Starting the Process

Cash (lots of it). Work in PJ's from Home. Fame. Fake Twitter Friends. For many folks who decide to give SEO the good ol' college try those are likely some of the major reasons why they decide to dive into the industry.

Those same tenets are typically reinforced by slimy internet marketers most new entrants run across in their travels around the SEO world. They are strong selling points, no question about it, and they hit on the times we are currently living in.

Who wouldn't want to work from home, or work for themselves, or work whenever they want?

Unfortunately, by the time someone willing to do the work and learn about the business reaches a solid source of SEO information they might already have been taken for thousands of bucks by Joe Blow Internet Marketing Guru or Joe Schmo the Social Media Guru. In this economy most folks cannot afford to lose that amount upfront and either:

• have enough resources to continue
• have enough resources to continue + enough trust to continue

Or maybe someone really wants to get started in the industry but needs some tips on how to keep initial costs down while getting their feet wet and learning without losing their shirt.

For more on the exploits of some of the more well-known internet marketing folks, I'd suggest visiting the Salty Droid.

Run a Lean SEO Project

So to start an SEO project you need a couple of basic things (assuming you don't already have these and/or a business you are doing SEO for):

• an idea of what your site is going to be about
• product(s) to sell either yourself of via an affiliate program

You could also build a site about a topic or specific topics and utilize Google AdSense as a means of revenue.

You can even create your own product based on your knowledge and sell it via monthly e-newsletters, a video training series, consulting, and by sharing your knowledge via a community forum.

This model would likely be a bit more costly based on software needed, programming help you might need, etc. However, it is something you can eventually build towards as you earn revenue from other activities.

Places to Find Products

You can try applying to a variety of affiliate networks like:

• Commission Junction
• Linkshare
• Performics

Those are some of the bigger ones so you may not get accepted without a site or a referral. No worries though, you can try smaller networks like:

• Epic Direct
• Affiliate.Com
• Hydra Media
• Neverblue
• XY7

sidebar: Be aware many of the smaller affiliate networks are known for using their publisher data to compete directly against their publishers. Some also go so far as finding out where the publishers are buying ads to try to cut the affiliate out of the loop that way. Here is a short tip for how trustworthy an affiliate network is: if their leading offers are the types of offers that you will likely see covered by the FTC in 6 to 12 months (like the reverse billing fraud stuff for vaporware "products") then it might be worth skipping them, as any company which is built on pushing scams likely scams business partners as well.

Also, you can use Amazon Associates or Clickbank to find a variety of products to promote.

So far, you've spent $0.00 and you should have an idea of what you want to build a site about and ideas on what kind of products you'll be promoting (or how you will monetize the site).

Keyword Tools

There are a variety of keyword tools on the market. You can utilize a slew of Google tools for free:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google's Search Based Keyword Tool
• Google Trends
• Google Insights
• Google Suggest (just start typing something into the search bar)
• Google Sets

Wordtracker is a well-known paid tool and it powers our free Keyword Tool. This can be helpful as an alternative to Google-provided data.

Many keyword tools sold by internet marketers are powered by Google, so all you are really paying for is a different UI and some (usually) useless metrics layered on by the marketer as a way to differentiate their tool from Google.

So now you've got an idea for a site, products to sell, and keywords to target. Your total cost = $0.00.

Domain Registration & Web Hosting

There are lots and lots of choices here. For the sake of simplicity let's look at some common options for both. For domain registration:

• GoDaddy (watch out for the unrelenting upsells)
• Moniker
• Namecheap

Sometimes you can find coupon codes for domain registrars simply by searching for them online. Inside our community forums members routinely share coupons they receive from domain registrars :)

Let's say you went with Moniker for your site, which at first glance offered the lowest initial price of a com as of this writing, and you opted for domain privacy for an additional cost.

Now you are up to roughly $14/year in costs.

Typically it is a good idea to keep registration and hosting separate for the sake of portability and reliability. For web hosting when first starting out you could certainly get by with hosting from reliable shared hosts like:

• HostGator
• Bluehost
• Dreamhost

All these hosts are suitable for a new site that you are going to develop and grow judiciously. As traffic grows and grows you may want to upgrade to a dedicated server or a larger shared plan but for now a basic plan on these hosts is just fine.

Hostgator is a shared host you can scale up with, with respect to dedicated or virtual servers and such. So as of this writing you can snag one year's worth of hosting on their basic plan for approximately $66.72 ($5.56 per month if you prepay for a year).

So now you've got hosting, a domain, keywords to target, and products to sell for your site all for the annual cost of around $80.

Link Research Tools

There are link research tools that sell for upwards of $500 per month! Now, they might be just fine for enterprise level stuff but you can get a fair amount of data from some free tools and free accounts on paid services:

• SoloSEO will give you a list of search operators you can use to find link opportunities in your niche (based on keyword entered) for free
• OpenSiteExplorer.Org a intuitive link research tool with lots of features and data points. As of this writing a free trial is available and then it's $99/mo for access to SeoMoz's complete toolset.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer a free tool which returns backlinks to a url, typically sorted by strongest top to bottom.
• Blekko gives backlink data as well as anchor text information for free
• Majestic SEO has perhaps the largest database of links and link data on the publicly available market. Plans vary from starter packages to enterprise solutions.

Naturally, our SEO Toolbar and Seo4Firefox both link through to free data sources within Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Yahoo!. :D

You can also access Majestic's paid data as part of a subscription to Raven SEO tools (which does a lot more than link research as you'll see).

Since you are starting/running one site you can take advantage of Raven's $19/mo pricing and access a ton of helpful tools and up to 10 Majestic reports (which is plenty on a monthly basis).

Link Tracking

As you build links and acquire links, you'll want to track the status of those links and make sure the ones you've acquired are holding up their end of the bargain (not disappearing on you). You can track link building efforts manually with Word/Excel or through a CRM or through some other method. That gets old fast. Tracking links is something you don't want to do manually (making sure the links are still pointing to your site).

Raven's toolset has both of those bases covered. With their $19/mo plan you can monitor up to 500 links and manage up to 1,000 link records (managing new opportunities, pending links, etc). Raven's toolset is 100% in the cloud so all of the heavy lifting gets done on their servers.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool that is spoken highly of by many members of our community. You can get the basic account for just $99/year and get the ability to track a ton of links from within the program (software).

Alright so let's say you decided that while Advanced Link Manager is a great piece of software, you don't need the full power just yet and you decide to hit up Raven for link tracking, monitoring, and research at $19/mo.

So your annual recurring tab is $308 and you've got the following items covered:

• keywords to target
• link tracking
• link monitoring
• link research
• links to target
• domain
• hosting
• stuff to sell

Analytics Tools

You can use Google Analytics which is free, save for the cost of your data :)

Some other analytics providers you can use for free or for a low cost are:

• Clicky
• Mint
• Piwik

Piwik is free and you need to install it on your server, much like Mint. Mint is $30 per site, as a one time fee. Clicky has free plan but it has ads and lacks some of their better features.

Mint doesn't have some of goal tracking and custom functionality of Clicky and Clicky can be had for $29.99/yr if you prepay. You can scale up with Clicky and place more sites in your account as you start to develop more sites and such.

I like the additional features of Clicky and I'd rock either Clicky or Mint when first starting out. You can certainly choose Google Analytics, which is feature rich and free.

As a new site, with likely no branding while trying to monetize, I'd probably wait a bit until I started handing over data to Google. This post on why Google Analytics isn't really "free" is a must read.

As a side note, Raven integrates with Google Analytics in case you decide to go with GA. So now your running an annual bill of around $338 (if you choose Clicky or Mint).

Rank Checking Tools

We offer a free rank checker tool, which is also accessible via our SEO Toolbar, via our free firefox extensions. If you are looking for ways to make graphical charts via the data you get from our rank checker you can follow the tips listed here.

Advanced Web Ranking can be purchased as a standalone program or in conjunction with Advanced Link Manager as a bundle. Both programs are solid but they do have a slight learning curve, however the functionality of the software makes the learning part worth it. The basic packages do not include customized reports but you can easily export the data. The package deal is $149.

Even though AWR/ALM are fantastic options, since we are assuming you are already paying for Raven's suite of tools (and we are being cost-conscious) we can move ahead with rank checking from either Raven and/or our free Rank Checker.

Raven's rank checking runs once per week so it's handy to have another tool to spot check once and awhile (our Rank Checker can be run at anytime). So you are still at roughly $338. :D

Building the Site

Now that you've got most of the back-office stuff set up you can get your site on the web. Wordpress.Org is free, powerful, easy to use, and used by most web marketers that I know. Sometimes free themes can be dangerous so you have to be careful when installing those types of themes.

Smashing Magazine generally has some decent themes and you can pick up affordable themes from a place like ThemeForest.

There are also premium Wordpress themes like Thesis and StudioPress where you can get a single license and theme for around $80. These themes have solid support and strong, built in design and SEO options (which reduces your reliance on plugins to some degree, at least the basic SEO-type ones).

If you are unfamiliar with Wordpress or HTML (if you decide to build your site outside of Wordpress) then you better become familiar with them. All the tools in the world, free or paid, won't help you if you aren't willing to learn how to use them or the underlying engine that drives them.

Lynda.Com has some solid training that covers just about everything and there are free online resources you can use like:

• Wordpress Codex
• HTML Dog
• W3 Schools
• Wordpress Forums

If you go with a free theme, or one that doesn't have SEO controls built in, then you'll want to consider the All In One SEO Pack for your SEO needs.

You can also find competent, affordable Wordpress developers or designers on sites like Elance or Odesk to help design or tweak the design of your theme.

Ok so you found a nicely designed, free theme over at Smashing Magazine and you've got the All in One SEO Pack ready to go. How about logos and content?

Logos and Content

If you want an icon for your business you can look around on a site like istockphoto.com for ideas and icon sets or you can get a ready made logo from the 99 Designs Logo Store for $99, which you can customize or have customized.

It's important to note that you don't have the rights to trademark either of these (or claim them as your own) and as time goes on and you start to brand your site, it would be wise to invest in a customized logo which you own the full rights to, can trademark as a symbol of your business, etc.

You can write the content yourself or use a service like TextBroker or the aforementioned Elance or Odesk.

For site graphics (buttons, icons, etc) you can use GraphicRiver (owned by the same folks at ThemeForest.Net) for nicely designed, affordable graphics.

You could easily budget a couple hundred bucks here for a logo, some graphical pieces, and some content (and even some stock photos from istockphoto.com) and probably have what you need to get started. Assuming that, your current cost for a 12 month period would be $538.

Promoting the Site

In just about any industry you enter, there are many ways for you to promote your site for free (minus the cost of your time of course). Twitter, Facebook, online forums, blogs, and so on are all ways to reach people in your market or niche. Using the SoloSEO link tool we mentioned before, you can find all sorts of blogs and communities related to your niche (by keyword).

You may want to hold off on monetizing the site if you are using AdSense and/or affiliate products until you've earned some semblance of trust within your market. Otherwise, you risk being shunned as someone who is just looking to make money and is not adding value or whatever.

Funny thing is, most people who'd shun you are online to make money too (weird how that works) but I digress. Point is to earn some trust (and links) before you start selling stuff or clicks.

For Twitter, you can use a site like Twellow to find people and businesses by categories and markets.

Time Cost vs $ Cost

Some of these "free" options are free in terms of $ but not in time. That's the trade off and there's no real way around it. You can likely outsource quite a bit of this stuff but then you risk losing the personal touch associated with your site or business that you are trying to brand.

Think of how often you are marketed to in a given day online.....whether its in your email, on Facebook and Twitter, those creepy ads that follow you around the web, etc. If you come out of the gate ready to add value and can hold off on monetizing for a bit (and integrate it smartly when you do) then your ahead of many other people that just want to come online and SELL SELL SELL!

Hopefully you can avoid a lot of unnecessary costs upfront which should help you with holding off on going commercial. We covered most aspects of getting started and ongoing tracking here, with a total 12/mo cost of less than $600!

Clearly if you are going into SEO on a shoestring budget, you don't want to compete for mega-competitive keywords but you can certainly take this approach with less competitive markets and scale up as needed.

An "Algorithmic" Approach

When it comes to buying links, Google not only fights it with algorithms, but also ran a 5-year long FUD campaign, introduced nofollow as a proprietary filter, encouraged webmasters to rat on each other, and has engineers hunting for paid links. On top of that, Google's link penalties range from subtle to overt.

Google claims that they do not want to police low quality content by trying to judge intent, that doing so would not be scalable enough to solve the problem, & that they need to do it algorithmically. At the same time, Google is willing to manually torch some sites and basically destroy the associated businesses. Talk to enough SEOs and you will find stories of carnage - complete decimation.

Economics Drive Everything

Content farms are driven by economics. Make them unprofitable (rather than funding them) and the problem solves itself - just like Google AdWords does with quality scores. Sure you can show up on AdWords where you don't belong and/or with a crappy scam offer, but you are priced out of the market so losses are guaranteed. Hello $100 clicks!

How many content farms would Google need to manually torch to deter investment in the category? 5? Maybe 10? 20 tops? Does that really require a new algorithmic approach on a web with 10's of millions of websites?

When Google nuked a ton of article banks a few years back the damage was fairly complete and lasted a long time. When Google nuked a ton of web directories a few years back the damage was fairly complete and lasted a long time. These were done in sweeps where on day you would see 50 sites lose their toolbar PageRank & see a swan dive in traffic. Yet content farms are a sacred cow that need an innovated "algorithmic" approach.

One Bad Page? TORCHED

If they feel an outright ban would be too much, then they could even dial the sites down over time if they desired to deter them without immediately killing them. Some bloggers who didn't know any better got torched based on a single blog post:

The Forrester report discusses a recent “sponsored conversation” from Kmart, but I doubt whether mentions that even in that small test, Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more.

One post and the ENTIRE SITE got torched.

An Endless Sea of Garbage

How many garbage posts have you seen on content farms?

When you look at garbage content there are hundreds of words on the page screaming "I AM EXPLOITATIVE TRASH." Yet when you look at links they are often embedded inline and there is little context to tell if the link is paid or not, and determine if the link was an organic reference or something that is paid for.

Why is it that Google is comfortable implying intent with links, but must look the other way when it comes to content?

Purchasing Distribution

Media is a game of numbers, and so content companies have various layers of quality they mix in to make it harder for Google to find signal from noise. Yahoo! has fairly solid content in their sports category, but then fluff it out with top 10 lists and such from Associated Content. Now Yahoo! is hoping they can offset lower quality with a higher level of personalization:

The Yahoo platform aims to draw from a user’s declared preferences, search items, social media and other sources to find and highlight the most relevant content, according to the people familiar with the matter. It will be available on Yahoo’s Web site, but is optimized to work as an app on tablets and smartphones, and especially on Google Android and Apple devices, they said.

AOL made a big splash when they bought TechCrunch for $25 million. When AOL's editorial strategy was recently leaked it highlighted how they promoted cross linking their channels to drive SEO strategy. And, since acquisition, TechCrunch has only scaled up on the volume of content they produce. In the last 2 days I have seen 2 advertorials on TechCrunch where the conflicting relationship was only mentioned *after* you read the post. One was a Google employee suggesting Wikipedia needs ads, and the other was some social commerce platform guy promoting the social commerce revolution occurring on Facebook.

Being at the heart of technology is a great source of link equity to funnel around their websites. TechCrunch.com already has over 25% as many unique linking domains as AOL.com does. One of the few areas that is more connected on the social graph than technology is politics. AOL just bought Huffington Post for $315 million. The fusion of political bias, political connections, celebrity contributors, and pushing a guy who promoted (an ultimately empty) promise of hope and change quickly gave the Huffington Post even more link equity than TechCrunch has.

Thus they have the weight to do all the things that good online journalism is known for, like ads so deeply embedded in content you can't tell them apart, off-topic paginated syndicated duplicate content and writing meaningless posts devoid of content based on Google Trends data. As other politically charged mainstream media outlets have shown, you don't need to be factually correct (or even attempt honesty) so long as your bias is consistent.

Ultimately this is where Google's head in the sand approach to content farms backfired. When content farms were isolated websites full of trash Google could have nuked them without much risk. But now that their is a blended approach and content farms are part of public companies backed by politically powerful individuals, Google can't do anything about them. Their hands are tied.

Trends in Journalism

Much like the middle class has been gutted in the United States, Ireland (and pretty much everywhere that is not Iceland) by economic policies that gut the average person to promote banking criminals, we are seeing the same thing happen online to the value of any type of online journalism. As we continue to ask people to do more for less we suffer through a lower quality user experience with more half-content that leaves out the essential bits.

How to build a brick wall:

• step 1: get some bricks
• step 2: stack them in your workplace
• step 3: build the brick wall

The other thing destroying journalism is not only lean farms competing against thick and inefficient organizations for distribution, but also Google pushing to control more distribution via their various data grabs: Youtube video & music, graphical CPA ads in the search results, lead generation ads in the search results, graphic AdSense ads on publisher sites that drive searches into those lead generation funnels, grouping like data from publishers above the organic search results, offering branded navigational aids above the organic search results, acquiring manufacturer data, scraping 3rd party reviews, buying sentiment analysis tools, promoting Google maps everywhere, Google product pages & local review pages, extended ad units, etc. If most growth in journalism is based on SEO & Google is systematically eating the search results, then at some point that bubble will get pricked and there will be plenty of pain to go around.

My guess is that in 3 to 4 years the search results become so full of junk that Google pushes hard to rank chunks of ebooks wrapped in Google ads directly in the search results. Books are already heavily commoditized (it's amazing how much knowledge you can get for $10 or $20), and given that Google already hard-codes their ebooks in the search results, it is not a big jump for them to work on ad deals that pull publishers in. It follows the trend elsewhere "Free Music Can Pay as Well as Paid Music, YouTube Says."

It's Not All Bad

The silver lining there is that if you are the employer your margins may grow, but if you are an employee & are just scraping by on $10 an hour then it increases the importance of doing something on the side to lower your perceived risk & increase your influence. A few years back Marshall Kirkpatrick started out on AOL's content farms. The tips he shared to stand out would be a competitive advantage in almost any vertical outside of technology & politics:

one day Michael Arrington called and hired me at TechCrunch. "You keep beating us to stories," he told me. I was able to do that because I was getting RSS feeds from key vendors in our market delivered by IM and SMS. That's standard practice among tech bloggers now, but at the time no one else was doing it, so I was able to cover lots of news first.

Three big tips from the "becoming a well known writer front" for new writers are...

• if short form junk content is the standard then it is easier to stand out by creating long form well edited content
• it is easier to be a big fish in a small pond than to try to get well known in a saturated area, so it is sometimes better to start working for niche publishers that have a strong spot in a smallish niche
• if you want to target the bigger communities the most important thing to them (and the thing they are most likely to talk about) are themselves

Another benefit to publishers is that as the web becomes more polluted people will become far more likely to pay to access better content and smaller + tighter communities.

Prioritizing User Feedback?

On a Google blog post about web spam they state the following:

Spam reports are prioritized by looking at how much visibility a potentially spammy site has in our search results, in order to help us focus on high-impact sites in a timely manner. For instance, we’re likely to prioritize the investigation of a site that regularly ranks on the first or second page over that of a site that only gets a few search impressions per month.

Given the widely echoed complaints on content farms, it seems Google has a different approach on content farms, especially considering that the top farms are seen by millions of searchers every month.

Implying Intent

If end users can determine when links are paid (with limited context) then why not trust their input on judging the quality of the content as well? The Google Toolbar has a PageRank meter for assessing link authority. Why not add a meter for publisher reputation & content quality? I can hear people saying "people will use it to harm competitors" but I have also seen websites torched in Google because a competitor went on a link buying spree on behalf of their fellow webmaster. At least if someone gives you a bad rating for great content then the content still has a chance to defend its own quality.

With link stuff there is a final opinion and that is it. Not only are particular techniques of varying levels of risk, but THE prescribed analysis of intent depends on who is doing it!

A Google engineer saw an SEO blog about our affiliate program passing link juice and our affiliate links stopped passing weight. (I am an SEO so the appropriate intent is spam). Then something weird happened. A few months later a Google engineer *publicly* stated that affiliate links should count. A few years later Google invested in a start up which turns direct links into affiliate links while hiding the paid compensation in the background. (Since Google is doing it the intent is NOT spam).

Implying Ignorance

Some of the content mills benefit from the benefit-of-doubt. Jason Calacanis lied repeatedly about "experimental pages" and other such nonsense. But when his schemes were highlighted he was offered the benefit of the doubt. eHow also enjoys that benefit of the doubt. It doesn't matter that Demand Media's CEO was the chairman of an SEO consulting company which sold for hundreds of millions of Dollars. What matters is the benefit of the doubt (even if his company flagrantly violates quality guidelines by doing bulk 301 redirects of EXPIRED domains into eHow ... something where a lesser act can put you up for vote on a Google engineer's blog for public lynching).

The algorithm. They say. It has opinions.

What Other Search Engines Are Doing

A Bing engineer accused Google of funding web pollution. Blekko invites end users to report spam in their index, and the first thing end-users wanted booted out was the content mills.

But Google need to be "algorithmic" when the problems are obvious and smack them in the face. And they need to "imply intent" where the problems are less problematic & nowhere near as overt.

Makes sense, almost!

Is the following an SEO strategy?

• Research keywords
• Select keywords that have existing traffic
• Write pages based on those keywords
• Publish pages
• Get those pages ranked against those keywords

How is this different to what a Content Farm does? So, if Content Farm pages are undesirable, so too is SEO content?

Low Quality Content?

Perhaps people take issue with low-quality content.

The problem with arguments about quality is that such arguments are subjective. Is Wikipedia quality? How about the Huffington Post? Wikipedia is full of inaccuracies, and the Huffington Post is not above fixating on trivia, like what - or who - Charlie Sheen did in the weekend. These exact same criticisms are often leveled against Content Farms.

One could argue that those two sources at least attempt to provide a high degree of quality, most of time. However, quality is in the eye of the beholder. eHow may not be to everyone's taste, but it isn't true to say eHow is all worthless, to all people, all of the time. Perhaps some people don't want to wade through the dense academia of Wikipedia. They simply want someone to tell them what that weird spot is on their cat's mouth.

How One Content Farm Describes Other Content Farms

What is a Content Farm, anyway? Is a magazine a Content Farm? Wikipedia's own definition of a Content Farm displays the same level of trite fluff often found on eHow:

• "The articles in content farms are written by human beings but may not be written by a specialist in the area" The same could be said of many newspapers, websites and magazines. So what?
• "Content farms are criticized for providing relatively low quality content as they maximize profit by producing just "good enough" rather than best possible quality articles". If that criteria was applied to all publishers, most would disappear overnight.
• "A typical content writer is a female with children that contrasts with sites expecting voluntary unpaid contribution for the sake of idea....." . Seriously, WTF?

Economics Drive EVERYTHING

Now, I'm not saying I like the fact that Google searches often return fluff content. But that problem is a direct result of the economics of the web. It's difficult to publish "quality" web content that provides a return to the writer, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that publishers either drive down the cost of production, erect pay-walls, or simply never publish in the first place.

Who Hates Content Farms?

Criticism regarding Content Farms appears to be coming from two camps.

One camp consists of professional journalists and established publishers. This is hardly surprising, as the Content Farms are undermining their publishing model. If the reader doesn't care much about standards, then it's difficult to charge a premium for them.

The other camp is SEOs, which is odd, given that Demand Media appears to be built around an applied SEO model. Perhaps some people just don't like the competition.

I guess the important aspect, as far as SEOs are concerned, is how Google defines a Content Farm, and what they intend to do about them.

"As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content."

Matt's definition of spam has been reasonably consistent over the years, and is detailed on Google's Webmaster Guidelines. The interesting bit is Google's definition of "low-quality content". Well, it would be if they would tell us, but they don't.

Six of One, a Half Dozen of the Other

Put it this way. Any algorithm that takes out Demand Media content is going to take out a lot of SEO content, too. SEO copy-writing? What is that? That's what Demand Media do. As I outlined in the first paragraph, a lot of SEO content in not that different, and any algorithm that targets Demand Media's content isn't going to see any difference. Keyword traffic stream identical to title tag? Yep. A couple of hundred words? Yep. SEO format? Yep. Repeats keywords and keyword phrases a few times? Yep. Contributes to the betterment of mankind? Nope.

SEO's need to be careful what they wish for.

Barry reports Google hasn't rolled out their Content Farm algo, if indeed there is such a thing: "After we spoke with Matt Cutts today, we learned that the new algorithm that went live last week is related to blocking low quality content scraper sites and not content farms".

Watch this space :)

Search can be used as a wedge in a variety of ways. Most are perhaps poorly understood by the media and market regulators.

Woot! Check Out Our Bundling Discounts

When Google Checkout rolled out, it was free. Not only was it free, but it came with a badge that appears near AdWords ads to make the ads stand out. That boosts ad clickthrough rates, which feeds into ad quality score & acts as a discount for advertisers who used Google Checkout. If you did not use Google's bundled services you were stuck paying above market rates to compete with those who accepted Google's bundling discounts.

And there is no conspiracy theory to the above bundling. Here is a video on how quality score works & this Google Checkout page states it plain as day

And all the while Google was doing the above bundling (as they still are to this day) they were also lobbying in Australia about Paypal's dominant market position. eBay (which owns Paypal) is one of Google's 5 largest advertisers.

This Brand is Your Brand, This Brand is My Brand

Companies spend billions of Dollars every year building their trademarked brands. But if they don't pay Google for existing brand equity then Google sells access to that stream of branded traffic to competitors, even though internal Google studies have shown it causes confusion in the marketplace.

The Right to Copy

Copyright protects the value of content. To increase the cost of maintaining that value, DoubleClick and AdSense fund a lot of copy and paste publishing, even of the automated variety. Sure you can hide your content behind a paywall, but if Google is paying people to steal it and wrap it in ads how do you have legal recourse if those people live in a country which doesn't respect copyright?

You can see how LOOSE Google's AdSense standards are when it comes to things like copyright and trademarks by searching for something like "bulk PageRank checker" and seeing how many sites that violate Google's TOS multiple ways are built on cybersquatted domain names that contain the word "PageRank" in them. There are also sites dedicated to turning Youtube videos into MP3's which are monetized via AdSense.

Universal Youtube Search

Google bought Youtube and then swiftly rolled out universal search, which dramatically increased the exposure of Youtube. Only recent heat & regulatory review has caused Google to add more prominent links to competing services, nearly a half-decade later.

A Unit of Obscurity

Knol was pushed as a way to revolutionize how people share information online. But it went nowhere. Why? Google got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, so they couldn't force the market to eat it.

Scrape You Very Much

Philosophically Google believes in (and delivers regular sermons about) an open web where companies should compete on the merit of their products. And yet when Google enters a new vertical they *require* you to let them use your content against you. If you want to opt out of competing against yourself Google say that is fine, but the only way they will allow you to opt out is if you block them from indexing your content & kill your search traffic.

“Google has also advised that if we want to stop content from appearing on Google Places we would have to reduce/stop Google’s ability to scan the TripAdvisor site,” said Kaufer “Needless to say, this would have a significant impact on TripAdvisor’s ranking on natural search queries through Google and, as such, we are not blocking Google from scanning our site.”

From a public relations standpoint & a legal perspective I don't think it is a good idea for Google to deliver all-or-nothing ultimatums. Ultimately that could cause people in positions of power to view their acts as a collection which have to be justified on the whole, rather than on an individual basis.

Lucky for publishers, technology does allow them to skirt Google's suggestions. If I ran an industry-leading review site and wanted to opt out of Google's all-or-nothing scrape job scam, my approach would be to selectively post certain types of content. Some of it would be behind a registration wall, some of it would be publicly accessible in iframes, and maybe just a sliver of it is fully accessible to Google. That way Google indexes your site (and you still rank for the core industry keywords), but they can't scrape the parts you don't want them to. Of course that means losing out on some longtail search traffic (as the hidden content is invisible to search engines), but it is better than the alternatives of killing all search traffic or giving away the farm.

Bloggers as Media

Have you ever noticed that a lot of blogs want to be seen as being the same as the media? And media companies are responding by hiring bloggers. But why is emulating the media so exciting? After all, the same media is so big, bloated & redundant that it is buried in debt. How is it possible that a humor blog network built on open source software would ever need to raise $30 million?

The problem is that it is hard to stay different and operate at scale. You eventually become that you claimed to hate. If you are good at public relations you can claim to be different to build exposure, but ultimately once a site becomes large there is no incentive for creating signal. Rather the game becomes generating as much exposure as you can to sell to brand advertisers. Content can be dressed up to stand out, but at the core it is basically the same.

Bloggers can state that the hype cycle they hype shouldn't be hyped, but action speaks louder than words. We can say we don't need more Scoble hype (and the associated retractions), but rather a more filtered one. The problem is there is no incentive on the publisher front. Check out how outraged TechCrunch comment freetards were at the idea of a $4 per month premium offering from Kevin Rose.

If people don't want to pay for quality instead they pay for it by having to wade through more junk, scams & repetition.

Here are 2 posts from TechCrunch about Yahoo!. Both published on the same day. Both saying the same thing. There isn't much difference between them than what a good markov generator could do.

And, of course, there are the obligatory cat fights. Junk.

A Comfortable Spin

What's worse is that many sites exist simply to sell you a pre-existing worldview rather than a pragmatic view of the world:

The million channel words brings addressability. There is no mass any more. You can't reach everyone. Mad Men is a hit and yet it has only been seen by 2% of the people in the USA.

The mcw bring silos, angry tribes and insularity. Fox News makes a fortune by pitting people against one another. Talkingpointsmemo is custom tailored for people who are sure that the other side is wrong. You can spend your entire day consuming media and never encounter a thought you don't agree with, don't like or don't want to see.

The polarization from such media & the blow-by-blow content style leads people to worry about inconsequential crap like their political ideology, where they can write based on a checklist. It makes them notice the trivial differences while remaining blinds to important things, like the systemic fraud that is supported and encouraged by both leading political parties. Arguing inconsequential details becomes increasingly addictive because the blame has to be sent to "them" rather than where is squarely belongs.

Media as a Conduit For Scams & Misinformation

Do you find it perplexing that the same media (which claims to be legitimate) has no problems running ads for total scams? Isn't it bizarre that the same media that claims to protect citizens from the evils of the marketplace tries to blend the ads for such scams in with their navigation to sell their readers down the river? Is this what you would expect of Newsweek?

Is that anything to aspire to?

Jokingly Geordie suggested how annoying he found the gallery sections on media sites with videos and pictures that seem like they are fresh off the Jerry Springer show. "WATCH: Teen beats ferret to death and eats it!" In the short run online advertising can grow quickly through tricking people, but the end result is distrust & people become less receptive.

That same media leaves the real media work to the comedians:

The problem is lack of sufficiently broad exposure to the facts here in the US. We don’t have a fourth estate, a national media in the role of providing checks and balances to government and business excesses. Instead we have media that sells product. In the late 1990s it sold tech stocks, in the early 2000s the Iraq War, from 2002 until 2007 it sold houses, and in the future it will sell whatever measures are a “necessary” price for social stability, national security, or whatever phrases are used, because things are going to get dicey once this 40 year old Rube Goldberg monetary and trade contraption comes apart when it’s hit with a Peak Cheap Oil sledgehammer in the middle of the Jon Stewart show. I mean, how healthy is the American fourth estate when all of the serious journalism here is done by comedians?

Governments often do dangerous and illegal things - which is why they fear each other. When the truth gets exposed people go to jail. Unfortunately, it is the wrong people who go to jail.

Social Media is Different*

Isn't it weird that the mark of a successful blog is that it starts to look and feel and act like bloated media organizations? Is social media any better? Or is social media mostly a bunch of lemmings following each other off the side of the mountain?

Just because there is lots of information doesn't make all of it valuable. In fact, some of it has negative value. Who are the people who login to Facebook so they can vote on Facebook about how Facebook is a waste of time & they don't use it?

As one social network crumbles the hype cycle is peaking out for the next.

Hyping a Social Network

The whole wave of online communication and publishing is that a new service promotes itself as disrupting x by making y more efficient. Most of it is simply a repeat of the recent past. Bookmarks were popular. Then they were not. Then bookmarks were popular. Now they are not. Soon they will be again. :)

The narrative of "change" gives new companies a niche or angle to get press coverage from. People ask if it is the next Google, or more! The service then go under-monetized for a couple years to feed growth and scale. The whole time the site is not monetized stories are seeded in the media about how media format x is powerful for brands even if the lead examples are nonsense.

Cashing Out

But ultimately what happens is the networks turn their navigational options into ad units and try to confuse users. Monetization is the name of the game as insiders rush to cash out.

Facebook turns user messages into ad units via sponsored stories, doing something akin to turning beacon back on without anyone caring. Even as Facebook's CEO page gets hacked, they want you to trust them with sharing as much information as possible (even if there is no benefit to you) and turning your messages into an ad unit.

If the NFL puts you in one of their commercials (without paying you or offering you free tickets) then they are simply using you as free content to sell more ads against. It is not like they are putting you in the revenue stream.

What Privacy?

How is it possible that we are told that data has value but privacy allegedly does not? Most such stores of data are built through an invasion of privacy.

Privacy has value. What happens when your account gets hacked & you start recommending some uncomfortable stuff? What happens when a stalker catches you on the way home based on one of your messages? How many such experiences will be viewed as a series of isolated events before people figure it out? Once these ads lose their novelty will there still be real businesses behind them? Or is narcissistic advertising the wave of the future even as people realize they are being spied on?

LinkedIn, the professional version of Facebook, is pushing hard on ads as well. And when they buy tools they can sell as services they often prefer to give those away to make the site more sticky and sell more ads.

Is Twitter any better? In some regards sure, but they are building a self-serve ad network and are pushing followers and retweets as ad units. Wherever there is conversation there will be advertisers. New ad units will claim to move beyond the click, but ultimately they will be measured by the people selling the ads. This ends up being a game of fakemytraffic.com/fakemyvalue.com...where networks find something that sounds appealing at first blush and then water it down.

Finding a Social Signal Amongst Sponsored Stories

These companies blend their ad units into editorial so effectively that most people can't tell them apart. If that sounds familiar, that is because it is. The key to making it work is perceived relevancy. That is easy to do when you have a large ad auction and users type their intent into a search box, but is much harder to do when people are browsing pictures of cats.

Anyone who thinks that social is a clean search signal is forgetting that people vote most for stuff that his humorous & easy to share. And people share things that they saw others shared because they felt they had to. The echo chamber effect doesn't encourage critical thought. It is mostly a bunch of +1.

The following video is sad & funny. It has been viewed widely, but it does nothing to fix a broken education system.

And there are entire categories that will never be featured honestly on social media. Sure the idea of turning Kinect into a virtual sex video game will get lots of exposure, but is anyone ever going to honestly Tweet about their favorite solutions to their genital warts problem? Is there enough context to matter? Worse yet, all these networks are turning their relevancy signals into ad units, so if a search engine was to count them heavily all the search engine would be doing is subsidizing the third party ad network. And the scammers who are pushing reverse billing fraud products on the news sites will do as much damage as they can get away with on the social sites.

Google's Amit Singhal is skeptical of the hype:

If there's a broad call at the company to integrate social networking features, Singhal hasn't quite heard it. He seems skeptical about whether social data can make search results significantly more relevant. If he's searching for a new kind of dishwasher, he argues, his friend's recommendations are interesting, but the cumulative opinion of experts manifested in search results is much more valuable. He notes that Google already integrates content from Twitter and says social networking data is easily manipulated. Can social context make search more relevant? "Maybe, maybe not. Social is just one signal. It's a tiny signal," he says.

If Google can't find much signal there then good luck to the folks trying to use Tweets to trade the (increasingly corrupted) stock market!

Why People Like Social Media

I think social media gives people the illusion of success through proximity. Thus people are impressed to rub shoulders with successful people, even if they are douchebags and liars to boot. There is the unsaid message that “you too can be a billionaire” that a lot of entrepreneurs and start up folks want to believe in that drives the growth of Quora. But the reality is that celebrities are whoring out their status for a quick payday, even if the advertiser value in such relationships is marginal.

Someone wants to eat my dog. Other than breathing, writing English(ish), and having a Twitter account, I probably do not have anything in common with that person. And yet there is no tool to sort that out.

That is the big problem with most social media tools: the monolithic nature.

And if you look at what brands (and even smaller advertisers) are doing, it is pretty clear that the "signal" in social isn't much of a signal. If they count that, then search engines may as well just use ad budget as the primary signal of relevancy at that point.

Why Smaller Communities Will Thrive

I am not sure where I read this quote from, but I think it went something like this "we are most similar where we are most vulgar and most unique in the ways we are sophisticated." That is precisely why a lot of the broader networks will repeatedly fail in efforts to build strong niches outside their core. It is why there is so much value in being a fast follower.

Given the interrupting noise and angst on social networks people (or at least the smart ones who are well experienced in the game of life & spend time to think deeply) eventually outgrow most of their social media habits.

Ultimately Social Media Changes Nothing

Human nature is both predictable & easily exploited. How you frame a question informs how people respond. We live in a corporate world where certain lies are expected & diseases are branded for maximum profitability.

Messaging and imagery allow piss poor product to be branded as food. The abuse of language is so thorough that even the words "shared planet" need a TM next to them.

What is Driving the "Social Revolution"?

A week ago Andy Xie wrote:

The inflation and bubbles in the developing world are not yet destabilizing because the dollar is weak and the hot money supports their currency values. Historically, inflation becomes a crisis in the developing world when the dollar turns around and appreciates. However, it is possible for inflation to create a crisis without a currency crisis. It erodes the purchasing power of the people at the bottom. Social unrest can lead to political crisis

That destabilization is now happening. What was an isolated incident in Tunisia has spread to Egypt. The same criminals that destroyed the United States economy are now blowing up other countries with rampant inflation:

The currency pegs mean that most of the inflationary pressure you're creating doesn't hit your nation, it's exported to others. That exactly how you like it, because you can claim "inflation expectations are well-anchored." Perhaps they are in your nation, but in other places they're extremely unanchored and are not only expectations, they're realized facts as the basic cost of life spirals up out of control.

This, in turn, provokes food riots in these less-well-endowed nations that you managed to dupe into participating in your outrageous scheme. After all, there's only one thing worse than a hungry man. That's a man who used to be well-fed and now he's both hungry and ****ed, along with being unemployed.

When his belly growls loudly enough, he riots. And so do his similarly-situated neighbors.

The social revolution we are seeing now is not due to social media. When Egypt shuts off the web (literally) Twitter and Facebook don't really matter. What you are seeing is not the power of online social networks, but rather smart marketers who are trying to embed their networks in media coverage of important events. You don't get mobs in the street the size of the following when the internet is unplugged if Twitter is the cause.

Rather such mobs are caused because the lack of media doing its job to enforce a sense of outrage over the injustices caused upon societies the world over by banking criminals. If there was any sense of justice the large banks that caused this mess would have been bankrupted. But instead we base economic strategy on the theoretical economy rather than its impact on the real world.

People are just an externality for bankers to exploit.

Meanwhile, those who let bankers commit fraud the world over think Twitter makes a difference. At least it's comical.