Typically each day or each week some roughly average number of people search for a specific keyword phrase or group of phrases. Some seasonal terms may have well known seasonal spikes, but typically when spikes occur because of news the quality and value of the associated search goes down. Sure more people are searching, but the people who are searching because something is in vogue have less implied intent than those who searched out a specific product even when it is not in the news.

With the Federal Reserve announcing 2 large rate cuts in a week, that topic carried over into the mainstream news, which drove a lot of search volume for related queries

At the same time, the 4x spike in search traffic drives home how anomalous last week was, and how much pressure people are demonstrably feeling. And it also reinforces that rising rates in mortgage markets, despite the Fed cuts, aren't doing anything to relieve the mortgage pressure out there.

There are many ways to arbitrage these opportunities. Off the top of my head...

• if your site sells ads at a high CPM and you have an excuse for inflating traffic stats, sending StumbleUpon traffic to your site can easily pay for itself
• if ad budgets dry up you can become a more aggressive ad buyer
• if you are in Google news or other trusted editorial positions you can get a lot of mindshare through covering the topic and being featured due to Google's promotion of universal search

There is also a hidden cost to testing or tweaking your monetization strategy during rapid changes in search volume. Unless you split test you don't know if the results are positive or negative because both lead volume and lead quality have changed drastically.

Duncan J Watts recently published a study debunking the role of influencers in synthetic virtual worlds, then debunking them again by showing how ads spread through the online world. I think the problems with the thesis are

• machines do not have emotions
• most of the people spreading the ideas in his studies did not have a large potential gain as a potential outcome of sharing the idea
• we live in a time of such an abundance of information that information / knowledge workers need to trust filters
• some filters have publicly available stats showing 10,000's of people trust and follow them
• the easiest way to target influencers is not through ads, but through content which gets exposure in some of those trusted filters...if your idea starts in an ad box you already tuned out many influencers

The Fast Company article covering the research goes on to state the following

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest?

In some cases that might be true, but online you can learn communities and individuals well enough to create content targeted around their needs / wants / passions / biases / identities. You can predict the viability future ideas with some degree of accuracy. And there is so much data to study that virtually anyone can pick up the patterns and start spreading ideas within a few months.

I have changed a few words in a blog post to change the angle of it to target certain individuals. My success rate with getting a mention from the specific personality or person I was targeting is much too high to be an anomaly. Not only have I taken past ideas from other markets and applied it to my market, but I have taken some fundamental social and psychological principals and value related ideas, applied them to markets I know almost nothing about (and have no influence in), and still over half of those linkbait ideas go viral.

And once you give an idea exposure on a leading channel or two (not as an ad but as editorial) you display social proof of value and start the cumulative advantage process.

I am not trying to toot my own horn. Just trying to write from experience rather than theory. Some people, like Andy Hagans, are way better at launching linkbait than I am. The reason that linkbait is so powerful is that it can be so targeted, and it targets the foundation of the web's value system, which typically does not look like an ad - the link.

I put a Microsoft AdCenter affiliate ad in the sidebar of the blog.

I generally do not like putting too many ads on this site, but...

• their traffic converts well because it is such a clean source (no dirty clickfarm syndication partners)
• I recently fell in love with Microsoft's Ad Intelligence tool. If you have not tried it yet I urge you to try it. This post and this video offer a review of some of the features
• $50 in free clicks is a great offer for search marketers who have yet to try Microsoft's ad platform
• I think the web is healthier if Google has some competition, and Yahoo no longer attempts to compete

Are you against affiliate ads? Have you tried AdCenter or the Ad Intelligence tool yet?

Some people are saying that Google #6 issue was just a glitch and not a penalty or a filter. And sure, according to Google's current classification, that change was a glitch.

But lots of glitches have commonalities amongst the sites that were hit. Like many of the sites that got hit by that #6 profile were in some ways stale. And perhaps stale was just a symptom of dated SEO strategy.

You can learn from glitches, because many times glitches show you where and how Google is trying to shape the web. Glitches are side effects of algorithms with a targeted intent, but with too many unintended consequences and/or casualties.

Look back a couple years, and at one point in time SEO Book was not ranking for SEO Book while Paypal was not ranking for Paypal. Add on a bit more market feedback from other sites that were hit and it seemed sites were getting filtered out for having their anchor text too well aligned. That glitch was fixed in a few days to a month (depending on how far over the line your site was and how important your brand was) but the underlying idea of whacking sites for having anchor text that was too focused was indeed a direction the algorithms moved.

Look back a few years more to the Florida update. Some people called pieces of it a glitch or thought that the whole thing needed to be undone. Sometimes lowering the keyword proximity of a page title that was not in the search results brought it back to ranking. And yes the update was too aggressive and they had to back off of it. But filtering out unnatural copy was indeed a direction the algorithm moved.

Glitches reveal engineer intent. And they do it early enough that you have time to change your strategy before your site is permanently filtered or banned. When you get to Google's size, market share, and have that much data, glitches usually mean something.

eBay announced they are planning on launching something like a quality score:

John Donahoe will set out a plan to reward the company's best sellers with sales incentives and priority ranking in search results for auction items.

"Sellers that describe items accurately, ship on time, and ship at a fair price will enjoy preferential pricing and discounts on eBay," [John] Donahoe said in prepared remarks. "We're serious about making eBay easier and safer to shop."

On February 20 the changes will start taking place. Depending on how serious eBay is about this change, many eBay based businesses may die. But they also plan on lowering initial listing fees and trying to get more commission when items sell, which could lead to more junk listings as the opportunity cost is lower. If you are one of a few legit sellers in a market saturated with scams perhaps this helps increase margins, but eBay will have a hard time bring back buyers who got scammed in the past or sellers who were sick of years of rate increases.

It is remarkable that eBay has been around over a decade and are just finally getting around to making these kinds of changes. If they didn't have a near monopoly there is no way they could have waited this long.

I understand why some people sell on eBay, but for anyone who has been doing it for a long time I wonder why they don't create a site and sell direct. Being stuck in someone else's network where quality scores can make you irrelevant is a risky way to make a living.