As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].
Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
My flight leaves tonight to go get married. I will be back in the last week of October. I might post again before then, but I might not. I wish you well and will be back soon(ish).
BTW, Compete.com search analytics launches tomorrow. It is exceptionally affordable for its value. Be sure to check it out.
Quintura recently made a search page for Seo Book. Their search service is likely going to be more useful for large publishers with millions of pages than it is on a personal blog, but give it a try and see what you think.
Their cloudlike visual search service is a great tool for finding related keyword modifiers used in competing sites, but I don't think we will see such technology front and center at the mainstream search engines anytime soon due to future advertising regulation which will make it harder to integrate ads and make search results more profitable than the current Google format is. Though I would love to see their technology integrated against social bookmarking sites and personal search history data.
A few months back Threadwatch had a post about Yahoo selling subdomains. Yesterday I stumbled across an AdSense ad for a company selling subdomains that they forward to other sites. I don't believe it is smart to build a big site on someone else's domain, but if you wanted to fling up a bunch of spam or create a single targeted ad page that goes after a competitive phrase why not leech of their authority and let them assume the risks?
There are no search engine guidelines on hosting advertisements for third parties because it is not an idea Google wants people thinking about or talking publicly about, and they can't edit out WSJ.com if they will want the WSJ to spread their public relations messages and business interests.
It seems politicians don't like this Internet thing too much. A 23 year old Polish man is facing 3 years in prison for ranking his president #1 for penis.
A friend of mine just posted about trying to build a business by creating 5,000 sites. Everything I know about the trends of the web tells me that there are far easier ways to make money online, especially if you are willing to grow with the latest trends.
You Can't Bring Back the Past
Why would anyone who deeply understands the web start a traditional book publishing business when web formats are so much more profitable and books are becoming irrelevant? Static boring content sites created without passion are, like books, growing irrelevant.
The reason smaller sites could work in the past is because many of them are set and forget. Virtually no incremental cost of upkeep. But the big issue is that they all have some set amount of work required to set them up. And if you are doing something 5,000 times you are going to start automating. And when you start automating you leave footprints. Even if your content is of average quality today, in a year that same content might be considered useless noise and/or spam. At some point a few of the sites get nuked, an engineer does a bit of research, and then the whole network tanks. Then you just lost a year of work and most of your investment.
New Verticals Are Stealing Market-share From the Generalist Web
The problem with set and forget is that there are many new TYPES of content coming online, working to back-fill the organic search results. How uncomfortable is it creating average quality or garbage content when you see half of some search results dominated by books? If you want to do a set and forget approach to marketing I think traditional websites or blogs might be the wrong approach, especially if done in bulk. If I were to try to profit from bulk and was to create something new today I would look at some of the information formats that are just starting to get more aggressively integrated into the search results.
Average Content Has No Sustainable Advantage
The problem with average plain Jane content is that being average is not enough to build permission, gain subscribers, and create a real brand. If you are starting out today you are up against companies with a decade of experience, traction, capital, leverage and market feedback.
The long tail queries that went to garbage content are now sending visitors to large businesses that are becoming more aware of SEO and other vertical searches that are creeping into the traditional organic search results. It is getting easier for competitors to buy your keyword stats for next to nothing, and competitive research is only getting cheaper by the day. When you have virtually no authority, a business model search engineers hate, and are easy to clone then where is your sustainable competitive advantage? Why build anything that lacks a solid foundation?
Dominate Newer Verticals
If it were within my power, and I was scaling this type of bulk content operation, I would have at least one site in Google news. The value of being listed there just went up because they are filtering out many of the duplicate wire service stories that dominated the results in the past. You could also think of videos as easy pickings, at least for now.
Are there other verticals that will become popular? Sure, but you have to be creative and use the word vertical loosely. Remember that in the Google Florida update commercial intent pages were demoted in favor of informational content pages. With Universal search Google has many ways to define verticals and filter irrelevant or lower quality ones. Here is a quote from a recent brilliant post by Tedster
Search terms themselves can also be sorted into various taxonomies, especially the 1-word and 2-word queries. ... With the advent of Universal Search, Google now has the infrastructure to force integrate selections from any class of websites onto the first page. So the implications of Universal Search can go well past the obvious and publicised taxonomies of images, video, news, books, maps, blogs. Even more than a simple "commercial" and "informational" taxonomy, there could also be classes like brochureware sites, trademark holders, businesses with a physical world presence, manufacturers, B2B, multi-topic (encyclopedic) and on and on. One factor Google could then tweak would be which classes of sites to force integrate into the results for which kinds of search terms.
Create a New Vertical
If you rush to find new verticals, change how people use language, or define a page as fitting an alternate meaning of a word then perhaps all this vertical stuff presents an arbitrage opportunity for you. If you create the same type of crap that is already saturated then it is working against you.
SEO Book was not a popular search query until after I created this site. Search engines follow people. Google recommends my brand name and my name in their ad links. The easiest and most sustainable way to dominate a high value vertical is to create a new one, which is something I hope to do in a big way before the year is out.
Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.
The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait. ;)
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful
Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.
It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn't pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.
Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.
It doesn't matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer
Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.
Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don't Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well
Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.
In a recent post I stated that one of the biggest flaws from a conversion perspective with this site was that the homepage was a blog. I just made a new homepage that features more of the site's content. I think it is a bit text heavy still, but I wanted to get your feedback on what you think of the new homepage.
Google and Amazon are both pushing to sell ebooks directly aggressively. An article in the NYT mentions a new device Amazon will offer for reading ebooks, but I don't think the problem with books and ebooks is that they need a better reader.
The big problem is that the web is quickly becoming more interactive and diverse and useful, making books irrelevant for all but true enthusiasts, desperate people seeking a manifesto for life change, or those who read as an escape.
Personal Relevancy
The larger a book becomes, the less likely it is to be relevant to any individual, and the less value each word has. People who may disagree with some concepts in your book may agree with pieces that they would be willing to cite if they could only find it. But they will never cite your information unless they can find it.
No matter what people believe, in almost every case someone has already shared the same belief. Format it in small sharable chunks with good findability and people will cite it.
People may want to consume relevant bits. Cognitive dissidents. Summaries that let us dive deeper if we want to. Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.
Rarely is something that is fully polished, comprehensive, and dated what we need. More likely it is easier to learn by stepping into a process and learning one piece at a time, starting with your interests, then expanding as we run into additional problems. Even with blog posts, people justifiably complain about my writing blog posts in spurts, and using links that are not descriptive enough to merit a click-through.
Leveraging the Web
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Writers should use the web for what it is worth. Break books into pieces, read and write daily, cite sources, go back and polish the best pieces and package them, but try to keep each idea as sharp as possible.
Knowing how to create a useful information product is not enough to maximize profits. A big flaw with my ebook is that it has soooo much information in it, but it is hard to show the value of it because it is a single item. You can't tell how much stuff was waded through to write it, that it is mentally and emotionally draining to revise, and it doesn't help that most Internet marketing ebooks are lead generation devices or affiliate marketing tools. Someone could sell much less and look like they were selling more, just by using better packaging.
The Inevitable Death of No & Low Value Networks
Just like chunks of content are getting broken down into smaller bits, so will content creation companies. Choice and technology are disintermediating most of the gatekeepers. You and I don't need publishers for distribution, and the fear associated with that is the real reason why the US DoJ recently whored itself out to telecom companies. Many people in positions of power abuse copyright and are afraid of open markets. From the Fake Steve blog:
[TV] was a wonderful system. For you [TV Networks] anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain -- the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let's be honest here, as a kind of cartel.
Artists Become Publishers
If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.
You “artists” out there generating content will have to learn to publish if you want to participate in the Internet economy. Maybe that’s why Google spends so much trying to help the Internet advance… because it helps Google disintermediate the middlemen. When will Google bring us fast quantities of ISP-free, wireless bandwidth?
One day there will be no more middlemen. And then, Google will squeeze you for more profits. After all, growth needs to come from somewhere, right? When all the middlemen are gone, what’s left? You are. For every producer there are hundreds of consumers hungry for more. Will Google offer rewards for you to procreate? Of course it will. It has to. It’s Google’s destiny to manage the creative class.
Contrary to popular belief, selling is not about tricking people into buying what they don't want. Yes, there are liars and thieves but that is not selling. That is lying and stealing.
Selling is about getting people to trust you enough to tell you their needs or desires and you satisfying those needs or desires. It is not always easy but it’s certainly not complicated.
The Key is to Not Look Like You are Selling
If markets keep getting more competitive and artists become publishers then I think publishers need to start becoming artists. Almost anything you want to consume has free samples available online. Some are copyright violations, others are free marketing, and some are both.
Here is Dane Cook on why it is so hard to win an argument against a woman:
the trust and goodwill you built up through sharing information, personal interaction, and the above points
Even when we are not buying we are still paying with attention. Familiarity and attention are early steps in sales. The WSJ wrote about how Disney kept a low-fi feel to Marié Digby's YouTube videos. She mixes in a few of her own original songs with old classics that have been viewed MILLIONS of times prior to dropping her first album. It is much easier to launch if you start off with a large fanbase.
Why it Helps to View Marketing as an Art
People are lazy and selfish. Especially anonymous people. If you try to replicate the links of an older competitor using the same techniques, many of the webmasters who linked at them will ignore you, even if your content is better than the stuff they are already linking at.
In all honesty, profit margins come more from perception than reality. If you are going to stay profitable you have to see the wave coming in and stay out in front of it, especially because as marketing techniques get abused they stop working. I am doing things today that I know I would not be profitable in a few years if I didn't go out of my way to lay the foundation to make them look and feel exceptionally legitimate today. The only differences between legitimacy and illegitimacy are trust, familiarity, and perception.
The Short Side of Web Publishing
This post is not to suggest that the web is a utopia that is better than all other sources of information, but more that it is cheaper, faster, easier, and provides something that is good enough to satisfy most demands for free.
The web has downsides to it, like promoting hyped up information pollution as a form of marketing. But the reality of it is that everyone is short on time. And few deeply understand the publishing dynamics of search, so when people get screwed by finding bad information on the web or make bad decisions because of ideas they discovered over the web they will likely blame themselves for it.
