 months of "service." And they didn't want to let the contract end when it was supposed to either. They were all sales, all the time. It didn't matter that they were selling ineffective garbage.

What eventually stopped the credit card charges was when I wrote him via email "If her credit card is charged again we will be doing a reverse charge and a full writeup on the service."

He responded to that with the following:

I would watch your comments and threats my friend as you have no idea of what I am capable of or who I am - this is a small industry and if you are trying to be a an up an coming player in it this is not the way to do it by bashing your competition. A simple email professionally stating that you were unhappy with the service would have sufficed and I would have looked into to make sure Giovanna got what she paid for.

I have run 2 optimization companies and have been in this business for 12 years now. With my contacts at Google and the other main engines I can get your ebook website banned within 1-2 days if this is how you do business - with threats and slander - keep it up.

The funny thing is all I said was that if he tried charging again (past the contract) that we would reverse charges. And yet the sleazeball told me to "watch your comments and threats" and that he could use "contacts at Google and other main engines" to get my website banned.

What a jerk.

I have always had contempt for blowhards, and for pure hard-sales salesmen who put sales first and are willfully ignorant of their trade and/or who are willing to sell garbage product without any concern for the customer's welfare.

I am grateful that the above mentioned person sucked at what they did & ripped people off back then. If they were not out scamming people and actually provided a useful service then my wife wouldn't have had a reason to contact me and meet me and marry me. ;)

I let it go for over 3 years, but if they are still scamming people then that needs to stop. I figure its only right that I write this post as a fair warning. All good things must come to an end. And so should bad things. Hopefully these clowns quite scamming people. Enough is enough.

Update: 3 years later the fake ratings continue. BigMouthMedia was rated a top SEO agency by Top SEOs, even when it no longer existed as a distinct company after a merger years earlier. Top SEOs is so bogus with their ratings that they even put out a press release announcing the above rating of the above non-company!

Is Alexa Relevant in 2010?

We recently reviewed a bunch of competitive research tools, and in that spirit I thought it would be a good idea to review Alexa. It is not that Alexa is the #1 service available, but they do provide one of the better services while being free. Every few years it seems they fall behind and become a bit of a relic, and then every few years they catch up.

Recently when using Alexa I saw they added a good number of features, so I thought it would be worth doing a run down.

Traffic


What Alexa is most popular for - their traffic rank, is popular because it has been around for a long time and is well referenced. I don't consider it to be a high value tool in terms of accuracy though. I think all these traffic estimation tools have a big margin for error, and its easy to read too much into the base/core number. Having mentioned that, you can try to use traffic data from Alexa, Google Website Trends / DoubleClick Ad Planner, Compete.com, and Quantcast to try to see how well they agree in terms of the traffic volume of a site or the relative volume between multiple sites in the same vertical.

In spite of my lack of faith in the Alexa rank numbers some people do put weight on it. Some investors use it. And when Markus Friend was launching PlentyOfFish he redirected Alexa users away from his site to stay below radar until his site was strong.

Pageviews Per Visit

This is a good hint at how compelling people find a particular website. Sites which are driven by arbitrage efforts typically are not very engaging, hoping to either sell something right away or get people off the site. They also offer a time on site feature which you can use to compare how sticky sites are.

Bounce Rate

This is basically a flip of the above...people who see 1 page and then are gone. You can see in the yellow area where we tested using a pop up. While the pop up did get more people to register on our site, we dropped the pop up because it was somewhat inconsistent with the rest of our marketing (our core audience of customers tends to tilt torward the expert end) and the types of people who were receptive to pop ups were not as good of a longterm fit for our site as customers.

Downstream Traffic Sources

Who are they sending traffic to? Where do their visitors go after leaving the site?

Upstream Traffic Sources

Who is sending them traffic? In many ways this can be unsurprising, but certain sites end up being more or less dependent on social media due to certain things like if they appeal to younger or older customers, what they are doing offline, if they are producing linkbait relevant to a specific audience which is heavily integrated into social media.

This can also help you locate some advertising locations, figure out how reliant they are on search, and help you see which sites in the vertical they are closely aligned with. DoubleClick Ad Planner also has a pretty awesome traffic affinity feature.

Search Traffic Percent

This shows the percentage of their traffic which comes from search engines. If it is abnormally high, that might mean the site has a search-heavy focus and needs some thickening out in terms of community participation and developing other traffic streams. If it is abnormally low, and you have similar link profiles to other sites that are higher, then it might mean that you are missing some important keywords that you should target. This is where digging in for more data with a tool like SEM Rush or Compete.com shines.

Subdomains

Do they have a membership area to their site? If they host it on a subdomain you can see how active they are. Having anywhere near 5% or 10% of your traffic in the private member's area is quite good if you have a well connected high traffic website. You can also see that our tools subdomain is a quite popular section of our site.

Top Search Queries

You can use this to find some of the most important keywords for a competing site. If some of your best keywords are being revealed it might make sense to publish some filler content on a popular topic that is hard to monetize so that it better shields some of your best keywords from free public viewing.

If you install the Alexa toolbar they will also show you a bit more query data and list some opportunities for that site on the paid search front.

Demographics

You can see what countries a particular site is popular in.

And you can get more detailed demographic data on a per site basis.

Many sites within the same field will have fairly similar demographic targets, but even things like at work vs at home can indicate if the site is primarily targeting independent types or corporate types. When compared against the above, notice how (generally) SeoMoz has a fairly similar audience composition:

They skew a bit younger (I think sometimes my cynical nature turns off some young pople), a bit more college educated (they go to like 10x as many SEO conferences as I do), and we are perhaps a bit more popular with self employed people. And then for Search Engine Land you can see that they have a similar profile to SEO Moz, but with even more people at work and more college educated people.

And then you have sites which are extreme demographic outliers. Ever wonder who the customers are for those websites primarily marketed through hyped up email launch sequences by affiliates?

Well throw some of those sites into Alexa, and you will find that for many of those sites it appears the target market is: old desperate and gullible men from the US who failed at life, still don't have a good b/s meter, and want to believe there is a silver bullet they can use now to automatically generate wealth. They can't, of course, but there is a crew that will sell them that story and get rich by working over the remaining crumbs in their retirement accounts.

I am betting that part of why our age distribution is a bit more flat than most other SEO sites is because we offer free tools which are recommended to some of the audiences that buy the launch product stuff (or, that is my theory, based on some of them left their member's areas not password protected and sent a bunch of traffic at our site).

How do your demographic profiles compare to other sites in your space? Have you checked out all the features Alexa has added? What do you think of them?

Ask.com Leads the Charge to Monetize the Second Click

Ask has removed referral data from many of their ads, leaving advertisers flying blind. Ask.com, which has long been known as one of the leading Google AdWords arbitrage plays, also syndicated their ad feed to the point where Google forced them to turn off syndication. From there Ask has look for new ways to arbitrage search. They have created an automated deals section...

Which has over a million pages indexed in Google!

And the Ask.com search results themselves are a bit rough. Some of them promote featured articles from other IAC parners

Many of them have Ask.com answers in them, which scrapes questions and answers from across the web and wraps them in ads.

And some of the search results have multiple lead generation boxes on them (without any disclosure).

A good chunk of them have Wikipedia listed, but wrapped in ads & hosted by Ask.

A few more vertical ad types and/or general purpose web services (to complement answers, news, local, lead generation, Wikipedia, FreeBases, PPC ads) and a search engine would have no need to send searchers anywhere but to advertisers and itself.

I have no doubt that Ask's search results monetize at a higher rate than Google's, but that aggressive monetization also costs them marketshare. It is a trade off every business faces: maximizing short term yield, while keeping the business healthy and growing in the market.

Given that Google has been testing lead generation AdWords ads, pushing maps hard (while testing ads in the maps results - along with beta tests in big money categories like hotels), paid inclusion in their product search, and product images in the organic search results ... it wouldn't be surprising to see Google clone whatever looks like it is working good for Ask.

But Google will have to move slower on many of these fronts, because if they move too quickly they won't be able to defuse the blowback and anti-trust concerns. Given their recent user privacy snafu, and the current brand ad push where they are now trying to promote the categories they once claimed to have hate, the last thing they want to do is give people more reasons to distrust them and give regulators more reasons to give them another look. So new features launch as a limited beta test / experiment to a subset of users (and in many cases free to advertisers) to slowly release their business plans in a way that does not create too much concern. Small steps bring limited regulatory interference, and by the time concerns are voiced they can say "we have done that for years."

But as the Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) of the web, I wonder if it is a good idea for Google to make blog posts with titles like Now it's easy to switch to Google Apps from Microsoft® Exchange. The broader they spread search, the more likely they are to find their words working against them at some point. They can't claim to be agnostic while self serving ads and writing how to guides on switching away from competitors.

Mixergy Interview

I was recently interviewed on Mixergy. :)

I love Andrew's energy & wish I had a bit more of his optimism, but years of marketing have turned me a weee bit cynical ;)

Here is the interview Andrew did of me:

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

And here is a recent interview of Andrew by Wall St. Cheat Sheet:

A couple other interviews I recently did, in case you haven't seen them: AdvanceMe & Ralph Wilson.

Embedded Structural Contempt for Personal Freedom

I must confess to being a junky for reading economics and investing sites. A person can't beat the market for a long period of time without having some skills, and so the level of discourse you find on top investing blogs blows other areas out of the water. And sometimes the comments are more quote-worthy and insightful than the blog posts. For instance, "The organisation of society is for one purpose only, to separate as much labor-value from the majority as is possible."

Cynical? Or Realistic?

Some people might look at the above quote and say "well that is cynical" but the truth of a debt based money system means that many people MUST fall behind and be impoverished by debt. How else do you explain most people having nothing saved for retirement going into our jobless recovery, while their children get to eat nearly 6 figures of debt just for being born?

It is fraudulent, but it is how "the system" is set up, and until enough people get outraged by it, it will continue:

That chart of diminishing returns is the window to understanding why humankind is trapped in a central banker debt backed money box. No money for NASA manned space flight - NASA's total budget a puny $18 billion in comparison to the $1.9 Trillion that went to service the bankers last year. One half the schools closing in Kansas City, states whose debts and budget deficits seem insurmountable all pale in comparison to how much money went to service the use of our own money system.

It doesn't have to be like that, in fact it's a ridiculous notion that the people of the United States, or any country, should pay private individuals for the use of their money system. Ridiculous!

It's difficult to see this from inside the box, so let's look at what happened to Iceland to illustrate. The central banks of the world created financial engineered products and brought them to the banks of Iceland. These products created a boom in the amount of credit. Prices of everything rose, and the people of Iceland then had no choice but to go along for the bubble ride. Then with incomes no longer able to service the bubble debt, the bubble collapsed.

To "save the day," the IMF and central bankers around the world rushed in to "rescue" the people, banks, and government of Iceland. They did this by offering loans... documents that create money simply by signing a contract of debt servitude. That contract demanded ownership of Iceland's infrastructure such as their geothermal electrical generating plants. It also demanded the future productivity of the people of Iceland in that they should work and pay high taxes for decades to pay back this "debt." Debt that they did not create or agree to service in the first place!

There were some wise people who saw through this central banker game and started a movement. They DEMANDED that the President of Iceland put the debt servitude to a vote and the people wisely said, "Central Bankers Pound Sand!"

How Structural Accounting Fraud Produces "Wealth"

All around the world banksters make large bets, and lever up on any kind of fraud they can spread to blow huge speculative bubbles. When/while they win, they keep the profits. When they lose (an inevitable consequence of blowing huge economic bubbles), they threaten to destroy the economy if someone else doesn't cover their losses. The correct term to describe the strategy is financial terrorism.

They Don't Make Presidents Like They Used To!

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs" - Thomas Jefferson

Some people thought the current US president would be different than the most recent president. It is the populist angle he based his campaign on. But promptly after entering office he got on his knees for the banking class. "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." - Dick Durbin.

Non-transparency = Fraud

The sad reality is we are headed toward bankruptcy and are implementing exactly the wrong strategies if we have any hope to get out of it. Years after the fraudulent bailouts were passed in the U.S. (against the will of the people) the Federal Reserve is still withholding information and appealing legal requests, and key members are willing to commit perjury to maintain secrecy. When they gave away a half-trillion Dollars to foreign interests they couldn't even share who got the money.

The don't worry, trust us angle doesn't hold water when the mathematical realities of failure hit us all. "Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don't see why it wouldn't be here" - Gerald O'Driscoll, former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Until the bankers who looted Trillions of Dollars via mortgage fraud see jail time I don't think there is any hope for change. The system is rotten to the core, from the top down.

Moral Hazard in Context

Normally we make laws to prevent such corruption: "In the early years of the London insurance market, it was possible to buy a life insurance policy on a complete stranger. Then insurance companies noticed the high incidence of unexpected homicides among their lives assured, and the concept of insurable interest was devised, codified by the Life Assurance Act of 1774. Today, you can’t buy a life insurance policy unless you can demonstrate some loss by the assured party’s death. The business is safer that way!"

In paying banksters for losing money & relaxing accounting standards (so they can claim false profits while losing money), they are only encouraged to commit more fraud. It's moral hazard writ large.

Stolen vs Earned

Give anyone a trillion Dollars to play the market, backstop the losses on the losing half and let them keep the profits on the winning trades and they will make billions. It's so easy a monkey could do it. And yet it is considered a legitimate trade for bankers to do just that.

Most of these large financial companies are entirely parasitic in their nature, providing society with no real or lasting value - stealing whatever they earn while creating economic distortions that harmfully misallocate capital. Whatever scam they can use to steal your retirement will be deployed: "Quite bluntly, the clueless dolts who allowed [high frequency trading] to occur need to be publicly excoriated, fired from their job as exchange officials, and driven out of town on a rail. Oh, and, all the gains from this organized theft should be clawed back from all the front-running firms that stole this money — THAT’S RIGHT, ITS THEFT — one quarter cent at a time. - Barry Ritholtz"

A top investment bank can give you bogus trading tips on a stock over a half-dozen times in a row - while trading against the (mis)information they share publicly to move the markets. But if someone else trades against that information before they do it is illegal and must be stopped.

How is This Relevant to the Web?

The web shifts the flows of information and finance. The above mention folks in positions of authority don't like that much.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

Popularity is the inequality in supply and demand, equalized by price. The web allows for a direct connection between content creators and their audiences with little to no intermediation:

This isn’t complicated. In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.

The inventor of the web & leaders of other popular internet services think government transparency is important. Many people view access to the WWW as a fundamental human right.

What do elected officials like Jay Rockefeller think? The internet should have never existed.

Numerous governments have aimed at destroying WikiLeaks due to fake security concerns, while some government agencies track social network activity. Lets not forget how many governments are willing to outright lie to their own populous to gain support for bogus wars. War is a racket. It always has been. Just like our banking system!

The freedom and opportunity the web represent can't last long. If it does, many of the above concerns will try to regulate it or (rightfully) find themselves irrelevant.

Where do you place your bets? And who is betting against you?

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