• My 2000 calorie diet in preparation for the kayak marathon World Championships in September, where I’m racing doubles in the masters class.
• Going on a Bing Diet…

Yes, I thought it was time to give Bing a go and I found it worked! You can try the  search engine blind tase test and see for yourself! (popout)

(FYI as of July 2009 the overall results were:  Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%)

The main difference between Google and everybody else is that they pad out their brand so we become too inert to move somewhere else for our search results. There is a high chance you use one or more of these  services  (wikipedia/popout) and every time you do, you probably love Google a little more for giving you some great service for free.

But if you are tired of the slow erosion of the search results with real time search, video search, news search, then maybe like me you might try a simpler easy engine like Bing.

And it seems I’m not the only one. According to Hitwise who published some interesting stats recently, it’ s all go for Bing!.

(Since this is a quick post, I’ve copied and pasted from Search Engine Roundtable:

Microsoft relaunched their search engine Bing on June 1, 2009, just over a year ago.

On June 1, 2009 Bing’s market share, according to Hitwise was 5.25%. A year later, according to Hitwise it is 9.85% share. If you do the math, that is about 88% growth year-over-year, not too far under double growth!

Here are some of the latest stats from Hitwise:

Of course, growing share from 5% to 10% is nice, but it still shadows Google’s share. In June 2009, Google had a share of 74.04%, June 2010 Google’s share is 71.65, so that is a 3% decline.

I was riding home tonight on my motorbike thinking of the reality that has struck home. Yes, the era of SEO’ers gaming the system wholesale might just start getting a lot tougher. And today I saw a the most visible sign yet of harder times for this species of online marketeer.

To preface what I am about to explain, its worth understanding a little about how Google think. If you have ever read complexity theory, you will know that within eco systems, there are depths of complexity we will never know about. A good example of a ‘micro eco system’ is a flock of birds flying in an apparently random way, but somehow working cohesively as a ‘mega mind’. It looks impossible, but in fact its all held together by a few simple rules:
- speed of a birds reaction
- external forces in play (wind)
- distance from the next bird
- desire to follow the bird in front
Change any of these variables and the whole character of the flock will change.

Have a look at this video and it will make sense to you:

And so with Google, they think ecosystems. They understand that great complexity is ruled by relatively simple forces.

Now you are thinking in a certain way, let me carry on…

Google have announced they are now beta testing this:

https://google.com

Whats relevant? – it’s the ‘s’, as in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections . They justify the test by saying this:

“A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings.”

Ref their announcement / The Register comment

So off the back of
- a number privacy disasters including Facebook and Google buzz,
- The federal trade commission and its efforts to stamp out bad marketing practice on the Internet
- European legislation on ‘opt in to store cookies‘
There is a pro privacy climate.

That’s good, sort of if you’re a consumer. For marketeers of course is just more stuff to deal with when trying to accurately target customers. (I won’t go there right now)

Google now tell us that we can surf privately. We can avoid being snooped on, so its got to be good for you. In thory – yes,  in practice NO. When did you last hear about a user suing because of surfing habits being revealed?

But what this does do, is make google a ton of extra $$$$$$$$$

How?

By switching over to https surfing, off the privacy card, Google will block all referrer data and IMHO they will also block this data in Google analytics. This referrer information will no longer contain keywords users came to the site on and also what they converted on.

If you are a professional SEO’er, you are gaming Google to get your site in places where ‘the money lives’. Every time a user clicks and converts on your SEO driven result, that is money Google could have made from AdWords.

To accurately game Google, you need to know what phrases convert, so you can spend money on linkbuilding for that phrase. Of course you can run an AdWords campaign and it will give you very good keyword intelligence. Now imagine you have this data and you run your expensive SEO programme but you cant track anything from Google natural search. You are getting conversions, but where from? How can you manage spend when you have little idea on what actually converts?

Now you are driving with a fogged up windshield. You will know what your rankings are (probably) But you won’t know be able to attribute ROI to phrases.

That means

>> less resource and accuracy within SEO

>> which in turn means more intensity within AdWords auctions

>> which makes Google loads more $$$$$$$$$

And all because they use a simple lever: imposing secure search.

There are other things going on that will affect their positive revenue uplift:
- More blended search / News search / Real time search / wikipedia pages, pushing out commercial natural results
- Reduction of the long tail. Webmasters are already seeing a drop of between 5% and 15% in long tail search volume, therefore concentrating users around fewer keywords and so making it easier for advertisers to advertise on these results.
- Category wide downward revision of quality score which I have seen recently with brand phrases.
- Bigger emphasis on ranking brand sites, knowing how bad they generally are with converting uses on anything other than dedicated landing pages.
- Attacking any sector where search is a factor: Product search, travel, mortgages
My guess is that this intensifying of AdWords auctions will uplift their revenues by 15% – 20% overall within 12 months.

So what am I doing about this?

Well, I’m going to restructure my sites, so I an run unique ‘join now’ buttons per page and then use tools like SEM rush to work out what pages rank for what and then match this all up to give me a reasonable idea which pages produce the best results and rank for the biggest terms.

It’s all a hack workaround, but its better than no accurate data.

So to wrap up, Google used to say “don’t be evil“, but they have dropped this mantra in favour of “You can make money without doing evil.”

They are not evil as individuals. But as a collective they are great at misdirection, deception and silence. They are moulding the shape of the Internet in a way that makes them more money and sell us the idea that its good for us.

You can say Micro$oft are evil, but I see them as a heavy thug barging smaller people out of its way. At least you know that’s what they are about. Google on the other hand are feeding us with happy pills (gmail / docs / youtube / tricks in the SERPS) and getting us to love them whilst sucking the financial lifeblood out of us until we can pay no more and our ROI goes negative.

I know this sort of behaviour has gone on for generations, and its just what happens when business goes greedy. I only hope Bing comes good and takes Google on.

—

BTW – I’m on a BING diet – and I’m liking it much! Here, try this: the blind search engine taste test

and you might like BING too

Noisy, but quiet at the same time

I get asked what is going on in SEO and where I think it’s is going and I have 2 sets of answers:

On whats going on?

Not that much if you are just a regular SEOer working on pimping your property. The tricks don’t seem to have changed that much over the last 3 years. There are no big new exploits to play on, its all just settled down and rolling along.

This is evidenced by looking on the SEO social bookmarking site Sphinn.com – lots of recycled stuff about core SEO housekeeping, but nothing really that new.

The new stuff is with Social, but from an SEO view, the only interesting thing here is how Google is leveraging social to connect the whole of the Internet as one giant social network. That’s cool, but not relevant if you are looking to punt out mortgage applications!

Where SEO is going?

1. Its here to stay and its becoming more and more important as the Internet becomes  more ‘socalised’ i.e. as web sites who care about traffic conform to certain architectural practices; These practices revolve around being index-able and bookmark-able.

2. Its dying slowly as the engines get better and better at holding out against manipulation from SEO’ers like me.

Of course this is ‘onsite’ versus ‘offsite’ classification of things.

I am lucky to manage a reasonably large SEO operation and I have access to stats across my SEO work and my colleague’s PPC activities. I’ve seen a slow and progressive shift towards users getting more comfortable with clicking the paid for ad, as opposed to the natural search listing when they are doing a commercial query.

Of course this all makes sense when you see the huge push on quality of advertising. Google know when users don’t really discriminate between paid and natural, they will have won the battle.

By the same measure, I’m seeing fewer commercial results within the informational queries.  This has a bunch of consequences, the greatest being a shift of money towards paid for as the easiest pathway to buying a product when you are ready!

So in conclusion, for as long as techies build sites in ignorance of the web ecosystem, SEO’ers will carry on patching up the damage. But Gaming the system for rankings will get a lot harder and will gently roll into online PR.

The end is not nigh - yet

So according to Search Engine Land Google Caffeine is a few months away from roll  out and we won’t be able to see which data centre its being rolled out in.

There are two points here:

a. In SEO, something BIG is most probably happening, but its like a slow moving tide where there are few noticeable markers to work off.

b. Google have learned how to manage their PR (sort of – ref: buzz mess up) and through obfuscation they will control the situation one small slightly visible step at a time.

What are we in for? I’m not sure really. Professionally its business as usual. I had thought of taking a very proactive stance and working the social media stuff, but im not that sure which bits will have greatest effect for Caffeine, so I’m just holding back to see what changes come.

My guess is that:

a. The investment we have made in making our little corner of the Internet a better place, will pay off in a big way as the algo gets to understand how to filter for quality better.

b. Seo will migrate to social engineering.  Social engineering, as in using PR to rustle up noise in the social landscape and align it will SEO objectives.

So its all change, just not quite yet and it will be slow.

I think we need some warm bodies

A quick post…Some time ago I wrote a post with a pdf link to the leaked Google human reviewer document written in 2007. As some of you may know there has been a little more ‘openess’ in the big G and following that theme, this article gives great insight into how they use humans to augment the algo.

A few nice quotes:

Q: Can you give me a sense for how you approach evaluation?

A: We use two main kinds of evaluation data. One kind is we have human evaluators all over the world for whom we have a workflow system. They come to it and are fed things to evaluate. A typical thing is: Here is a query, you’re speaking French in Switzerland, here’s a URL, tell us on some kind of scale or some set of flags and description how good of a URL is that for that query.

Q: Who are these human raters?

A: They’re not volunteers. They’re paid, through contractors from third parties. We look for a basic level of education and communication skills, and in particular our one requirement is that they need to be able to some level in English. Other than that, what we’re really looking for is a broad cross-section of folks. Not a technology background, just like to use the Internet. We have some screening around testing of their ability to do some of the tasks we want them to do and follow the instructions.

Q: How important are the human raters vs. the more automated methods? And do you get alerts if search results or search behavior is not what you expect?

A: The human evaluators are pretty important for us today. The more automated or user behavior/click-based things really give you complementary kinds of data. Both have noise in them: Human evaluators make mistakes. Clicks are hard to interpret; people click or don’t click for all kinds of reasons.

It’s well worth taking some time out to trawl through this lot since it will give you a much better idea of how Google uses humans to help it’s search engine.

Front page Computer Weekly

I pitched the editor of Computer Weekly on this and happpily he took  the article. And I guess the subject resonated with him, since I’ve been given front page placement!

For those of you who like technical stuff, this article in The Register gives a very complete view of what’s going on.

I guess it resonates with me since I know first hand the power of having a flexible ‘future proof’ platform that acts as an enabler. So in short, brace yourselves!

Caffeine is a new update from google and unlike the bluster of the Bing merger with yahoo, this is the first emergence of something that will probably change the world – and I don’t think im exaggerating…it will level the SEO playing field and let sites that have genuine merit rise up the rankings, overshooting the sites gamed by SEO’ers. This will mean better reach into better information and thus help the knowledge flow and so ‘change the world’

In essence it’s a massive new infrastructural update of the Google search algo that allows it to work more efficiently and faster. This means they are paving the way for a far more comprehensive search algo. In short (IMO) its the death knell of SEO and the emergence of social engineering as the best way to get ranked.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

“Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”.
http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-index-23823

Powerful stuff.

SEO is in trouble

I was asked about an SEO company who was bullying one of my friends in the social media space and this was my response (partially edited) :

What a load of !*!^£*$£!!!!. They are just trying to make you feel insecure.

The most important part of SEO is linkbuilding and the main thing agencies fall over on is link building. So that’s why they are very vague on this. So they talk about top rankings, but how are they going to do this? What is their link building plan what sort of sites will they get links from and how much resource will that take. So often they hide behind jargon so they can cover up their incapabilities when it comes to getting the kind of links you will need to rank and not get done for spamming.

And companies like this are going to be in trouble when potential clients sort out their basic SEO and when google finds a better way to rank sites using other then links

Ultimately SEO as we know it is dying. Shoemoney wrote on this and got it basically right,( IMO) he does not cover the incompetence of web developers who ignore SEO 101 stuff. For as long as they carry on, there will always be some fixing to do.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/07/seo-has-no-future/

This is why I’m spending about ½ of my effort on social… because ultimately google cares only about revenue… and what their users want. So you will see a bigger and bigger split between commercial and informational listings and for prominence on commercial listings, you will have to pay $$$

To me social is powerful because it where those conversations happen that help decide on one course of action or another – in other words, it’s a continuum of a process that has carried on for 1000’s of years. Sadly it was disrupted in the 20th C by broadcast media, but now it returning to its normal state. i.e. the power of individuals sharing information is coming back.

So in conclusion… read seomoz, seobook and webmasterworld and put yourself out as an seo’er since you are far better equipped to handle the link (relationship) building that Google care so much about when they decide on the value of a site

SES is a corporate thing these days, the sessions are’nt that in depth but despite that the big players in SEO go becasuse of the networking.

The catch for hard core SEO’ers is that next year there may not be a good reason to go and network.

This year there was no ‘meet the engineers’ – so if you wanted to speak with one, you had to look hard. I heard of one very respected seo guy at the Google Dance (who will remain nameless) who had to send ‘gofors’ to find engineers.?  And I hear this is the last Google Dance…That’s bad.

The Key SEO’ers go to be closer to the root of their business – Google and its engineers. If they go, those further down the foodchain, the in house and agency SEO’ers will not have the same motivation to go to SES, since they wont be able get close to the key SEO’ers. And so on it goes.

My verdict: Great networking (I picked up several new suppliers for my SEO work)
Will I go again? it all depends on how much Google are tied in with the conference next year!

(Kevin is the ‘front guy’ for SES)

So you know , this is where a selected panel ‘out’ themselves on the best seo tricks they can come up with that they dare to give away. Interestingly there is a blogging blackout for 1 month. Then we can go ahead and talk about it all. The weird thing is that the blackout is done on an honor basis and once again this year, everyone has kept their promise.

Since i was privileged enough to be there, i thought I’d add a couple of comments to the excellent coverage on this give it up session…

My main overview comment was that there was a lot of blackhat stuff, which is great for getting laughs and applause, but realistically how would you actually use most of this stuff without getting busted by the big G?

key points for me:

Google does obfuscation in a BIG way?¿½ – (and yes they are getting more evil by the day) So a good example is their PPC quality score where they have been outed for completely misleading us on what they really look for when determining price per click and what were told.

the google guidelines:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas, the core components remain more or less the same. Below you’ll find a breakdown of each type of Quality Score.

For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid:

• The keyword’s historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• Other relevance factors

the bit about landing page quality is most important here – so much so, it has a whole page to itself. Big points are Relevant and Original Content and Transparency.

Of course its all obfuscation in spadefulls since its got nothing to do with ‘being a good guy and doing it the google way’ – you pay relative to the authority of the site your ad points to.

Michel Grey and the truth:

Michael Gray was next at bat. Luckily his presentation was a lot more white hat.

Michael asks Google to stop trying to be our moral compass. Be truthful and honest and stop sidestepping the question. Amen.

Michael’s presentation is about how to beat the AdWords Quality Score.

Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

He shows us his site for Sanjaya ringtones. His AdWords ad was disabled because he had a low quality score.

He shows another site. It has the same ad copy but it’s going to a different domain. That ad runs for 75 cents. On the other site the ad goes for 10 dollars.

Everyone applauds and I giggle.

So what’s the difference?

• All campaigns were created in one account
• Ad copy identical
• Landing page identical

The only difference was the domain age. The domain that was created in 2006 had its ad jacked up to $10.00. The domain from 2008 was just $.75. It’s not just the domain age. They’re looking at the number of trusted links you get over a period of time. You need a certain number of links but you have to do it over a certain period of time.

Quality Score Gets Adjusted Just Like The Sandbox

Landing Page Quality Score has nothing to do with the actual landing page. To prove this, Michael creates a third ad going to the whitehouse.gov site. Any landing page algorithm that gives whitehouse.gov a good quality score for ringtones is really not looking at the landing page.

What is the Landing Page Quality Score really looking at? The main factor Google looks at is your site’s organic trust score. Trusted sites equal good low pricing. Non-trusted sites get bad pricing.

How do you beat the Landing Page Quality Score? Every few months Google updates their Landing Page score. If your Web site moves into a non-trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all your keywords over.

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data that you give them is going into their borg and being used in their algorithm. Every piece of data can and will be used against you. Think twice before you give it to them.

Interesting one if you’re in Europe / UK.?  In essence its a loosely worded (as applied to online marketing) piece of European legislation that prohibits misrepresentation by law

Misrepresentation for us online marketing types is for instance where we say something good about a company, whilst in their pay, pretending to be a random person off the street.

The only unsettling part of this, is the remote possibility of prosecution or if there were an overzealous party intent on causing a PR nightmare for a big brand (motor insurance companies come to mind).

In reality of course there is far more serious mis-representaiton cases, but you never know…

Whilst at SMX Advanced there was a bit of a noise about black hat SEO having too much prominence. Since I was lucky enough to be there, I am adding my tuppence to this one.

There is a prevailing sense that Google is really getting it’s index un-spammed for the big money phrases. Apart form the army of site checkers (10-12 thousand of them) The algo is getting far better at understanding ‘quality’.

In the old days, a black hat SEO had a real chance of making good money from their trade. However now there is a sense of the net closing in. So back to SMX, well there was a dynamic there:

Audiences in need of SEO stunts to stay interested

Audiences advanced enough to feel pissed of by Big G’s massive dominance

Speakers who did walk the Black hat road, but who mostly now make their money consulting or working in agencies

all of this added together = loads of noise about black hat. I say noise, because none of the ideas were particularly amazing or potentially profitable in themselves. Obviously there are certain things… but if youre managing a big brand (as i am for SEO) you cannot afford to take chances on reckless SEO in the name of short term gain.

Of course if I followed every Google rule about buying links and so on, I would not have such success, but I do it carefully and sustainably.

SEO is changing and SMX advanced really demonstrated the frustrations of such a dominant player.

Black hat SEO Bloggers
SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side
They even got yahoo directories… no page rank on yahoo directories
SMX top 10 learnings

#1: Onside Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be History
#2: Searching will become more User-friendly
#3: More Personalized & Localized Results will Influence SEM
#4: Natural Language Reputation Algorithm will be a Great Factor
#5: Copying Themes will be punished by Near Duplicate Content Filter
#6: TrustRank will be Stronger than PageRank
#7: Online Social Media will kill Traffic from Search Engines
#8: Handheld Devices will Rule Future Traffic
#9: Email will be the Least Used for Personal Communication
#10: Personal Power to Influence Purchase will Increase
#11: Web-based Consumer Analytics will be Major Internet Marketing Process
#12: Web Cluster and Widgets will mean Businesses for Small Companies
#13: Future Internet Marketers will be Personal Helper

the post http://www.seobook.com/bloggers

and a great video from one of the authors of boingboing.net about how to write a discriptive seo friendly blog headline.

I have always thought search engines were fairly bad at understanding what is good or bad content – it goes back to an idea in zen and the art of motocycle maintanance about quality. I.e. you can’t define quality. Certainly from a search engine algorithm perspective, how do you judge the ‘qualty’ of a particular site or the content in it?

Obviously you can assume more links into a site is more, but then spammers can do a site with 100’000 links in an afternoon – so within reason that idea doesn’t hold water.

So how about having humans do the quality control for the engines ? i.e. if a link comes from an authority blog, then maybe it does have currency, after all it has been quality checked.

And this is where i go to blogging and seo. Blogs ‘wash ‘ and ‘filter links, engines pick up on this distinctive footprint and if you have plenty of blog references and youre seo’d properly, then you will rank.

I really believe engines need bloggers for quality control.

Of course there is the question about why blogs don’t do as well as they should on seo. My take, is that by their architecture, they are just not built right for search engines.

As you know, engines dont like content churn, it means they can’t grab on to anything. Also they like a pyramid internal links structure, which helps them work out which pages are the most important within a site. Blogs dont do this structure at all well…

so you have to do a lot of hacking and manipulation to get a reasonable spread of phrases up there.

So if you sort out your site SE, get involved in the conversation, then in time you will rank.

Links and communities: how do you define a good link? How do you place your site in a good community?

Find who’s linking to your competitors, and get links from them. We use one of our own tools to find them…think there’s other tools on the market which do something like this, but ours looks at all the top sites and find where their backlinks are coming from and any site who is linking to 2 or more of the top sites are located in the community.

We also have an authority finder, similar to your hub finder tool which we use to find possible industry authority sites. This is the community and where you want links from. This is kinda old “forgotten” knowledge (replaced with pushbutton link programs), but still work great.

We also analyze “who you link to” and try to optimize sites for linking to certain industry authorities and resources. The mix for a neighborhood is partly, who links to you, who links to those who link to you, what are the similar backlinks of those in the top to (Google’s “Similar Pages”) and who you link out to.

I believe getting 100 links from outside the community are not worth as much as 10 links from within your community, so if you’re seeking links, where do you want to put your efforts?

Too true ! For more, go and buy the book !

Links and communities: how do you define a good link? How do you place your site in a good community?

Find who’s linking to your competitors, and get links from them. We use one of our own tools to find them…think there’s other tools on the market which do something like this, but ours looks at all the top sites and find where their backlinks are coming from and any site who is linking to 2 or more of the top sites are located in the community.

We also have an authority finder, similar to your hub finder tool which we use to find possible industry authority sites. This is the community and where you want links from. This is kinda old “forgotten” knowledge (replaced with pushbutton link programs), but still work great.

We also analyze “who you link to” and try to optimize sites for linking to certain industry authorities and resources. The mix for a neighborhood is partly, who links to you, who links to those who link to you, what are the similar backlinks of those in the top to (Google’s “Similar Pages”) and who you link out to.

I believe getting 100 links from outside the community are not worth as much as 10 links from within your community, so if you’re seeking links, where do you want to put your efforts?

Too true ! For more, go and buy the book !

So I explained myself as an SEO guy and i was about getting us up the search engine rankings – pretty simple, but really a fairly inadequate description

So here is what I said in the bar afterwards

there are 2 parts – the 20 % part which is actual search engine optimisation (tec stuff all done before and definable)

and the 80% part – getting links, and building buzz. (not teccy, undefinable, impossible to accurately predict)
I explained that to understand search engines, you need to understand human behaviour as expressed online. From that you begin to understand where to go and how to get links. (have a look at the map showing a social network of a blogger – you will notice how its very similar to how websites connect with each other)

I also explained that engines have customers they have to please, (you the searcher) and to understand what their customer wants, i.e. great content with great site usability, you will be at the point of enlightment.

The you give yourself a leg up with a bit of black hat (clean-ish style) – some clever paid for link acquisition and site content manipulation and mix it with a genuinely great content site you will rank.

Sounds simple enough and in a sense it is, but of course the devil is in the detail as is the complexity.

there are 2 parts to this : 1 the bit where I talk about the book and 2. the bit where I talk about the clever marketing they have used for this cool book.

My review

I dig it, its a really good book for someone who is a professional web developer working with PHP MySQL and has built their own CMS, or may be has inherited it and they want to get theor heads around SEO without getting into the social theory of what and why with SEO. In other words its a book for people getting their hands dirty with code.

Through my professional role as an SEO’er I’m advising a company who my employers are working with. They have a custom CMS and they need traffic since their SEO is hell (they even use an Iframe on the front page where the content goes ! ! and they wonder why google does not rank them.

Anyhow the dev guy got a load of “seo this and seo that” and all he got was bored. he wanted to know how to fix things and what things to fix. thats all. Wether the site got more traffic was almost academic to him. It was all about eh development solution. This is where this cool book comes in nicely. For more SEO you should check out the authors site SEO Egghead

The marketing thing is on a seperate post

The site has a PR of 6/10 and about 68,000 inbound links and about 180,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days – so not bad, but then it has been online for about 6 years and importantly its got great writers.

It runs on wordpress 2.1 and has about 20 plugins see here (kudos to JasonD who suggested i run the site on WP

The hacking has been a mix of doing SEO stuff and making the site ‘buzzy’ – I’ll document this more thoroughly in the next week or so and explain some of the marketing ideas i have for the site, including some thoughts on monetizing this.

the gist is that in real terms search engine algo’s are hardcore maths with human behavior as their driver. I am lucky enough to know someone who seems to have his head around both the human and mathematical side of search engine marketing – lucky guy.

my advantage is the ‘soft side’ of this i.e. the conversion stuff, content and principles behind the way algo’s are built.

I know this is a bit of a ramble, its because its late and i feel compelled to actually write something on the site. so on the theme of disconnect, how about this article $10 million if anyone can rank a poker site for online poker in the top 5 on google… yes – those big ticket key phrases are really valuable!

So in order to avoid the usual; tag this , keyword that link this and link that , I went to a far more base level…

the enlightened of you will have heard of www.cluetrain.com (markets are conversations) and taking my que from that, I explained by my learned friend that he had to get into a conversation with the right people in the internet.

Conversations and seo !?!

If we assume search engines want to leverage humans as a quality control tool for filtering links and information, then places like wikipedia, DMOZ ….and blogs, make complete sense.

Aside: this explains why a few years back, google ranked those niche directories.

Blogs follow a set format, they have humans filtering stuff and importantly their prominence mirrors off line social interaction. i.e. the more opinionated, knowledgeable and entertaining the writer, the more likely the person will rise to prominence within their sphere of other influencers. Prominence in this case is links and commentary in from the right sites.

So back to my friend
My advice was:
- spend on pay per post/reviewme
- really bend overbackwards to help the paid for bloggers write good stuff
- pick you keywords carefully, going for words which are’nt too competitive early on and build from that
- use this opportunity to build some goodwill from the bloggers
- if you do it right and really enter into the spirit of the cconversation you will get a buzz going
- that buzz means more writeups and more links (unpaid for)

and then you should get on to the google SERPS for some meaningful keyphrases.

The other point about paid for blogging is that its dips under the search engines radar for ‘spammy’ paid for links, unlike the template text links of old.

and since there is a self adjusting ‘human filter’ involved i.e. write crap, and your fans abandon you, it seems like a relatively sustainable model.

Finally. If I were paid for this, how do you think a search engine would know!

I’ve begun to use google mobile since I have a new orange SPV M3100 with wireless. it means I can read my rss feeds and do a bit of light web surfing at the most random of times.

Anyhow – I wanted to do a keyword lookup and so I typed in overture uk keyword tool’ and up came my site (SEPguy) as top result. Amazed, I did a ranking search on googlerankings.com and it turns out that I’m really ranked 298th on Uk search.

And , yes the result worked, since I have a link to overture keywords search on my site. Cool! So it rocks.

On a professional level, I’m a bit nervous.

I reassure myself by the core idea: good SEO is good SEO and all personal search is doing is helping clear the clutter for users.

I suppose the final outcome is that sites will get less of a spread of irrelevant traffic. Conversion rates should rise since youre getting the right traffic and there will still be massive competition for top spot for your ‘type’ of user.

But how do you get to the top of the rankings?

If its based on personal user patterns, then is it google giving ou sites associated with the sites you have already checked out? If so, maybe if youre not visible now in the emergence of personal search, then you will be buried later on. becaseu if they never see you, how can you be associated with a given search.

I guesss the net outcome is less shifting in popularity of encumbant sites and possibly more reliance on ‘viral’ spread of informaiton on new sites through the blogosphere and the like.

Interesting future we have!

This promo site has never been SEO optimised and has never solicited for SEO traffic. It is simply there to land incoming affiliate / PPC / Banner advertising.

But Google has given page rank to about 130 pf these pages and Yahoo has ranked this site well across the board.

So I am re organising these pages and redirecting them to my other site.

Here is the clever bit (I think) I have looked at the doner page and worked out the content and then I go to google and do a site wide search on my own site for the keywords I want ranked i.e. ‘widget1 widget2′ the search string is:

widget1 widget2 site:mysite.com

And the 1st one that comes up on the list is obviously the best page to link to for your chosen keywords, since it is google’s take on which page is the most important for a search on that phrase.

‘no follow’ is a tag used to tell search engines not to follow a link. of course its up to the search engines as to weather they actually do or don’t follow a lnik. Google say they acknowledge this protocol, but i bet they follow the links nevertheless, but don’t give those links any value to the reciepient site.

So there are 5 strands here:

1. Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.

2. The founder Jimbo Wales has recently launched a new search engine called wikiseek which trawls through wikipedia for results and shows links shown on the site. These results rely on great entries and a buzzing community adding new content and keeping the whole thing in order.

Wiki seek say “The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. ” – so what if there is no incentive by a huge part of the online community to add content and place links ?

3. I thought wikipedia was a democratic thing!, so whats with Jimbo simply telling us all – ‘no follow’ where was the community participation ? For more on wikiseek see Danny Sullivans comment

4. whats Search Wikia all about? and why take on the search engines? As you may know search wikia uses community participation to rank content. you may remember Yahoo triedhuman editing with their directory… and ultimately failed with it. So can humans do a better job than an algo? We shall see. I think the spammers will kill it in the end.

5. ever heard of a wiki nazi? with any society, when the ‘police’ get out of control it turns ugly. I think of my personal wikipedia experiences HERE and the laughable case of the linkbait page where all the references to Matt Cutts the google engineer and blogger were savagely culled. They were only reinstated after uproar from the SEO community. Fools.
So in conclusion, I see too much power with too few. fast erosion of goodwill. open day for the spamming community. dictatorship with a community front. Too many things on the boil at one time. And the core principles of ‘give and take’ being eroded with Wiki. All this will probably come to an unhappy ending much like DMOZ

• Google is:
• A very regimented secretive organisation (of course we already know that!)
• Its founders really do have an iron grip, so what they say goes ! – this is because being contrarian and sticking to what they think works has worked very well so far.
• They dont blog as a company, because Serge and Larry are secretive by nature ( it seems), so you could argue they are not conversing well with the market.
• I think search is a core interest, but data collection and usage thereof is the real google.

So what !?

Well there is a love affair with google that is burning very bright and the brighter it burns, the greater the fallout when the tide turns.
Its the nature of .com. massive rapid uptake and then massive rapid uptake for another service or product.

So if effective ownership of your window to the internet and data collection are the underlying prizes (remember good data collection and perspective ownership means marketing nirvana) Then any big company with deep enough pockets will fight for the most important marketing space for the next couple of decades.

I say all this, but i wish I was a genius linkbaiter. That is probably why I’m keeping a close lookout for master copywriters who can help me on this

link building reading
http://www.andyhagans.com/articles.php
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml
http://www.justilien.com/category/link-building/

But as with any ‘social envoronment, you get imbalances, you get power hungry *ankers who think they can go about doing as they please in the name of wikipedia. Just think of the last time you got a parking ticket from a gloating, self rightious parking attendant, the one that hangs around your car till its one minute past the ‘over time’ – this is how i feel about the wikipedia police.

below is how my story went :

i added this :

A web site has search engine prominence (SEP) when its content is ranked highly amongst the search engines. Webmasters build search engine prominence through building as large and relevant link inventory as possible.

A website can be prominent without being well search engine optimised, however a well optimised site may not be prominent if it does not have a sufficient link inventory to compete in popular search terms.

SEP should not be confused with SEO (search engine optimisation). SEO is to do with elements a webmaster can control i.e. content manipulation. SEP relates to activities undertaken by 3rd parties like placing a link to your website.
Contents

[hide]

* 1 Why sites enjoy search engine prominence
* 2 How webmasters build up search engine prominence
* 3 Dangers of sponsored link acquisition
* 4 References

[edit] Why sites enjoy search engine prominence

Typically such websites which have prominence, enjoy a large inventory of Inbound links or backlinks. The greater the number of links and the higher the ‘quality’ of these inbound links, the greater the prominence of relevant keywords (Keyword (Internet search)) in such a web site.

For example, Wikipedia enjoys a massive inventory of inbound links, or inlinks, which subsequently makes its extemely prominent in search engine listings across a great spread of keywords.

[edit] How webmasters build up search engine prominence

Webmasters typically either rely on the attractiveness of their website’s content to attract inbound links, or they actively set up Link bait, which attracts inbound links from webmasters. Webmasters also run online PR or Seo pr campaigns, but at the time of writing, SEO pr has not been widely adopted by the Public relations community as it is still a very specialised arena.

They can build a web sites prominence by purchasing links from 3rd party website owners, these are known as Sponsored links.

They can also enter into Pay per click campaigns to ensure they have visability amongst search engines. These include Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

[edit] Dangers of sponsored link acquisition

Search engines can recognise the patterns shown from purchased link acquisition. Google more than other search engines regard this attempt at search engine prominence potentially as Spamdexing and so will either penalise or not recognise these additional inbound links to a given site. Typically search engines will look at the rate of growth of inbound links and the similarity of the link text to determine wether it is Organic linking or inorganic linking Italic text

[edit] References
^ Microsoft Bcentral. PPC & Search engine Prominence.
^ Market Sentinel Spamming your way to search engine prominence.
^ webstrategy.com.au How do I improve my search engine ranking?
^ Internet marketing for your tourism business Chapter 3 Designing Your Site for Search Engine Prominence.
^ SEOMoz Blog Spammers Can’t Call Themselves SEOs
^ To Blog or no to blog Blogs are also a great way to get higher search engine prominence
^ PR Web Search Engine Submission: Is it a Necessity or a Liability?

they said :
Not standard terminology

“Search engine prominence” is not (yet) really standard terminology, so I wonder if an article is justified. A Google search on the phrase returns only 542 hits, compared with over 36 million for “search engine optimization” and over 23 million for “search engine marketing”. Are there source references, or would this fall under (Wikipedia’s policy against original research)? –IslandGyrl 22:32, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

i reincluded the text and edited it

they took it out and I said:
reason for re inclusion

from the writer of the article: I work as a professional search engine marketeer and in order to explain the difference between optimisation i.e. stuff they can control and prominence whicih is stuff they can’t directly control i came up with the term; search engine prominence.

normally I wouldnt feel that strongly about this issue except that for me and my clients it all makes complete sense. After all how much sense does link bait make ? All i’m doing is defining something which is not well defined at the moment. other related terms are linkbait, in linking, backlinking etc, but none of these deal with the core concept of search engines seeing one site as more important/prominent than another and ranking keywords accordingly….. ?€”The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sepguy (talk ?€¢ contribs).

Please read WP:OR. Wikipedia is not for things you made up yourself. — RockMFR 03:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

They took it out again and I said

reason for re-re inclusion

Hi, you can tell, I’m being persistant with this, mainly because I relly feel it should be included into wikipedia. I didnt come up with the term and i have cited references on the article – so please can this remain this time …sepguy

and they have taken it out again. So having had a look at who did the deleting I found their trail:

Contents

• 1 username
• 2 Andreas Evagelopoulos
• 3 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Washington Online Learning Institute
• 4 My RfA
• 5 RfA thanks
• 6 List of Jack Abramoff-related organizations
• 7 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Irascible Professor
• 8 Re: 66.79.167.173
• 9 Deletion protocol question
• 10 Old Louisville
• 11 General Mayhem
• 12 I said I would give an admin who protected a smiley face.
• 13 Main page protection
• 14 linkless template review
• 15 Small reminder
• 16 Down syndrome
• 17 Linkless article fix-up
• 18 Linkless article (fix-up)
• 19 FYI
• 20 AfD Iron Ring Clock
• 21 Baseball
• 22 Yeouinaru Station on deletion review
• 23 AfD Nomination being used in a personal dispute
• 24 Relisting AfD
• 25 Deleted Article: Albert R. Jonsen
• 26 Anna Marek
• 27 Do you seriously want me gone that badly?
• 28 List of famous tall/short people AfDs
• 29 October man sequence

Articles this editor has interfered with – see if you can see a pattern…the patten is – no pattern

- what the * uck does this person know about search engine prominence ?!@{!
So I give up and i hope the spammers have better luck than me.

Obviously the right content is something you want to return to in the future, perhaps its reference material, or a commentry on something. there is a caviat.. the content needs to follow a theme – hrence thsi latent symantec stuff i have been talking about

but what about this promenence stuff ? well here is the concept:

a website needs inbound links becasue they are a vote of confidence from 3rd parties saying ‘this is a good site’ – engines rely on this becasue its?  human powered filter and so almost by definition its the best way forward when it comes to filtering out sites whicih himand are not interested in.

no links = no interest

of course you need to have filters on ths inbound links otherwise you will get spam links, these spam links still work on MSN and to an extent on yahoo, but not so much on Google.

anyhow, the concept of prominence… simply lots of great inbound links = loads of promenence + content hirarchy + theme = high rankings

so when I talk of search engein prominence, i mean the stuff that gets your stuff up the rankings. Optimisation gets you on the starting line – prominence, gets you the visability.