1. Google Bombs Defused … Not

    4 months ago

    So coming back from SMX (more on that later) I see a trackback from SEL about GWB ranking for [who is a failure].
    GWB also ranks for [who is a miserable]. While Scientology no longer ranks for [dangerous cult] they do rank for [cult dangerous] and [dangerous is cult]

    Now of course you can’t really expect Google […]

    Google, Michael Gray

  2. Why Does Yahoo! Search Lag Google & Microsoft in Ranking Newer Websites?

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo! still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank?

    Here are some examples of what I am talking about (with URLs expunged to protect the guilty)…

    A couple year old site that was lingering about with a few inbound links and was promoted last November. Notice how quickly both Google and Microsoft took to the marketing, whereas Yahoo is still nowhere to be found

    Here is a site that was promoted from brand new. Notice how Google and Microsoft are trending toward trusting it more and more, while Yahoo! Search occasionally picks it up and then spits it back out again

    Here is yet another newish site that Microsoft loves and Google is starting to like more and more. Yahoo! is still nowhere to be found

    If you had to pick the 1,000 most competitive keywords on the web I think all 3 of the above would fall in that group. I could list numerous other example sites as well. All the above sites have been in the Yahoo! Directory for at least 4 months. Even with new sites and a moderate amount of targeted promotion it is not that hard to work your way up into Google and Microsoft’s rankings, but Yahoo usually ignores it.

    I have highlighted that Yahoo! Search has their domain authority score overemphasized in their relevancy algorithms, which causes a lot of parasitic SEO to dominate their search results, but do they even care?

    Can you rank a new site in Yahoo! for terms like insurance without getting it nuked in Google? What makes Yahoo! so much slower at ranking new sites than the other major search engines?

    Aaron Wall, Yahoo

  3. Content and SEO

    4 months, 1 week ago

    There are many types of content some which you should be able to do yourself and some you just need professionals for :
    Your Intro Content : First off this really need to be done be an inhouse person that really understands your business and an external keyword researcher may come in handy here as they […]

    Dave Naylor

  4. $100 of FREE Text Links

    Recently

    The friendly folks at Tet Link Ads are offering all new customers

    Text Link Ads

  5. Yahoo! Open Search

    4 months, 1 week ago

    One of the biggest things holding back Yahoo! Search is their preference for Yahoo! content. As a shift in strategy, Yahoo! announced they are opening up their search results to third party data integration. Instead of a typical search result, some of the results with third party data may look like this

    Google has largely been pulling in third party data and doing their best to keep that traffic on the Google network. To appreciate how aggressive this has been, you only need to look at the increased size of Google local listings or the sharp decline in stock prices of traditional Yellow Pages companies, as highlighted in this WSJ article.

    A couple questions that remain are how interactive will the paid inclusion results get, and will the paid search ads get more interactive as well?

    Google has a similar program to what Yahoo! offers, with a couple major differences

    • Yahoo! will turn on third party data for some leading sites by default
    • Google requires you to learn their proprietary confusing language AND promote Google, Google Search, Google Subscribed Links, AND get your users to subscribe for you to get any additional exposure (and yet they wonder why it hasn’t taken off yet)

    Through different strategies both of the top 2 engines are turning their search results into destinations. Worth watching as it progresses. More information available at Search Engine Land.

    Aaron Wall, Yahoo

  6. Is Your Content Solving Symptoms or Fixing Problems?

    4 months, 1 week ago

    A normal business practice is to treat symptoms as problems and come up with a wide array of bogus solutions, but content that asks why actually solves problems and creates real value.

    Once you look at content creation from that perspective, there are a lot of great content ideas that you will not find on many competing sites simply due to limitations tied to their business interests, or their lack of interest in providing real value to the market.

    Aaron Wall

  7. V10 Html Banner

    4 months, 1 week ago

    this is a Closed Beta at the moment
    Get £500 free spins at JackpotCity and play the hitman video slot

    Dave Naylor

  8. Microsoft Announces Engagement Mapping Ad Technology

    4 months, 1 week ago

    AdWords has become a black box beyond the means of many small advertisers. To help some advertisers automate their accounts tools like free conversion tracking and CPA based bidding have came about. But all the tools that help enhance the perceived value of search ads and the value of conversions does nothing for brand ads or the other ads people see before searching and buying.

    Content ads, which were relatively expensive when AdSense first came out, have seen their price drop over the years as

    • advertisers adjusted content bids downward
    • smart pricing reduces prices (again, again, and again)
    • quality scores that drives out arbitrage ads
    • the clickable region has got smaller

    The value of many publishing based business models has aggressively eroded as

    • publishing markets get saturated
    • AdSense has replaced direct ad sales for many sites
    • Google keeps discounting the price (and perceived value) of non-search ads
    • Google’s search based ads get conversion credit for demand created by other ads

    Google claims their success is just because they are simply better than the competition and they have been doing search longer (that second claim is untrue - Yahoo! owns Inktomi and AltaVista, which have both been doing search longer than Google). The truth is they have a huge advantage in network effects, have advertising believe that their inventory is worth more than it is, and that other online ads are worth less than they are. It is going to be hard to create a viable competitor unless the metrics for measuring value are changed.

    Microsoft’s answer to this is called Engagement Mapping, yet another black box, but one that aims to share part of the ad credit with display ads (clicked or not) instead of tying most of the ad value to the search based conversion. Publishers would clearly benefit from this, but if it is hard to get advertisers to buy AdSense ads on Google (where Google essentially giving away the ads) how hard will it be to get advertisers to buy in on this? Perhaps big brands will use it, but smaller companies will not be interested.

    If Microsoft does not own a big piece of the search market, another big hurdle is how will they advertisers trust this model without giving Microsoft their analytics data?

    How might this pricing model change online publishing (for better or worse)?

    Aaron Wall, pay per click search engines

  9. Inclusionary Statements - Are You Willing to be One of the Best?

    4 months, 1 week ago

    One of the things that a lot of thought leaders do is inspire people. It is easy to believe when they give you something to believe in.

    I recently stumbled across this page. Although it is just text, to me it seems just as powerful as listening to Barack Obama speak. It is not even the words that matter…it is the underlying tone and enthusiasm.

    Sometimes I am a bit too cynical for my own good. Far too often I place principal ahead of growth strategies. But most of that stuff does not matter. The future of sustainable marketing practices is more about creating inspiring stories than about knowing more or blending ads in content better. Which, I suppose, is a good reason to go to the gym every day. The better you maintain yourself the easier it is to be inspiring. Now that’s a holistic marketing strategy. :)

    Aaron Wall, marketing

  10. Asda Travel with Greenlight

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Companies with additional brands are always seeking SEO. This brings us to ASDA the well known brand who opt for Greenlight to do their seo who make a promise of “marketing success to its vertical brands”
    Let’s hope they do a bit better job of the descriptions in future…WTF is SASDA  ? Purposeful misspelling? me thinks […]

    Dave Naylor

  11. Free Stuff

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, announced his next book Free, in a featured Wired article.

    Speaking of free stuff, Patrick Altoft created a free Wordpress plugin to track which pages on your blog get crawled most frequently. Joost De Valk has a free newsletter dedicated to Wordpress plugins.

    Aaron Wall

  12. adExcellence UK Launch

    4 months, 1 week ago

    For those of us looking to become a Microsoft adCenter expert in the UK the wait is over. Announced at SES London, if you missed it, was that adCenter customers UK based can now sign up to the adExcellence exam.
    The adExcellence training promises to heighten your industry recognition and an improvement on ROI.  With the […]

    Dave Naylor, Microsoft

  13. Google Chart API Rocks

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Fancy including a Google Chart API within your web-pages ? Well, it’s not at all difficult and Google Charting seems somewhat overlooked by Seo’s.

    The charting has a limitation of 50,000 queries per day go beyond this and the API ceases to work. Web ready the format returned is PNG as a response to the URL […]

    Dave Naylor, Google

  14. Interview of Nicholas Carr on The Big Switch, Blogging, & the Internet

    4 months, 1 week ago

    I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, and as a longtime fan of his Rough Type blog asked if he would be up for doing an interview. He said sure, and here is the interview.

    What is The Big Switch about?

    It’s about the interplay between technology and economics and how it influences the way people live and work. I look at how the electric grid transformed industry and society a hundred years ago, which is a cool story in itself, and then I use that story as a way to explain the similar shift that’s going on today with computing, as software applications and data storage shift onto the Internet’s computing grid. I argue that the rise of “cloud computing,” as it’s called, will also have far-reaching social, cultural, and business effects - some good, some bad.

    What inspired you to write The Big Switch?

    It’s been clear to me for a number of years that the Internet was going to transform computing - to turn it into a kind of centrally supplied utility. I guess I just wanted to put that shift into a broader context for readers, a historical and economic context as well as a technological context.

    The web empowers many individuals. Yet in spite of all this innovation, the middle class in the United States is hollowing out. Why is that? As individuals how can we protect ourselves from that trend?

    People with computers and Internet connections have enormous new opportunities to express themselves, and a smaller set of people have also gained new economic opportunities thanks to the Net. But I don’t see any sign that the economic opportunities are being widely spread, as they were with industrialization in the last century. I think what we’re seeing, in fact, is that software can take the place of labor on a broad scale without creating large new pools of attractive jobs. That’s one of the main reasons the middle class has been stagnant in recent years and the divide between the very rich and everyone else has been growing ever wider. As the cost of computing continues to fall, software-based automation will only expand and accelerate. There will still be lots of good opportunities for individuals - the ranks of the rich are bigger than ever - but for the middle class in general things will likely get tougher.

    With the publishing economy becoming more attention based, will most writing come in chunks so small and so fast that they lack context and the bigger picture? If so, how could this trend be reversed?

    I think it’s quite clear that the Internet is training our minds to take in information in quick bursts and that in turn we’re slowly losing our ability to maintain the concentration and patience necessary to read extended pieces of writing. This is a phenomenon that many people who use the web a lot have noticed. I think we’re probably at the start of a major shift in cognition, and I doubt it’s reversible.

    Sometimes I read TechMeme and 100 claimed thought leaders are all agreeing on the same thing. Then the next day (or sometimes two days later) you write about how all of them are wrong, and then 2/3 of them agree with you. What makes your contrarian blogging so captivating and buzz-worthy?

    The wisdom of crowds is, I think, greatly overrated. Crowds are usually full of crap. So if you see a blog mob happily racing off in one direction, you can be pretty sure that if you go the opposite way you’ll find something interesting.

    TechMeme, by the way, is a great site to visit if you want to get a quick read on what’s going on at the moment in the Internet end of the technology world. But it’s a very dangerous site to spend a lot of time on if you’re a tech blogger. It narrows your view and promotes rapid-fire me-too-ism. It’s better to try to seek out interesting new sources of information, to give yourself some space to think rather than just reacting.

    Some bloggers have called you cynical, but many of them fail to see connections that you easily make. What makes it so easy for you to identify relationships that others miss?

    I don’t really know. Being open to a broad set of influences is important, I think. To me, what’s fun about writing - and about thinking, for that matter - is making unexpected connections. When most people write, they get very earnest. They approach writing as if it were work. It’s better to be playful, to let your mind and your sentences take chances.

    Is user generated content an answer to anything, or does it only accelerate the diminishing content quality problem?

    People write blogs and upload photos and videos and tag content because they enjoy it. It gives them satisfaction. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But user-generated content does not exist in a vacuum. It competes with other content, and because it’s cheap to produce and usually given away free it has a big market advantage. You have to ask yourself what’s going to be crowded out of the market - what good stuff are we going to lose. A lot of people seem to think that new digital media represents a break from mainstream mass media. I don’t see it that way. I think new media represents a continuation of mass media and a further amplification of some of mass media’s worst qualities.

    You mentioned studies about political blogs in The Big Switch. From those studies, it seems links, attention, and readership seemed confined and self-reinforcing in some ways. How may search engines (and other gate-keepers) promote the creation of balanced content when people typically vote for content that is aligned with their biases and identities?

    That’s a good question, but I don’t have a good answer. I think what we’re going to see is greater personalization in search and other filtering and navigation tools, and in time that will tend to further reinforce biases and push people to have less sympathy for views that are different from their own. I think media personalization is good for search engines and advertisers. I don’t think it’s a great thing for society.

    Some publishing companies already use profit potential to guide what types of content they create and what topics they cover. Could this create a thinning out in many important fields where the economic viability of the publishing in the field is limited?

    In the long run, all for-profit publishers are influenced by profit potential. How could they not be? That’s not meant as any kind of criticism of journalistic ethics. It’s just a simple observation that production shapes itself to the market. So, looking again at the longer term, you can expect that the combination of unbundled content and precisely targeted advertising will mean that some types of content, including some times of very serious, very worthy content, will fall by the wayside or be shunted to a small elite. We may come to look back fondly on the days of bundled content and lots of cross-subsidies.

    How far will the shift to publishing profitable topics go. Might we see a weekly (or daily) NYT story on Viagra?

    I think it will be more subtle than that, at least for the top papers. What we’ll see is a slow but meaningful change in what’s published and how it’s published as publications adapt to the new modes of information consumption among readers and the new expectations of advertisers.

    I just added a subscription based service to access parts of my website. Do you see publishing shifting to charging less for content (using content for marketing) and charging more for interaction? In what areas may selling content without interaction be a viable business model 20 years from now?

    I think there will always be niche markets where specialized content carries a high value, and printed books and magazines will probably continue to sell well for a good long time. But for most online publishing, including interactive publishing, a subscription fee is an awfully hard sell.

    Increasingly we let machines make decisions for us, which on the surface simplifies things. But what are the hidden costs?

    When you let machines take over parts of your thinking, you start to think like a machine. This is the greatest danger posed by the Net. Computers get a little smarter, we get a little dumber, and eventually we meet somewhere in the middle.

    Do you feel you have a health records problem, or was Google’s recent move into the space guided by profit potential? At some point will people refuse to use the data hoarding ad networks?

    There’s a huge health records problem - a fatal problem for some unfortunate folks. I think Google sees this as a problem to solve, a problem well suited to its own expertise. I applaud them for their ambition. But I think that using health records as a platform for advertising is dangerous and unethical, and so while I don’t doubt Google’s good intentions I am very suspicious of how its program will actually play out.

    If I was new to the web and wanted to write for a living, where would you suggest I start? What was key to helping you becoming a great writer?

    First of all, thank you for the compliment. I think the best way to learn to write well is to read a lot, particularly when you’re young and impressionable. If you want to write for a living on the web, your best bet is to find a niche market that’s attractive to advertisers, start a blog, and then work like hell. You’ll still probably fail, but you never know.

    ——-

    Thanks Nick. If you would like to read more from Nick please check out his Rough Type blog. Go buy The Big Switch today as well, I promise you will like it.

    Aaron Wall, interviews

  15. Quick, Cheap, & Easy Strategies to Dominate Google’s Search Results

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Following last year’s pillage of general web directories, Google reset the PageRank on many article syndication directories to PR3 or PR0. EzineArticles did not get edited, perhaps because they have more stringent editorial guidelines, they were a known market leader, or they were a Google case study. Just about every other article syndication directory did.

    About 3 years ago I create a directory of directories so I could keep track of new directories. But very few of the directory owners considered editorial quality. Eventually they started polluting their directories with site-wide links to payday loan websites.

    On the paid side some people who had success creating one low quality directory decided to create a dozen more pay for inclusion websites, often cross promoting them with discounts…after you buy one they thank you and offer you the ability to buy inclusion in the other dozen at half price.

    And on the cheap end, it got to the point where lots of companies like Directory Maximizer do directory submissions for a dime to a quarter each, allowing you to space out the submissions, mix anchor text, and mix listing descriptions. And while many of these services claim to be “SEO friendly” and offer services in bulk, you can see that a search engineer might not hold the same opinion. :)

    By the time a technique is cheaply and reliably outsourced the value has already been diminished or will soon become worthless.

    • lower cost and automation means more people will use the technique
    • the lower cost often appeals to those making lower quality websites
    • the more people who use a technique the more likely it is for search engineers to kill it

    Andy Hagans used to charge $900 for doing a couple dozen article submissions, and back when he did it, it was probably worth it. He marketed it to highbrow clients who used it to promote quality website. Lower end webmasters probably could not justify paying $900 for that service.

    And you could get a hand rolled product of similar quality to what Andy charged $900 for, but at a price $870 cheaper from We Submit Articles. About a month after I showed Andy that We Submit Articles website, where someone was selling services similar to his for $30, he changed his model to promote linkbait stuff, moving himself up the value chain, creating something that is much harder and more expensive to replicate.

    Article submission software and article remixing software came out, only making the issue worse. Andy probably could have continued his old model for another year and been fine, but he knew that Google would eventually pull the rug out from under it. It took a while, but the article directories had their PageRank edited.

    Search engineers can’t stop everything, but by the time a technique is cheaply and reliably outsourced the value has already been diminished or will soon become worthless.

    • lower cost and automation means more people will use the technique
    • the lower cost often appeals to those making lower quality websites
    • the more people who use a technique the more likely it is for search engineers to kill it

    When you think of the web from that perspective it is easy to see why my current business model is so much better than the old model. The community interaction allows for deeper understanding, and helps people move past using just the techniques that are quick, cheap, and easy.

    Parasitic hosts and upload sites, social media sites full of spam, endless cross-referencing internal tagging, blog carnivals…all are quick, cheap, and easy. What do you think is the next quick, cheap, and easy marketing technique that Google will kill?

    Aaron Wall, Google, internet

  16. Passion is a Prerequisite to Profitability

    4 months, 1 week ago

    Aaron likes to give his spiel about passion and that you need to be gunuinely interested in the topics you are promoting. I took that advice for granted and its importance finally hit me. One of the sites I’m promoting is very clean and I have very high respect for its merit. However, I was given the challenge to promote a seasonal yet very important topic for a specific audience. In addition, I was the one to write the content. That was a bit unfair due to my lack of experience in that field. It’s convenient to dodge work so I outsourced the content. Besides, promotion is the real challenge. Ok, I was wrong. The final version of the outsourced material needed heavy changes and it didn’t satisfy the person who originated the idea.

    It Ain’t 2005 Anymore

    You see, with more webmasters using no-follow and the overall "stinginess" of people linking out, you really need to avoid promoting mediocre content. The stuff REALLY needs to be useful. It helps to put yourself in the shoes of the target audience. Another advantage of producing real content is passing a search engineer’s hand edit. To sum it up, everyone wins when you promote good content. Content isn’t enough if you have very little traffic. The PROMOTION of good content is where it’s at, ladies and gentlemen with newer sites.

    Ok, Back to Passion

    I’ve been working on this project for almost a week and after a few minutes of working, my mind goes blank and wanders off. I love the site and I love the future promotional ideas in store because I TRULY BELIEVE that they are genuinely useful and will give a tremendous benefit to the site’s visitors. But this current topic is something I just don’t give a damn about. Promotion will be fun but writing the actual content, especially if it’s about something you care less for can be EXCRUCIATING.

    My case is a bit special because I didn’t think of this promotional idea and it was almost forced to me.

    Tips You Can Use That Worked Well for Me:

    1. You need to have an AUTHENTIC interest and be a genuine believer in what you are promoting. Ok, hypothetically you own a website about traveling to Spain and you are about to promote “The Top 10 Spanish Professors in the U.S.” Be honest with yourself. Are you personally interested or care about who the best Spanish professors are? Also, think about the visitors. Will they care or apply the material in real life? In contrast, Aaron and I wrote the Bloggers Guide to SEO. Are we genuinely interested in blogging and SEO? He works 7 days a week and well, it’s 3 am in Calfornia and guess what I’m doing? Yes I like blogging but I’ll do anything to avoid working on that project that was assigned to me :)
    2. It is important that you manage and go over every word of the content.
    3. When promoting ideas, quality succeeds quantity. You get more success promoting 2-3 well written, high-touch material than 10 mediocre ones.  

    What do you guys think? Feel free to add your thoughts and ideas.

    Aaron Wall

  17. Sponsored Links

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    Google

  18. Tracking Bogus Google AdWords Conversions

    4 months, 1 week ago

    I recently bought a few AdWords ads for Microsoft adCenter’s affiliate program. These links were direct affiliate links that headed directly to Microsoft - the searcher never touched my site.

    Compare the following 3 AdWords ad campaigns

    The first campaign is a strategic one, where I do not mind losing money if it increases usage, which may lead to more links (and better organic rankings) over time. But that second campaign, with a similar number of clicks, never even touches my site and still has a baseline conversion rate and conversion cost similar to the strategic ad group.

    Truth be told those conversion sample sizes are so small that it is hard to draw concrete evidence from them, but if I was telling myself that some of the ad sales caused by that strategic ad campaign help subsidize at least some of the cost, then I might be operating under a false pretense. Some of those conversions may have happened anyway.

    That third ad campaign consists largely of brand related keywords and a few other somewhat related terms. Notice how the conversion rate is higher. Microsoft recently published research that brand related search terms tend to convert better than twice as well as non-brand terms.

    Why is this important? As Google controls an increasing large piece of the online advertiser pie, if you use their analytics, many of those conversions THEY track are falsely tied to their ads. They would have happened even if you were not buying AdWords ads. As far as brand related conversions go, conversions tied to brand phrases typically are not incremental, which means those would have happened even if you were not buying AdWords ads.

    You can use direct conversions as a proxy for the value of advertisements, but if you have a large ad campaign and a well known brand, you are likely buying brand exposure more than direct conversions, even if you control your spend on using a CPA metric.

    Aaron Wall, pay per click search engines

  19. IM-NY SES NY Charity Party Sponsored by BOTW

    4 months, 1 week ago

    I’m a member of the Internet Marketers of New York and we meet once a month to talk and chat with some other search people in the NY area. Whenever a conference rolls into town we like to have a little fun, meet new people, and help out a charity who deserves it. So I […]

    Michael Gray, Random Thoughts

  20. Forbes.com Doing Some Google Referral Action

    4 months, 1 week ago

     
    Don’t you be worrying about why I was searching for Scrooge McDuck now …
    Sponsor:: Interested in seeing your message here, contact me to find out how.
    Related PostsForbes ArticleI’m mentioned in a Forbes article about Google along with Aaron Wall and Jim Boykin Google The Double Standard of Being an Authority WebsiteIf you’ve ever been to […]

    Google, Michael Gray


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