Search Engine Optimization: November 2010

Friday, November 26, 2010

SEO Book.com

Posted: 26 Nov 2010 08:40 AM PST

If Google is smarter than humans, we must accept that it should be able to help us answer the difficult questions about life that are vital toward making humans reach their full potential, such that we may help computers become smarter, so that we may reach the singularity.

Sure some folks who took some funding are trying hard to build real communities around niches, but they are doing it all wrong.

The folks who are doing it right seem to have the answer to everything. Millions and millions of answers. The modern day Matthew Lesko of the search world.

Aks from ebaumsworld + Matthew Lesko image from Popefauvexxiii on Wikipedia + Google search result showing indexed Ask 'answer' pages.

Ask has long played the search arbitrage game, but they are stepping up their game.

Every authoritative site should have an answers subdomain.

Every site is an opportunity for more answers.

Why shut a site down, when you can just throw up some scraped & autogenerated pages and wrap them in a Google ad feed that pays out over 80%?

Even if you have redirected a site as a defunct relic for a decade, once you have your auto-generated content in place you can simply throw the domain in the hopper and generate a few million pages.

Why did Ask fold their search engine & focus on Q & A? They claim the following:

"The development of search as a technology has become commoditized. To continue to invest our own resources to do web search doesn't make sense because that development is expensive and doesn't give you a differentiated product," Ask President Doug Leeds said by telephone.

My contention is that their is no value spending the engineering resources to fight auto-generated spam if Google is paying you to create it. At some point one stack of money becomes much larger than the other.

Then again, speaking of differentiation, I wonder if Doug Leeds would care to comment on if answers content "has been commoditized" at all by them skirting around the intent of fair use laws (much like Youtube did to video content). Are they offering a "differentiated" service by turning tons of their sites into giant answer farms?

Ultimately this is much like Mahalo, but on a grand scale. At least they are not pointing expired redirects into their site (like eHow did) but if this trend continues look for thin answer sites wrapped in AdSense to become the equivalent of the auto-generated affiliate feed powered website of years gone by. The model is infinitely more scalable than content mills since the companies doing it don't actually have content costs: throw a keyword list in the hopper, send your scrapers out to "add value" & watch the money come in. Wherever something is working simply throw more related keywords in the hopper.

The lack of cost to the model means you can build thousands of pages around misspellings and yet still have it be profitable...the cost of creating each page is under a cent.

Who funds the creation of all this garbage? Google, via their AdSense program. It's a bit of Southern Hospitality from Google, if you will.

Own a forum website or answers website & are sick of seeing Ask outrank you by leveraging their domain authority + "fair use" of your content? Here is how to block their bot in robots.txt:

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /

Google has the ability to warp markets as they see fit, be it ad exchanges, tax policy, copyright, trademark, or hard coding the search results for self-promotion. While reading Gmail a couple minutes ago I saw the following ad, which I think prettymuch sums up Google's approach to search: monetize everything!

With great power comes great responsibility, however working on the Google spam team must feel a bit like the movie Brazil when watching this stuff unfold.

Remember how all kinds of affiliates were given the boot by Google for not "adding value"? How are lander pages like this one adding any value? 10 of 10 above the fold links are monetized. And it looks like their sites are using content spinning too!

The promise of the web was that it could directly connect supply and demand to make markets more efficient, and yet leading search engines are paying to create a layer of (g)arbitrage that lowers the utility and value of the network for everyone else, while pushing even more publishers into bankruptcy as the leeches grow in size & number.

My guess is that unless this short term opportunism changes, some of the star search engineers will leave in disgust within 12 to 18 months. Mark 2012 on your calendars, it will be a good year for clean search plays like Blekko and DuckDuckGo. ;)

Thursday, November 25, 2010

SEO Book.com

Upgrades Coming Soon(ish) :)

Posted: 25 Nov 2010 01:58 PM PST

I already mentioned this to our subscribers & affiliates, but we are pausing the ability to subscribe to our membership site so we can perform upgrades.

We want to update Drupal, launch the new site design, and switch out the membership management software from what has become sorta big and hairy to a platform that is pre-packaged & thus more manageable. Doing this will allow us to accept payments on-site, offer a couple different tiers of access, allow me to segment some aspects of customer support to make some of the account management stuff easier to do by staff.

The end goal of this upgrade is to make the site look more modern & cohesive, and make it so we are spending more of our resources on creating new content & tools and less on management of the underlying software & such.

When we shifted to a membership site a couple years ago I didn't appreciate the level of success it would achieve & I didn't realize how some of the smaller bugs would become larger issues as our site grew. Most of those bugs have been fixed, but there are still a few ghosts & we are sorta limited by spending resources on re-creating the wheel, rather than buying wheels & then layering more value on top. :)

I still intend to be involved in the site daily, but for my health (and sanity) it really makes sense to leverage division of labor on some of the administrative stuff, rather than burning myself out trying to manage every aspect of everything. Our employees are great & now we just need to implement systems that help them be greater(er). :D

We are aiming to open back up sometime in mid-January. The blog and site will still continue, but given the number of databases the site currently has & how it syncs up with Paypal it is likely best for us to close off new subscriptions while we are changing stuff around.

We could try switching stuff while keeping everything active, but the big issue there is if any weird anomalies happen then that is probably more stress than I would care to deal with. I love the site & I want to keep it that way (vs pull my hair out due to putting too much stress on myself). :D

If you want to be notified when we re-open please comment on this post & we will email everyone who commented once we have relaunched under the new system & tested everything out. :)

Hope the holidays go well for you & more to come when we make some significant progress with these changes.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

AboutUs Weblog

AboutUs – The New Social Media Marketplace

Posted: 23 Nov 2010 12:03 AM PST

We’ve all received invitations on Facebook asking us to shop online, try new products, attend events, fundraisers and concerts. Savvy people use Facebook as a billboard for posting announcements and selling just about anything under the sun. While Facebook may be the ultimate new marketplace, promotional objectives can be met on AboutUs as well, or better!

AboutUs community members can create free wiki pages to promote a company, a product, marketable goods and services — all while directing potential customers and clients to their websites. Having an AboutUs wiki page is like having an auxiliary presence on the web, and a powerful one at that.

The key difference between AboutUs and Facebook lies in the vast visibility of our site. While Facebook boasts 500 million members, a posted promotion is only as powerful as the number of friends, fans, or connections a single person can have: Facebook puts a cap on 5000 friends. Even if your message goes viral, you can hope to reach, what, 25,000 people? Fifty thousand?

Those are big numbers, but AboutUs lets you reach an even bigger audience. An AboutUs wiki page can be found easily on the web and viewed by over three million unique visitors per month. When you craft an AboutUs page using relevant keywords and well-written content, you’re telling the world what makes your company unique.

Creating a page is easy and helping optimize your wiki page for search engines is our specialty. Let us show you how.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

AboutUs Weblog

Monday Roundup

Posted: 22 Nov 2010 02:00 PM PST

This will be a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday – so we might skip the roundup next week – we will see!

Last week we had two new writers for the AboutUs Learn section. Heinrich Muller writes about Writing Effective Press Releases and Becky Engel shows off her expertise with Choosing the Right SEO Company.

Long time community member, Drew Myers wrote a good follow up to the Cooks Source copyright issue.

Google Docs Goes Mobile, put together by Aliza Earnshaw, talks about the ever expanding realm of writing/editing/number crunching work that we are able to access. She also talked about the new funding for Meebo — Meebo knows people love websites – with a plug for AboutUs – as we also love websites!

When Web Surfers Skip Ads, SEO Becomes More Important

Posted: 22 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PST

Uh-oh. The web is going the way of Tivo. That could be bad news for people who have come to rely on pay-per-click ad campaigns.

Venerable ad industry magazine Advertising Age reports that YouTube is allowing visitors to choose which ads they want to see — or skip them altogether.

Considering that YouTube – owned by No. 1 search player Google – is itself the second most-queried site in the United States, that’s a significant signal that paid Internet advertising may not be as effective in the near future as it is now. If people can easily switch off ads, you know lots will. And if Google’s willing to offer optional paid ads on YouTube, other sites may soon follow suit.

This development underlines the importance of getting people to your site by means other than ads:

Use the principles of search engine optimization to make sure your pages rank well in search engine results when people are searching for what you sell
Make sure you use the social media networks as much as you can to reach your customers and potential customers
Touch the people who have showed interest in your site by sending well-crafted, thoughtful emails from time to time

These are just a few suggestions. You can find more ways to increase your online visibility by reading our articles for business owners. And do let us know if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

SEO Book.com

Google - Now With More Google in Your Google TM

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 06:50 PM PST

Ben Edelman did it again :)

This time he highlighted how Google hard codes their search results:

[When] we roll[ed] out Google Finance, we did put the Google link first. It seems only fair right, we do all the work for the search page and all these other things, so we do put it first... That has actually been our policy, since then, because of Finance. So for Google Maps again, it's the first link. - Marissa Mayer

If they gain certain privileges in the marketplace by claiming to not abuse their power and that their algorithmic results are neutral, but those algorithmic results may be pushed below the fold, then is it "only fair" for them to put themselves in a default market leading position in any category they feel they can make money from by selling ads in? Or is that an abuse of power?

As Google adds features, collects more data, puts ads everywhere, and pushes into being a publisher on more fronts, at some point there will be a straw that breaks the camel's back. Big money is paying attention and the list of "evidence" grows weekly. Sometimes they still think like a start up. And that will lead to their demise.

It might not be anytime soon, but eventually they will hit a whammy.

Friday, November 12, 2010

SEO Book.com

A Warning Shot or an Accident? Does it Matter?

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 11:10 AM PST

On the 22nd of October Google had an indexing issue and a separate algorithmic change. Some of the sites associated with the indexing glitch quickly came back, whereas others seemed like they were hosed for weeks and headed toward the path of perpetual obscurity.

To give a visual of how dire this situation was for some webmasters, consider the following graphic.

The blue line is Google search traffic and the gray is total unique visitors. And since search visitors tend to monetize better than most other website visitors, the actual impact on revenues was greater than the impact on visitors. And, if you figure that sites have fixed costs (hosting, maintenance, new content creation, data licensing, marketing, etc.) then the impact on profits is even more extreme than the impact on revenues.

Hence in the search game you can go from hero to zero fast!

Search is one of the highest leverage business functions around today.

But it is also volatile. And it is a winner take most market.

When stuff heads south like that, what do you do? Do you consider it game over and try to lower costs further?

My approach to such events is to take it as a warning shot. To take it as a challenge. In the above example the traffic came back...

...but algorithms sometimes get rolled in using phases. Sometimes stuff that gets tripped up and later restored is being set up for a second fall when they refine their relevancy algorithms again. Sites that get caught in snags are sites which are fairly weak. So if you take any set back as motivation to create something better and work hard then you at least know that if you failed you tried and it just didn't work. Most likely, if you try hard, you will be able to make the site much better and not only reach your old traffic levels, but exceed them.

Even though the traffic came back for the above site, it has been getting a lot more effort. And it will continue to for months and months. The fear of loss is a great motivator to push people to create something better. Sometimes I think Google should mix up the results a bit more often just to drive people to create better stuff. :)

Now All Blogger Outreach Campaigns Will Be Considered Spam Too :)

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 10:08 AM PST

Not that long ago I highlighted how infographics were largely being destroyed as a link building tool by some unscrupulous folks who were offering to pay people to host the infographics to their sites - in a sense making the word infographic seem & feel like spam, just like paid links. :D

After killing that source of links, the folks behind that work are proudly moving on to fake non-profits and awards for bloggers, launching multiple fake charity sites in the last couple months, and then mass emailing bloggers with fake awards and link buying offers, along with a touch of comment spamming. I mean, its not that many comments. :)

Any website with only 4 pages of content, that claims to be a non-profit, yet has no contact information available, while claiming to be 3 or 4 years old (even the domain name was only registered 2 months ago) is probably somewhat sketchy.

Hello,
I'd love to purchase a text link ad on one of your pages such as ____

The link would be going to a finance or MBA site.

My budget is $100 and can pay via PayPal. I can give you a call about the
details or email you more information, let me know.
--
Maggie Sands

As a marketer, you want anything you do to pass the sniff test. So if your stuff looks anything like this fake scammy crap garbage then you are not going to have much success with it. Largely because the folks who are sending out millions of emails are going to sterilize the market and turn the web cynical toward even more marketing techniques. So you need to make your marketing efforts that much more personalized, and it also helps to have a real presence in the field, that way bloggers won't dismiss you as just another scam, like they might those folks promoting the fake charity angle.

This is another reason why it also helps to create things in entirely unique formats. The gamers exploiting stuff burn out one opportunity after another, but most of their new & creative slants are simply extensions of things that worked for others. Getting out in front of the scammers on a new trend & format is far more profitable than following in their footsteps. But be aware that marketing ideas have a curve to them. An idea which starts off pure and is successful & profitable will end up coming under the eye of scammers at some point. And most forms of fraud are based around trying to look like the real thing, so eventually a format that was once profitable eventually loses its potency and you must move on.

The best forms of marketing which help you differentiate yourself from the scammers are those which build trust over time: branding, awareness, social interaction, etc. The person holding up a puppet might be able to compete with you here and there from time to time, but if you build something with depth and substance they will have a hard time competing on a sustainable basis.