Why Analytics Are So Important

With SEO the most important thing to track is performance. Of course the bank account (& its growth rate) is a high level tracking mechanism, but it is the result of the combination of many ideas & efforts, the combination of multiple marketing strategies & traffic streams. To dig in further on what’s working web analytics are your bread and butter. They don’t give you aggregate data or could be data, but precisely and exactly what is happening on your sites: separating out what is working from what is not…

The Big Portals Can’t Grow Ad Revenues

In spite of the transitioning of print Dollars to digital dimes for print media, TV advertising remains healthy and robust. Much like the decline of print media, the flow of brand ad Dollars online is skipping over even some of the largest players, leaving them out of the growth from the shift to online media.

While Yahoo! is still a leader in many categories they are struggling to sell their ad inventory directly & are selling more of it as backfill/remnant inventory…

Affiliates Are a Dying Breed

Being an ecommerce affiliate keeps getting harder & harder unless you have a strong brand and/or are selling things with a complex sales cycle.

Portable air conditioners is a pretty niche category, but when I look at it I simply don’t see any opportunity on the SEO front unless you take on the significant risk of carrying inventory & drop hundreds of thousands to millions of Dollars on branding…

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Frederic Bastiat

Business Ethics vs Sustainability

The concept of business ethics is usually a self-serving approach to marketing.

Some people would rather make money dishonestly than honestly, getting satisfaction out of screwing people over (hi Andy), but gray is a broad spectrum…

We live in a culture where it is far more profitable to solve symptoms than it is to solve problems. As such, the disappearance of ripoffreport.com from Google’s index probably has retainer-based reputation management firms like reputation.com singing the blues.

Ed Magedson, the owner of Rip Off Report, has been charged with RICO in the past and managed to come through unscathed, but he has never tackled an opponent as media savvy or powerful as Google…

We recently interviewed Branko Rihtman. He started working in the industry in 2001, doing SEO for clients and properties in a variety of competitive niches. Over that time, he realized the importance of properly done research and experimentation and started publishing findings and experiments at http://www.seo-scientist.com.

How did you get into the SEO space?

Completely by accident…

I was just checking out the ongoing strategic meltdown in the value of the Dollar & noticed an AdWords ad with an extended headline & a 150 character ad description.

Currently I believe the above extended description is a limited beta test, but if Google starts mixing that in with Google Advisor ads & ad sitelinks there might not be a single organic result above the fold on commercial keywords…

Yet another problem with Google’s brand first approach to search: parasitic hosting.

The .co.cc subdomain was removed from the Google index due to excessive malware and spam. Since .co.cc wasn’t a brand the spam on the domain was too much. But as Google keeps dialing up the “brand” piece of the algorithm there is a lot of stuff on sites like Facebook or even my.Opera that is really flat out junk…

Authoritative, but Often Wrong

Trusting a powerful authority is easy. It allows us to have a quick shorthand for how things work without having to go through the pain, effort, & expense to figure things out. But it often leads to bogus solutions.

This video does a great job of explaining how nothing replaces experience in the SEO industry.

A combination of numerous parallel projects, years of trial and error experience & a deep study of analytics data is far superior to having the God complex & feeling 100% certain you are right…

Want a good example of Google’s brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs?

Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next?

Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections.

Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile (in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized, counter to Google’s cultural norm) but a few months later the penalty was dropped, even though some of the spam stuff is still in place…

I am not sure how many people were holding off on updating to Firefox 5 because of our SEO extensions, however we made versions for Firefox 5 quite a while ago for Seo for Firefox, Rank Checker & the SEO Toolbar. When you first go to update it there might be a message that the extensions are not compliant. If that is the case, upgrade to Firefox 5 & then after you get Firefox 5 installed it has a check for updated versions of extensions…

Search is political.

Google has maintained that there were no exceptions to Panda & they couldn’t provide personalized advice on it, but it turns out that if you can publicly position their “algorithm” as an abuse of power by a monopoly you will soon find 1:1 support coming to you.

The WSJ’s Amir Efrati recently wrote:

In June, a top Google search engineer, Matt Cutts, wrote to Edmondson that he might want to try subdomains, among other things…

If the social sites were isolated I would comfortably ignore them as a waste of time. Unfortunately, search engines are convinced there is signal to be had on social networks (in spite of how easy they are to game with promotions).

If I wasn’t super busy I would run one such promotion to prove my point, but I am already drowning in email.

Bing + Facebook

Bing is pushing Facebook integration everywhere…

In any market where the leader has a monopolistic marketshare it is a great idea to encourage innovation elsewhere and promote further competition. In the past Blekko was a great SEO data source but I couldn’t use it as a default search service because the auto-firing of their slashtags were in many cases too restrictive. They did a recent update which still fires slashtag results, but now rather than requiring results to be part of that slashtag they allow the slashtags to compliment their search results…

You Must Disclose, or Else…

Matt Cutts has long stated that machine-readable disclosure of paid links is required to be within Google’s guidelines.

The idea behind such Cassandra calls is that the web should be graded based on merit, rather than who has the largest ad budget. The Google founders harped on this in their early research:

we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…

“I am just like a robot – following only what I have been told.” – Katutu, Google toolbar testimonial

As long as end users get their Angry Birds they really don’t care how it comes to them. But they should!

Right now, an aggregated link to this entry places higher in a search of the title than my own site, which is a Page Rank 5 site (i.e. it has a lot of “strong” links in and a lot of content)…

A Copy, of a Copy, of a Copy

There are many approaches to online navigation & discovery. On the surface many of them look exceptionally different, but when you look a bit deeper many of them are playing the same game with the same game plan. The main differences are brand perception & marketing angle, but they all copy off of each other.

New Ideas, or The Same Ideas?

There is an illusion that social media is significantly different because messages from friends are mixed in with the other stuff…

Dr. Pete shared examples of the marketing funnel, highlighting how we must overcome hurdles (or break through barriers to conversion) in order to make a sale.

Why People Buy Premium Domain Names

The idea of an exact match domain (EMD) is that you are buying a piece of land right next to the highway. You sink in a lot of money upfront, but hope that it backs out over time by lowering your traffic acquisition costs…

This Shouldn’t Hurt Too Bad

One of the more perverse things about online markets is that since things are not done in person a lot of people are willing to work in the gray area. That allows people like Vitaly Borker to torture his customers as a marketing strategy.

When Stanley Milgram did his famous study on if people were willing to torture others (so long as they thought it was part of a scientific experiment), he found out that the more distance they put between the torturer and torturee the more brutally they would behave…

Consumer Finance

Google recently unveiled Google Advisor, which ties together the concept of Google Comparison Ads with a better looking interface.

“With Google Advisor, you enter information about what you’re looking for in a mortgage, credit card, CD, or checking and savings account.”

And unlike Google comparison ads, Google is caching these pages

When you add in BeatThatQuote, AdWords, Google affiliate network, Google ads that filter content clicks through to search ads, and AdSense there are at least 6 different ways for Google to sniff data on & monetize the consumer financial product market…

The New York Times has an interesting article about Cisco’s roll in the Great Firewall of China + more:

Cisco, the maker of Internet routing gear, customized its technology to help China track members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week by members of the movement.

The lawsuit, which relies on internal sales materials, also said that Cisco had tried to market its equipment to the Chinese government by using inflammatory language that stemmed from the Maoist Cultural Revolution…

Facebook is a Sleazy Organization

Facebook recently hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant a Google smear campaign in the media:

Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post…

Hit By Panda

In a recent comment someone shared the fate of Patrick Jordan, owner of justanotheripadblog.com.

Since the Panda update happened, some scraper websites (monetized by Google AdSense) have started outranking Patrick for his own content.

Panda = No AdWords Soup for You

Distraught with the traffic fall off, Patrick turned to AdWords to try to bridge the gap and drive some revenues…

How to Handle Duplicate Content

Here is a fun webmaster help video from March 10th of 2010, answering the following question:

“If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using META ROBOTS NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW a better alternative?”

The answer kinda jumps around a bit, but here is a quote:

I believe if you were to talk to our crawl and index team, they would normally say “look, let us crawl all the content, we’ll figure out what parts of the site are dupe (so which sub-tree are dupes) and we’ll combine that together…

In October of 2008 Eric Schmidt announced that SEO was about to get really ugly for anyone who doesn’t own a brand. He didn’t word it that way though. Rather, he stated

“Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.” – Eric Schmidt

In response to that comment (& some of Google’s pro-brand algorithmic updates) I created the following video…

Google’s Amit Singhal offered more “clarity” into Google’s approach with the Panda update. However I am not convinced that any clarity was actually added, and I think a lot of the questions they ask are to a degree even a bit wrong-headed.

Would you trust the information presented in this article?

Sounds like this is all about promoting perceived authority.

Counter points:

• Did you (or anyone you know) trust this outlet to give you a complete worldview at any point in the last couple decades & end up bankrupt, utterly decimated, or destitute because you followed its advice (on say internet stocks or the housing bubble or using excessive credit because “this time may actually be different”)?
• Did your allegiance to this particular media outlet cause you to be more likely to be unbelievably ignorant & ill informed about world-shaping anti-facts used to push things like wars based on fraud? Are there extra trillion Dollars of debt your children must pay interest on & over 100,000 people dead because a news outlet lied to you? And the US government (the largest seat of power & authority in the world today) was also complicit in ensuring American citizens were ignorant going into Iraq…

In the Manufacturing Consent DVD a newspaper executive highlighted that they liked to have a 60/40 ratio between ads and content.

Google says that if over half your page’s content is ads then your pages are of insufficient value.

What Google engineers miss when delivering sermons to webmasters is that Google is fine with disappearing their organic search results for self promotion & even advertises that consumers can’t tell the difference between their search ads and the organic results…

Before Google’s Panda update an effective SEO strategy was to “make a page for everything.” If you are Wikipedia that strategy may still work, but for most websites that approach is a high risk & low return approach. Clustering like keywords together and using that to help set up your site’s information architecture is a lower risk and higher return strategy.

Given Google’s new approach to search (where dead weight can harm your good pages) organization is more important than ever…

The #1 goal for any organization is self-preservation. When people feel things are fairly just & they are just getting by they are fine with squeezing out more efficiency in what they do and figuring out ways to pay the bills. But when people feel the table is tilted at some point they stop caring and do whatever it takes.

Ex Post Facto

Some longtime AdWords advertisers have recently been punished for affiliate ads they ran 8 years ago where some of the sites they promoted at some point fell out of Google’s graces through an ad system which never allows you to delete your history & offers ex post facto regulations that turn a regular advertiser arbitrarily into a spammer…

Outiside of Google, Amazon and eBay own perhaps the 2 largest streams of ecommerce traffic. In fact, both are amongst the top 10 sites in Alexa (even though ~ 100% of their traffic is commercial while ~ 0.001% of Twitter’s traffic is). In spite of Google’s prominent promotion of Wikipedia, Amazon still gets more traffic.

In the leak of AdWords top spenders data last June Amazon was #5 on the list…