SEO Industry News Articles by SEO Speedwagon

February 10, 2009

Finally ... John Dvorak Exposes SEO Industry

PC Mag's John Dvorak has declared SEO to be snake oil. Guess it's time to close up the shop.

Sigh. Not exactly a new theme, but as weak arguments go, Dvorak's is particularly so. I'll sum it up for you in case you don't have the time:

• John gets bad advice about optimizing his blog.
• John's page views decline.
• John equates his bad advice with SEO practice.
• John picks another third-tier technique (tagging) and also equates it with SEO.
• John anecdotally proves that tagging is ineffective.
• John concludes that SEO "simply doesn't work."

But wait! He completes the formula. Don't forget about the final, disclaiming paragraph, designed to hedge himself against any criticism:

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's nothing you can do to get more attention. Much of what you can control is structural. If you have a blog full of fancy AJAX code, it's going to be difficult to index, for example. Making your Web site search-engine-friendly is one thing, in other words. But using stupid human tricks such as the long URL and tags to get more attention is folly -- and bad advice, from what I can tell. Beware!

In other words, real SEO isn't bad, but bad SEO is bad, but you don't get to know that until you wade through his lesson on why singular techniques, in a vacuum absent an overall strategy, are unhelpful. Come on, John. You're better than this.

Finally ... John Dvorak Exposes SEO Industry
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July 29, 2008

What We're Reading: Summer 2008

Here at Intrapromote, we are constantly reading industry articles and books and discussing them as a team.

Here are a handful of books (plus one) we are currently reading:

• Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
• The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
• Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media
• The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media
• Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online

Stay tuned for staff book reviews!

What We're Reading: Summer 2008
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June 13, 2008

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?

Sean saw it coming yesterday, and little more than a Month ago I thought it a Yang Threat to balance the Microsoft yin of bluster.

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:


If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?
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May 21, 2008

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update

This is from much earlier in this fleeting year, admittedly, but with most focusing on the average words per search query increase angle of the story, I wanted to make sure and dig out a fine morsel from the very mouth of Google that may have been lost had I not:

14% of Google clicks come from paid search and 86% of clicks are organic.

True in court it may only qualify as hearsay, having come from the Google mouth of Avinash Kaushik to the ear of beu blog before finally being transcribed into print; yet, as you may remember from my earlier quest for a documented source behind that most mythical of numbers in all of SEM, the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, hearsay here surely now trumps unattributed there.

And the alleged statement is said to have come from Google's Analytics Evangelist, folks, so I think we are getting closer...

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Gets a Big, Big Update
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May 03, 2008

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer

Just when it seemed the twain might soon be making their way down the aisle, arm-in-arm, the mere spectre of Google is enough to call off the nuptials: Mashable has the goods, including Balmer's e-mail that is really more about Google than Yahoo:

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

He goes on to devote almost half of his e-mail to explaining how bad an idea Yang's Google threat is. I caught this on my Mashable feed as I began watching the original Frankenstein movie with my kids. No kidding.

Breaking: Yang Googles Ballmer
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February 18, 2008

MSN's Berkowitz Pulled from the Index

I haven't seen this anywhere except ClickZ and I thought you might be interested. As of last Thursday, Steve Berkowitz, the SVP of Microsoft's Online Services Group, is out. He'll be staying through August "to ensure a smooth transition."

In the big picture, two years doesn't seem like quite enough time to have turned the MSN Search ocean liner around, despite the fact that Berkowitz is credited with Ask's financial turnaround during his tenure there. But someone has to fall on the sword in situations like this, and it looks like he was the logical choice. One wonders whether a simple management shuffle will have a significant effect, or whether it's merely bringing a sharper knife to the gunfight.

Further reading:


• MSN plucks Berkowitz from Ask/IAC (2006)
  
• Berkowitz out in MSN reorg
  
• Berkowitz bio on Microsoft site

MSN's Berkowitz Pulled from the Index
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January 16, 2008

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?

One of my favorite clients of all time, with us now going on 8 years and powered mightily by the rare, dual client-side SEO strengths of search understanding and inter-departmental implementation influence, recently noticed the same thing Mark Jackson saw in Google's most recent round of Universal Search peekaboo:

Notice the incredibly disappearing PPC Ads? My immediate explication was that surely this must be to prove, in a small test sample, that someone's bad idea from above would be a disaster, indeed.

Mark, though, has made me think again:


Google may succeed in encouraging companies to bid more ferociously for the top two positions. If universal search leads to more searches because it's fun, this could be a win for Google (higher revenues) and users (better experience).


Sometimes it's hard for us to imagine that there is a finite set of clicks on any given day. The business model in a closed set like this, then, must discover what to do to increase the value of the average click within the set on a given day. Mark's point about less ads likelier driving up value per is on target, I believe, but thanks to him getting me to think again I think the test layout in question has less to do about increasing searches "because it's fun" and much ado about that map, an image mind you, kissing the PPC ads at the right corner of the screen and making your eye immediately jump there to focus.

Take a look yourself and see where your eye is drawn, and then check out what eye tracking heat maps are telling us about how pictures affect focus on a search page.

Less Sponsored Ads = More PPC Revenue? Que Pasa, Google?
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January 07, 2008

All Eyes on Wikia Search Launch

After more than a year since the initial news, Wikia Search officially launched this morning. I won't bore you with the reviews, which are mixed (although seldom neutral).

Probably the funniest line came from Matt Cutts, whose

...reaction is pretty simple: congrats to the Wikia crew on your public launch, and welcome to the search industry! I’m glad that you’re jumping into the search space.

This seems a little like Tom Brady welcoming his grandmother to the pickup scrimmage at the family reunion.

All Eyes on Wikia Search Launch
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December 06, 2007

Old Media Quote of the Day

I just love it when Old Media can't adapt to Web 2.0 and tries to pass the buck while hubris prevents them from admitting they are passing the buck:


...the Motion Picture Association of America has asked ISPs to act as monitors of movie piracy. MPAA head Dan Glickman says ISPs need to take on that role if they are hoping for any sort of future support from Hollywood.


Actual buck-passing-disguised-as-responsible-parenting quote from Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA:


The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected.




Old Media Quote of the Day
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November 28, 2007

SEO Speedwagon Killing In Vegas

Who'd have thought a mere 2.5 years from first post we'd be blogging to beat the band?:

Here's the link for proof this isn't a photoshop job, let's just hope the jump in visits doesn't cause them to wonder what is going on.

I for one am having a T-Shirt made of this, anyone else interested?

SEO Speedwagon Killing In Vegas
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Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!

We are sticklers with our clients when it comes to issues of content duplication, sometimes to the point, I think, of being viewed as Canonical Fascists. This can be annoying, much like fascism mostly can be annoying, so it is gratifying to see Mr. Google himself lay out just why such annoyance is worthwhile advocacy, even approaching the subject of PageRank Splitting in the process:


When I did a wget from the Googleplex, I eventually got a 301 from the seomoz.com url to the seomoz.org url. But look at the timestamps: " --09:28:33-- " was the initial fetch and "--09:32:41--" was when the 301 came over the wire. Assuming that I'm reading right, that means almost a four minute delay on getting the 301 from seomoz.com to seomoz.org. Googlebot will wait around for several seconds for a page, but it won't wait four minutes. Instead, the connection will time out and we'll treat those urls as separate (and think that we couldn't fetch the seomoz.com url). So if a bunch of people are linking to your article, and some link to seomoz.org and some link to seomoz.com, that PageRank is getting split between two urls, and the long delay on the 301 response can cause Google to believe that the urls are separate and therefore cause dupe issues.

Hat tip to Randfish for calling forth such manna in his heavily commented comments area.

Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!
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November 01, 2007

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?

Search Quote of the Day from He of the Great Name:

Search is utilitarian. Search is constantly accused of not being sexy. That drives me nuts. The irony is that in pigeonholing search as being boring and utilitarian, all these brilliant advertising minds are missing the biggest idea of all: search works because it’s the customer driving the process, not the advertiser.

I'm with you, Gord. In our industry, conversions are sexy.

Search: Too Sexy for Advertising?
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October 08, 2007

Yes, Virginia(,) SEO Philology

I was quite humbled to see via Link Spiel heute morgen that yours truly unwittingly birthed the SEO Virginia genre long, long ago, circa Summer 2001.

And while they say everything changed after September 11, really the only thing the genre lost in the aftermath was the Really Is convention I thought was authentic at the time. Turns out while I had invented Really completely out of thin air, but not the all-important Is, what we really lost in exactly half of the genre along with our innocence was the comma after the introductory Yes I had faithfully inserted at the time.

SEO Virginia genre history buffs will note Danny Sullivan took less than a year to catch, and correct, his own mistake, the only such self-correction on record. He really is that good.


UPDATE: Reader Brainmuffin e-mails to suggest the genre be officially known as The SEO Virginia Monologues.

Yes, Virginia(,) SEO Philology
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October 01, 2007

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles

Frank and Maureen and Thomas, oh my!

The chipped cement still has yet to be cleaned up fully from the wall being torn down at that historical error known as TimesSelect, and already we are seeing NY Times columnists able to commune with readers freely at point of search, at least at the Frank and Maureen level:


As internet titan Alan Meckler noted in his posting of the Times e-mail to subscribers, search results like these were the driving force:


Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

Sharing it, linking to it, and commenting on it are the currency of being able to find it in search, and that might be important to a newspaper if, as the latest surveys indicate, 91% of adults use a search engine to find information and 72% get news therefrom.

Ya think?

LATE UPDATE: We just noticed that similar to 1989, another Eastern Block Web Site is about to topple...

Google Search Results Already Finding Columnist Articles
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September 18, 2007

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989

We knew it was coming and we tried to bake a cake for Maureen Dowd more than a Month ago, yet we are still surprised at how search-friendly they are being in their explanation today:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

If you have any doubt that this is the SEO equivalent of 1989 scroll a bit further down the page for this money quote:

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly one million paying online readers, generating about $65 million in revenue.

Dow Jones and the company that is about to take it over, the News Corporation, are discussing whether to continue that practice, according to people briefed on those talks. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has talked of the possibility of making access to The Journal free online.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

Search Tearing Down Walls Like It's 1989
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September 17, 2007

PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA

Via Chris Zaharias via MediaPost via Piper Jaffray, we get this stark contrast:


Search advertising has proven to be fertile ground for customer acquisition. A recent study by Piper Jaffray & Co. entitled, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” indicated that the average CPA for search was $8.50, considerably lower than the CPA for the Yellow Pages ($20), online display ads ($50) and direct mail ($70).

Could you imagine how low the Organic CPA would have been in comparison, had they found a way to incorporate that into the study?


PPC vs. Yellow Pages vs. Direct Mail CPA
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August 30, 2007

New MSN Tools Coming Includes Sitemaps

Back in April, I updated Wagon readers on the latest in Sitemap and Sitemap Protocol news and now it's time for a quick update.

Last week on MSN Live Search's blog, MSN trumpeted their new Webmaster Portal that will allow sitemap creation and submission. A beta program has been started and the Wagon has applied for a test drive.

Along with these sitemap features, MSN also announced that the Webmaster Portal will also include crawling and indexing tools as well as statistics about web sites. As we've said in the past, these statistics can be very helpful.

Stay tuned for news on the beta program. Official launch of the Webmaster Portal is expected in early Q4.

New MSN Tools Coming Includes Sitemaps
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August 21, 2007

Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II

Article or Press Release?:

It's always seemed strange to look for information on a brand, and to see it appear both in the organic search results and at or near the top of the paid listings. Why spend money on a brand term that's going to deliver a top five organic result for the same query anyway?

If this sounds eerily similar to what many Wagon Riders thought yesterday was a lede of questionable intelligence, then your parotid attention may have kept you from swallowing full gulp. For those caught in the act of mastication, though, it's good to know that the above meme is being pushed by Atlas, owned by Microsoft, neither of which are owned or own or like Google, beneficiary of the great majority of the branded ad spend currently under PR assault.

Here at The Wagon we get the same strange feeling the Talking Point pushes in the quote above when we fix our eyes on a graph like the below:


With search behavior like that, why in the world would you want your brand to appear more than once, let alone a single time, in the same screen space above the fold? Good advice from the originator of democracy of screen space.




Microsoft Talking Points Parroted: Day II
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August 16, 2007

IAB, DMA, and SEO: WTF?

I just noticed this posted by Barry Schwartz over at SEL: The UK flavors of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have joined forces "to establish industry-wide search standards", as they put it in their release on the IAB's UK web site.

Every few years I see this stuff and I try -- really, I do try -- not to by cynical. But trying to qualify and quantify best practices is like sprinting like hell to get to the end of a Mobius strip. Historically, any efforts to define acceptable and unacceptable practices in SEO have been either so rigidly prescriptive as to except significant portions of successful (and lauded) SEO companies, or they've been so toothlessly vague as to allow access to anyone who can forge a backstage pass.

To which of these camps does the IAB/DMA "charter" belong? Judge for yourself: Following (in bold) are the minimum corporate qualifications found in the IAB's charter document (MS Word, 238K), with a little commentary (mine) in italic.

• They must have at least two employees dedicated to search marketing
  Many -- many -- of the industry's best SEOs are one-(wo)man shops.
  
• They must have search engine accreditation (from Google or Microsoft with more to follow) and have received official search engine optimisation (SEO) training as relevant
  That's actually not a bad benchmark. For PPC. How about the other 80% of clicks?
  
• The company must have been trading for 6 months
  I'm not exactly sure what "trading" means, but I think it's a UKism for "having been in business." I certainly concede that most good SEOs have been in business for more than 6 months. But most of the lousy ones have been too.
  
• The company must be a member of either IAB UK, IAB Europe, DMA or Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation (SEMPO) or the Association of Business to Business Agencies (ABBA).
  Now we're getting somewhere. Explore the links to the membership pricing levels of the IAB UK, IAB Europe (PDF), DMA, and SEMPO.

I have nothing personally against any of these organizations, but answer this question honestly: With mass adoption of this charter by SEO companies, who benefits more -- these four membership organizations, or companies in search of a reputable SEO firm?

And in case you're still reading, thanks. Here's your reward, pulled from the original charter Word document, and delivered in the world's most accepted currency -- laughter:

Monitoring compliance
The charter will be self-policed by the SEM industry.

IAB, DMA, and SEO: WTF?
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August 15, 2007

NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade

As you probably know, the NY Times has been the most prominent experiment in the paid content-behind-a-firewall-yet-at-least-partially-indexable model, and they are indeed now, finally, announcing via trial ballooning they are no longer going to put their most popular columnists behind that magic curtain one has to pay to sweep aside. After the magic show ends and the same fingers which initially drew the curtain are finished being pointed this way and that, this failed experiment will have had much to do with the principles of Link Building.


A party-goer cloaks her content as Maureen Dowd. Found on Flickr. Copyright 485i

First a great quote that helps explain the decision's relevance to our industry:

But the truth of the matter is that you get far more eyeballs when you're not locking away your content from the general public. The reality of Web 2.0 news is that people a rising tide raises all the ships. If you've got good content, and the Times does, people will link to it. When people read a technology blog like Engadget or a political blog like Daily Kos and find links to articles at the New York Times, everybody wins. Keeping your archives, op-eds, and other content locked up means that blogs and news sites won't link to you, won't give you credit for finding a story first, and won't drive up your traffic.

This lack of inbound links to the content-behind-the-firewall damaged traffic to the site not only through a paucity of visitors being able to click on these links to the columns themselves...:

...the share of traffic that the NY Times sends to NY Times Select has been decreasing over the past year – down by 16% year-on-year in July. With NY Times Select receiving more than two thirds (67%) of its US traffic from NYTimes.com, the decline had an impact with US visits to NY Select down 22% in the past year.

...in having to rely far too heavily on the parent site rather than third party links for traffic, but also in the residual effect such had in these columns' search engine visibility. With few third party inbound links accumulating with each new column, in fact from a deliberate online community decision not to link to content-behind-a-firewall, it is also very difficult for each new column to be judged more relevant than similarly themed columns emerging on the same topic that immediately acquire inbound links in the form of the same online community recommending them. It's no wonder the Times Select had to rely so heavily on clicks from the parent site for visits, as a great many of those visits were likely already subscribers. In that situation it is difficult to grow at the rate of the internet. Try these two simple searches for Frank and Maureen alone: nary a column to be found. Haven't they written quite a few?

I think everyone likely to read this blog knew this would happen. But to say we knew it would happen ultimately is not to say we are not happy to see even giants felled by an algorthm rejected, not select(ed).


NY Times Select(s) Death over Charade
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August 08, 2007

Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)

I get the feeling that most people, even in our industry, using Google Webmaster Tools for themselves or a client aren't scrolling far enough on the Query Stats page to reach this link:



What you get if you click is rather unwieldy, sure, especially if you are dealing with a very large site, but the payoff is simply as large by the same degree. We are beginning to view it more and more here as a kind of matrix for how Google views your site architecturally, especially in light of GSI now having been moved to an undisclosed location. Actually, now that I've said it I'm a bit afraid it, too, will be taken away...

Download all query stats for this site (including subfolders)
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August 01, 2007

Happy Fourth Birthday, High Rankings Forum

Let us be one of the first "outside" sites to wish Jill Whalen and her High Rankings Forum a happy fourth birthday.

Here's a great quote from Jill from the announcement on July 30, 2003:



I know, I know. The last thing the world needs is another search engine marketing forum! But I like to think that this one will be unique because I've lined up some of the best and the brightest in the search engine marketing industry to be expert moderators. This means that people who are truly "in the know" will be answering your questions. I've met most of the moderators in person, as a good portion of them speak at the same conferences that I speak at. These guys and gals know their stuff!

I joined the forum a little "late" -- about a month after it launched. I visit the site pretty often, but I rarely contribute, for what I consider a couple good reasons. I simply don't have time to follow up on posts and join too many "conversations," and I don't want to be one of those "drive-by" posters that I find so annoying. Plus, it's not as if I have a ton to add: Jill has assembled a crack staff of moderators, and I rarely disagree with the consensus over there.

So congratulations Jill.

Happy Fourth Birthday, High Rankings Forum
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July 03, 2007

SEO Speedwagon Enters its Third Year

Over the weekend, SEO Speedwagon celebrated its second birthday, which I suppose means we're beginning to enter the "terrible twos."

With any luck, we'll be able to effectively deal with problems that surround typical two-year-olds, such as the following:

• Increasing our vocabulary (more categories!)
• Effectively dealing with our waste (pages in the Supplemental Index)
• Learning how to share (better linking out to SEO resources)
• Handling growth (Intrapromote is adding staff -- and that means more bloggers!)
• Trying not to annoy you by constantly asking "why?" (we are inquisitive, after all)

For some historical perspective, here are some of the issues that were on the plate in the summer of 2005, when we started blogging:

• Adwords introducing geo-targeting and dropping five-cent minimum bids
• Click fraud reaching $1B annually (by some estimates)
• Ask (Jeeves) and MSN publicizing their imminent PPC systems
• Google's quarterly profits growing four-fold over the same period in 2004

Looking back, we've acquired a really strong and loyal group of readers, and we really appreciate the feedback we receive. Here's to a strong third year.

SEO Speedwagon Enters its Third Year
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June 19, 2007

High Rankings Seminar in Denver - June 28-29

Jill Whalen asked us to mention her upcoming seminar in Denver next week, June 28-29. I'm getting around to it a little late, but there's still room if you're a) going to be in Denver next week and b) need rock-solid SEO advice from one the best known names in the biz.

Jill's been doing SEO since the late '60s, loves chocolate, and is giving away two free tickets for non-profit groups (more details). By themselves, those three qualities are okay. But put them together, and that's a good show.

High Rankings Seminar in Denver - June 28-29
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March 27, 2007

Did You Know WWW and Non-WWW are Two Different Sites?

If you're an SEO you certainly do lest you are malpracticing. And if you're a Cutlett, you've likely concurred here just a little while ago but more likely immediately.

Yet in spite of immediate pick-ups of everything Matt posts and that fact that this is a day later, Good God, I want to highlight his explanation of why, if only to be able to link to this portion of it when I am asked why and do a poor job explaining why:

Some people ask “Why don’t you just assume www.example.com and example.com are the same?�? The answer is that they don’t have to be, and for some websites they are different. For example, http://phpicalendar.net/ is a different page than http://www.phpicalendar.net/. This happens more often than you might think; FindWhat has different www vs. non-www pages, for example.

Best and simplest it's ever been put.

Am I now a Cutlett, too?


Did You Know WWW and Non-WWW are Two Different Sites?
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March 15, 2007

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Goes Primetime

It's one of the most mythical numbers in all of SEM, rarely published, seldom spoken; yet most industry insiders nod and agree, even if furtively, that the organic search share of total search clicks, meaning the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, is somewhere in the 70% - 85% region.

I was quite stunned, then, when by happenstance I came across this line in Macworld, of all places:

Site owners are eager to get their hands on the 75 percent of free Google traffic that is not affected by AdSense and AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click programs.

Still within that magical, mythical margin. Still unattributed. Damn nice to see as a given in a non-industry mag.

The Ineluctable Organic Moment Goes Primetime
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March 02, 2007

Matt Cutts Concurrence Committee Part Deux

A year after our inaugural ode to Matt Cutts sycophantism, the Concurrence Committee continues to raise the bar to unimaginable heights of fawning flattery. From the mouth of Mr. Cutts today comes the manna of eight (8) words brilliantly crafted into an iambic pentameter gift to the Committee:

I want to play some roller hockey today.

For the poetic purists among us this would actually have to be read as follows to achieve that vaunted meter, though:

i WANT to PLAY some ROL ler HOCKEY to DAY

We're betting the Committee will concur with such a reading.

To be sure, the generous giftiness of the souring gift of phrase did not go unnoticed by the Committee. To date, the eight (8) word throwaway line, albeit beautiful, has received 39 comments!

Our favorite by far:

Hi Matt, as a frequent reader, I was wondering if you could help me out. I know you’re insanely busy, but could you shoot me an email?

Suggested Refrain:



All glory, laud, and honor,
to thee, Redeemer, King,
to whom the lips of children
made sweet hosannas ring.

Matt Cutts Concurrence Committee Part Deux
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December 18, 2006

Google Gobbles Up The Globe

We've noticed the Google juggernaut gobbling up more and more international marketshare from our SEO perch here over the years, especially with many of our clients wanting to know what engines matter most as we move across the globe results-wise. Still, this blurb from The International Herald Tribune is quite staggering:

For Europe as a whole, as in much of the world, Google leads in Internet search. Of all those who visited search and navigation sites in Europe this October, 86 percent went to Google at least once, compared with 30 percent for Microsoft's search sites and 21 percent for Yahoo, according to comScore, an online market research firm.

Using this as a plank from which to dive into explaining how the sea is ripe for European competition against the Big G, though, I have to find fault with the article's assumed assessment throughout that the results are basically the same across countries. We have noticed quite the opposite, with a local bias quite evident.

To take a look at this phenomenon yourself, try your favorite search phrase at the .com version of Google and then, in your address bar, change the domain extension to the the country extension of your choice, like http://www.google.jp, and then give that same phrase a spin.

Google Gobbles Up The Globe
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December 07, 2006

Smells Like ... Thursday Potpourri

Just a few items of interest on a dark and stormy night...

• Segmentation of the SEO/SEM convention audience? As Doug noted, Danny Sullivan is heading out on his own - and not quietly. He and his team have launched a new media company, news & blog site, and a webcast site. But the one that caught my eye was the new convention he's planning, Search Marketing Expo. The first SMX event will be in June 2007, last for two days, and "will be especially geared toward advanced search marketers" - a distinction that separates it from the ever-expanding Search Engine Strategies franchise. At four days long and up to five sessions deep, SES is on the verge of suffering from the all-things-to-all-people syndrome. With Danny leaving, SES seems ripe for becoming, as Yogi Berra might have said, "so crowded nobody goes there anymore." Alan Meckler also weighs in.
• Happy Birthday, SE Roundtable. A belated third birthday wish to SER. Nearly two years ago, as we scoped out the editorial vision for our own blog, one of the potential routes was a SEO-news-as-it-happens approach. It was quickly put aside, however, because SER was already doing it, and doing it so well.
• SES Coverage. Speaking of SE Roundtable, make sure to catch its coverage of the current SES show, including an especially erudite post from our old pal, Amy Edelstein.
• Adsense and Al Qaeda. First spotted at WebGuerrilla and followed up at Search Engine Journal is what promises to be a very sensational story - one on which Webmaster Radio has apparently done much research - regarding terrorist groups using Google Adsense and Adwords programs to fund their organizations. No one (at this point) is accusing Google of actual complicity, but this will surely ignite further debate on click fraud and finding the balance between privacy and openness in the PPC money trail. Stay tuned.

Smells Like ... Thursday Potpourri
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December 05, 2006

SEO Speedwagon Congratulates Chris Elwell & Danny Sullivan

Door Number Three

The Wagon would like to congratulate our colleagues and friends Chris Elwell and Danny Sullivan in their successful launch of Third Door Media, a new firm that will focus on search and interactive marketing.

Readers of the Wagon will definitely want to check out Third Door's search news blog that will provide daily, in-depth information about search engine marketing and how search engines work in general. Daily coverage begins on December 11.

SEO Speedwagon Congratulates Chris Elwell & Danny Sullivan
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October 25, 2006

SES Registration - Now Five Times as Open!

Say, does anyone know whether registration is now open for Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2006?





Oh, wait. Forget I asked.

SES Registration - Now Five Times as Open!
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October 10, 2006

Is Google Gagging?

I was very surprised when I just came across this story in Webpronews.com. Apparently in an interview with LA Times reporter Chris Gaither, Sergey actually admitted what a lot of us probably feel. "It's worse than that," said Brin, Google's president of technology. "It's that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing."

I for one am pleased that they are going to focus more on integration, but perhaps mostly so because they admitted a problem and are fixing it. I'd say this adds to their credibility in the "Do No Evil" department and is a breath of some fresh, honest, air.

Is Google Gagging?
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High Rankings Seminar in Dallas/Ft. Worth - Oct. 19-20

Colleague and fellow chocolate lover Jill Whalen asked us to post the details of her upcoming SEO seminar.

For the uninformed - if there are any left - Jill has been doing SEO since long before it was called "SEO." She's a regular speaker at SES and has been since Larry and Sergei were studying for their SATs. (That's probably an exaggeration, but it makes a good line.)

Here are the specs:

What: High Rankings® Search Engine Marketing Seminar

When: October 19 & 20, 2006

Where: American Airlines Training and Conference Center in Dallas/Ft. Worth

Why? To deliver the proven strategies and techniques of search engine optimization that will make your site work harder than it ever has before.

Get full details at Jill's site.

Discount: If you use INTRAPROMOTE as your discount code when registering, you'll save 25% off the seminar's sticker price.

Note that we do not receive any sort of referral fee, nor would we ask for one. Our recommendation is not for sale. We mention this only because Jill's that good, and sites of any size will benefit from her program.

High Rankings Seminar in Dallas/Ft. Worth - Oct. 19-20
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August 09, 2006

SEO Quick Hits: NYT Mocks AOL, Inaccessibility Turns 10

Everyone's either at SES this week or too busy to attend (I fall into the latter camp), so I wanted to give you a fast, dim sum-style post today. If the first bite doesn't taste good, just move on to the next plate.

NYT + AOL = FUBAR
Gotta love the New York Times. While you might have heard about the fiasco involving AOL releasing the search queries of over 600,000 "anonymous" searchers, here's the kicker: In less than a day, the Times looked at the search queries of one particular searcher and identified her.

Perhaps next, the Wall St. Journal will both identify another user and decry the anti-privacy implications of identifying users.

(thanks to WMW and Battelle)

Flash Turns 10

In a Wired article today, the tenth anniversary of the release of Flash, Michael Calore interviews Robert Tatsumi, one of the program's two inventors. Personally, I love Flash, in sort of the same way that exterminators love termites: job security.

Yahoo Expands Site Explorer

I've said again and again how much I love YSE. Yesterday, the team announced upgrades to the service, including the ability to "claim" your site to find additional information, upload sitemap feeds, and see when those feeds were last accessed. It's a lot like Google's new "Webmaster Central" area (formerly known simply as Google Sitemaps), which is a nice indication that Yahoo is equally committed to good webmaster relations. And it's pretty fast too; it authenticated me instantly and fetched my sitemap feed in under an hour.

I'll keep an eye on its reporting and see if there's any effect on indexing and let you know anything I find.

SEO Quick Hits: NYT Mocks AOL, Inaccessibility Turns 10
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August 01, 2006

NOODP: Should Google Have Kept Greasing Wheezer?





One of my favorite Little Rascals episodes is called Bear Shooters where Spud can’t join the gang on their hunting trip because he has to stay home and grease his little brother Wheezer. It’s rumored that the band Weezer took it’s name from this classic episode.

"I can't come out," whines Spud. "I've got to stay home and grease Wheezer!"

It all works out for Spud in the end. But, I’m wondering if Google should have stayed inside and greased Wheezer a while longer before adding support for the NOODP tag. Did we celebrate prematurely?

We’ve read several site owner reports that allege their rankings have dropped significantly since implementing the tag on their sites. A few of these also report that they removed the tag and their placements returned to their former positions.

The only Intrapromote client so far that has implemented the tag has also experienced a drop in placement for their most important and competitive search phrase at Google. About the same time, they’ve also seen a major drop in the number of pages indexed by Google.

Coincidence?

Poor Wheezer was better off with the croup?

Hmmmmm . . . . . . . . . .

Our client plans to yank the NOODP tag to see if normalcy resumes. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know what happens.

NOODP: Should Google Have Kept Greasing Wheezer?
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July 31, 2006

Proximity Uber Alles: Relevancy Not Very Relevant

This is a hoot:

The idea is to encourage visitors to start their searches for additional articles on newspapers' own sites, rather than go to Google News or another news aggregator, said Julian Steinberg, Inform's vice president of operations. "If you give your users all the functionality and content that your users want online, then your users will keep coming back day in and day out," he said.

Julian, we hardly knew ye. Yet online history is littered with the tattered pages of business plans stipulating relevance to be less important than proximity, so there is a long line of tradition for you to stand in and, hopefully, some free drinks remain at the bar from the bubble era to tide you over as you await your on-site search revolution.

Relevance? Fie! We'll worry about relevance after users start searching within our site.


Old media can be so quaint it's almost kind of cute...




Proximity Uber Alles: Relevancy Not Very Relevant
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July 04, 2006

Can an Algorithm be Intimidated?

One would hope not.

Yet, as we were all readying our kindling sticks for bomb and brat alike here in the old US of A, many of us seem to have missed this very, very strange blurb:

A FEDERAL JUDGE FRIDAY INDICATED that he is inclined to allow a company to proceed with a lawsuit against Google stemming from low rankings in search results, according to published reports of the proceeding. The judge reportedly said he might permit KinderStart.com to amend its complaint against Google by spelling out its allegations in greater detail. In March, KinderStart.com sued Google, alleging that last year, Google wrongfully lowered KinderStart's ranking in the results, sending its traffic plummeting by 70 percent.

Blogcritics.org, to their credit, had the only extended piece on the courtly decision, one we had laughed away as an impossibility only 3 Months ago with a flavor of derision we will partly reprise here to jog our riders' memories:

The last sentence [about KinderStart seeking to force Google to reveal its algorithm] is laughable, and you are likely laughing with me right now as you read this, yet the sentiment expressed in the foregoing is very real and serious if you've had the nightmare I opened with or, worse, been in a real staff meeting careening out of control with organic rankings rage. You see, some people in a company have a notion, difficult to be disabused of, that organic rankings are a right- as if there were some Bill of Rights relative to company web sites and how they rank in the organic results.

We stand by our previous derisiveness.

U.S. District Court Justice Jeremy Fogel, however, doesn't, persuaded by the old antitrust boogeyman:

Kinderstart claims that Google violates antitrust laws in delivering rankings based on secret criteria. The suit seeks damages, but more importantly, it seeks disclosure of the methods Google uses to rank sites. It calls Google's practices anti-competitive, and it was this claim of anti-competitive behavior leading to antitrust that caused U.S. District Court Justice Jeremy Fogel to suggest that he intends to let the case proceed. A hearing in the case has been set for September 29, 2006.

Fogel did draw a line of absurdity, though, thankfully:

A claim that Google violated the first-amendment rights of Kinderstart did not seem to move the judge.

Whew.

Can an Algorithm be Intimidated?
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May 16, 2006

The Second Cutts is the Deepest

You've probably read by now that Google has hired someone to help Matt Cutts in his work as liaison to webmasters. The new "MiniMatt," as he's been dubbed, is Adam Lasnik.

Until very recently, Adam was Intrapromote's Director of Paid Search, a role in which he handled PPC strategy for clients small, large, and very large. In his new role with Google, Adam's heading over to the organic side, where he'll be "hanging out at Webmaster conferences and various geek gatherings, occasionally replying to Google-related blog or forum posts, tackling some Webmaster-related e-mails, and undoubtedly popping up in other random places."

Intrapromote is proud to have had Adam on our roster, and we wish him the best in his new role at Google.

The Second Cutts is the Deepest
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May 10, 2006

Highlights of Search Marketing Standard - Vol. I, Issue I

With 15,000 subscribers already under its belt (and for a yearly subscription fee of $0, why aren't you one of them?), the first issue of Search Marketing Standard magazine hit my virtual actual In box yesterday. Following are some observations - a hastily crafted mix of humorous and serious - but each one true.

For the uninitiated, Search Marketing Standard is our little industry's first major print periodical.

• At 36 pages (including covers), about half of which are ads, I think this is a good start for a publication that many viewed skeptically upon its announcement.
• "Collectively, page views are a good metric for site popularity" (page 8).
• I was a little disappointed that nearly every article was devoted to PPC. Maybe I should have expected that, but I was hoping organic SEO would get a little real estate.
• An article debunking SEM myths (page 12) leads off with an entry that says "any search engine that tries to lure you into a contract based on a huge number of searches is probably lying, or may at best be using a very loose interpretation of the word 'searches'." Six pages later, a full-page ad for a PPC engine tries to lure you into a contract based on a huge number of searches.
• With its landscape-style full-page ad, those crazy cats over at Kinetic Results are trying to make everyone think you're reading a porno mag.
• If someone tries to sell you a domain for $3000 and they claim it makes $20,000 per day, they might be lying (page 16).
• Most SEM agencies are really REALLY bad at creating print ads.
• 19 different SEM/technology/tradeshow companies advertised in this issue. Some clearly used URLs and toll-free numbers that enabled source tracking. Many did not. Come on, people - don't get sloppy.
• Jim Bouton will be at Affiliate Summit East - July 9-11, Orlando (inside back cover). I will not, because I was sure I had a 1968 Topps card of his, but now I can't find it.
• Grammarians take note: "Zunch" is now a verb (back cover).

Highlights of Search Marketing Standard - Vol. I, Issue I
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May 03, 2006

Another Brand Bites the Dust

Oh, the irony. Regular riders of The Wagon will remember it was but last week I blogged about the ironic electronic disappearance of the brand that was to be the very definition of living life online- now we must rubberneck to even have a glance at M-Life as we 301 past it like a car wreck.

Now the brand that put the M-Life rabbit back into the hat, Cingular, itself a brand built by $870 Million in advertising last year alone, is about to make like a Bodhisattva and disappear from this world:

The new AT&T, created by SBC Communications'$16 billion acquisition of AT&T, revealed last March that it would replace the names BellSouth and Cingular with AT&T. Currently, San Antonio-based AT&T is in the midst of a rebranding effort whose cost is estimated at $500 million, by far the most expensive in U.S. telecommunications history.

BellSouth, with a 2005 ad spend of $115 million, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus, is currently represented by Grey in New York. BBDO offices in Atlanta and New York have worked on Cingular, which spent $870 million on ads last year, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. The first campaign used the tagline, "What do you want to say?" The agencies declined comment on the future of the account.

What can anyone say if they no longer have a mouth?

Another Brand Bites the Dust
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April 24, 2006

Is Anyone Still Leading an M-Life?

Comes now a very bold, it's-about-time dictum from Advertising Age, that galloping-toward-extinction dinosaur of old media:

It is bordering on derogation of duty for a marketer today to commit to a campaign that isn't integrated, particularly in terms of the way it marries offline components with the use of Web tools such as search and even online retail, yet many still start their years by parceling out budgets into media-by-media silos, sometimes even competing agencies, that often don't communicate, much less collaborate.

We see the media silo effect frequently on the SEM side, as a brand will have committed a budget for the year and then, with a new product launch, have no water left in the well for extending out search efforts to meet and integrate in the mix real-time. A companion AdAge.com article has a wonderful exemplar of this phenomenon, frozen in time by its sheer incompetence:

After a consumer's curiosity is piqued by watching a broadcast branding ad, they head straight to the Internet to uncover more information. If the advertiser didn't invest in keywords on search engines, they end up where AT&T did after spending millions to introduce m-life (its mobile initiative) in Super Bowl ads four years ago. Consumers flocked online to find out what m-life was. But since the telecom hadn't purchased any search terms related to the ads, consumers remained clueless about the concept. AT&T was nowhere.

Nowhere indeed. But we do know that an m-load of cash was flushed into the old media silo of Ogilvy and Mather to make m-life come to life; so how much would it cost to make m-life die? A simple 301, search friends, and now we have before our eyes the greatest, most breathtaking disappearance act in non-integrated branding history: http://www.mlife.com

Is Anyone Still Leading an M-Life?
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March 27, 2006

SERPS: The Winnower of the 50-Millisecond Judgement

Dorky as far as acronyms go, yet fitting in its ultimate geekiness, SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages for you virgins out there) have always been known to be a winnower of destination based on input intent. What we may not have fully grasped or accounted for, however, is the winnowing that occurs of our ultimate judgment of the destination we choose.

Back in February Gord Hotchkiss, he of the cool name, penned a fascinating look at what he coined the 50-Millisecond Judgement-- the amount of time it takes a site visitor to decide whether or not they like the site they are visiting:

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard and her team undertook a fascinating study at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Their goal: to determine just how long it takes to make a reliable judgment of the visual appeal of a Web site. They found that we can accurately judge visual appeal in just 50 milliseconds, or one twentieth of a second!

Moreover, we even try to persuade ourselves that our blink-of-an-eye judgment is an accurate one:

If we have a positive emotional response in those first few milliseconds, our logical mind will kick in and try to rationalize that response. We will look for positive reasons why it was the right decision, and we will tend to ignore negative factors. If the first impression is not good, the opposite occurs. We look for reasons not to like something, and tend to discount any positives we might find. We want to prove our first impression right.

Now back to SERPS. Doesn't it stand to reason that layered atop this head game we play with ourselves at moment of judgment might also be a hangover from why we chose to go to that site in the first place? If so, then apart from pure position politics, the winnower here would have been the title and description, those twin trusty building blocks of a SERP.

We've long known that split-second judgments on what to click on a SERP are heavily influenced by whether keywords that had been input are sprinkled in the title and description. Combined with the fidings from the above study, having the right keyword combination therein might not only have helped you achieve the relevancy to appear where you did on the SERP at issue in the first place, but also give you a head start in being liked before you are even clicked.

If you can wrap your head around that, you've just made an argument not only for The Long Tail and Keyword Torso but also site-wide, comprehensive optimization of a website. The more pages you have optimized from a site the more critical phrases you have an opportunity to appear for, and along with that, the greater the chance that, owing to the winnowing effect of titles and descriptions, your visitors may have been pre-wired to convince themselves that they like you. They really like you.

Even before they clicked.

SERPS: The Winnower of the 50-Millisecond Judgement
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March 21, 2006

Don't Discount The Offline Conversion

From the I bet you weren't figuring this into your ROI file-- a new study by Google and ComScore Networks found that more than half of purchases related to consumer Internet searches occur offline:

The Internet giant teamed with the Reston, Va., research firm to examine consumer search and purchase behavior. It found that 25 percent of searchers for product information in several categories eventually made purchases. Of those, about 37 percent happened online, with the rest happening in stores.

The remarkable finding is even more remarkable in certain verticals:

Buyers who looked for information about video games, for example, visited stores for the product 93 percent of the time. That figure was above 80 percent for the electronics, music and toys categories.

We are still many such studies away from offline influence being fully and regularly credited to online, and not primarily due to the tracking leap required logistically; our great lurch forward from infancy to pubescence in the marketing mix has been propelled in fits and starts over our life span thus far by the sharpness of the direct marketing blade and the immediacy of real-time conversions taking flight at the very whirl. That is a big wheel indeed to unspin, and one that, you online marketers will know, can lose as many as it gains if it must necessarily grind completely to a halt in the proving.

Don't Discount The Offline Conversion
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March 20, 2006

Are There Inalienable Organic Ranking Rights?

If you have a superior above you in your hierarchy who thinks so, this may seem like a nightmare you may have had about a staff-meeting action item gone horribly wrong:

KINDERSTART.COM, A DIRECTORY AND SEARCH engine focused on children, filed a lawsuit Friday against Google, alleging that in March 2005, Google wrongfully lowered KinderStart's ranking in the results, sending its traffic plummeting by 70 percent. As of Sunday, the first result that appears when users type "KinderStart" into the Google query box is a U.K.-based site about nursery schools. But the directory KinderStart.com is the first result to appear on queries for KinderStart on Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com. Among other relief, KinderStart is now seeking to force Google to reveal the formula by which it determines a site's placement in the results page.

The last sentence is laughable, and you are likely laughing with me right now as you read this, yet the sentiment expressed in the foregoing is very real and serious if you've had the nightmare I opened with or, worse, been in a real staff metting careening out of control with organic rankings rage. You see, some people in a company have a notion, difficult to be disabused of, that organic rankings are a right- as if there were some Bill of Rights relative to company web sites and how they rank in the organic results.

That there is not a magical Restore Your Rankings Bill of Rights to invoke is the type of pill that for some mouths just won't fit, let alone swallow.

The spoonful of sugar? That is another blog post in and of itself, if not a novella- or a full blown tragic drama.

Are There Inalienable Organic Ranking Rights?
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March 14, 2006

Pithy Comments About SEO Tools

There are a lot of SEO Tools available to both “in-house�? SEOers as well as agencies like ours that specialize in SEO. There are tools for nearly everything – from keyword research tools all the way to Google vs. Yahoo SERP comparison tools. We’ve even created our own helpful tools to assist us in directing client campaigns.

The success of some very good SEO tools has been a catalyst for a plethora of SEO tools being created and made available online. Some of these are unique and useful, many are simply “me too / jump on the bandwagon�? applications, and some are really not tools at all but rather experimentations. The latter group are the ones that you say “Cool!�? when you see them, followed by “What exactly is that?", then you never visit them ever again.

Here’s my pithy comments about SEO tools...

If you are going to throw an SEO tool out to the public, please make sure it works. And if it’s broken, at least put up a notice on your site that it’s temporarily unavailable.

I visited two of the most popular online SEO tools this week and both of them had major problems. One didn’t work at all and the other gave incorrect results.

Crippled SEO tools reflect poorly on your company and our industry. If you are doing SEO in-house, make sure to verify some of the results provided by your frequently visited SEO tools.

Pithy Comments About SEO Tools
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March 02, 2006

The Bright Lights of SES NYC 2006

One need only meander toward the steaming Cup O' Noodles sign at the apex of Times Square to have the pedestrian thought--NYC is all about advertising.

No small wonder, then, that SES NYC 2006, too, was dominated by the advertising side of the SEM coin. The difference from previous versions of the NYC portion of the SES franchise, though, was that SEO didn't just seem to be given a dutiful nod and wink as the progenitor of SEM. Rather, much as if I were bold enough to aver some others than family were reading what I wrote last week when I suggested that as natural, or organic (or opposite-of-PPC for you advertising folks), or just plain SEO becomes more tethered to the actual language we earthlings use in pursuit of actual products, down to the exact phrasings--a moveable feast of consumer intelligence--might some in the advertising world actually find some use for what is currently being treated as little more than shrapnel?

In the wonderfully prescient Leveraging Search Data Beyond SEO And SEM, Max Kalenhoff sees the light I was trying to shine:

One significant area where search has tremendous potential involves the long trail of search-query data that consumers leave behind when seeking, comparing and analyzing information. Similar to consumer-generated media--which marketers are increasingly paying attention to amidst the rise of blogs and other social media--consumer search queries represent one of the largest pools of unprompted consumer intelligence. Setting aside keyword buys, consider the wealth of real-time insight into consumer intentions, behaviors, attitudes and drivers.

Make sure to take a look at the four specific areas he outlines where the wealth of information currently being ignored can be leveraged:

1. Identifying The Right Marketing Questions.

2. Divulging Consumer Insights.

3. Identifying Issues and Trends Early On.

4. Measuring Brand Equity and Marketing Effectiveness.

I couldn't have said it better myself, but then again I'm not really from the bright lights of advertising.

The Bright Lights of SES NYC 2006
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February 20, 2006

At the Intersection of Language and Creativity is Search

The Superbowl having come and gone, and in its wake the shards of the TV ad bombs having exploded, falling now listlessly back to earth, we earthlings interested in the media mix might ask ourselves why we didn't hear the report we always expect: a sonic boom. It certainly wasn't because no one was watching.

Perhaps there is something of a language barrier at play. Marc Babej tackles the problem well in Being Reasonable: A Creative Roundtable:

What do we get for all this "creativity"? We get metaphors without meaning: Financial services company Wachovia gives us "Uncommon Wisdom" but fails to tell us why we should choose it over the competition. We get sentiment without sell: Coca-Cola welcomes us "to the Coke side of life." And we get cutesiness without content: VW touts the Beetle as a "Force of Good." Much of what passes for creativity these days has become untethered from promoting actual products. The more untethered, it seems, the more "creative."

Or, as my Dad always manages to put it pithily at the conclusion of each such commercial, turning to all in the room- "What the hell were they trying to sell?" What the hell, indeed. Striking, too, in that as Search becomes more tethered to the actual language we earthlings use in pursuit of actual products, down to the exact phrasings--a moveable feast of consumer intelligence--TV ads manage to move away, rather, straying further and further from reality.

I call on Robert Murray to provide the hook here:

...traditional agencies should love search marketing because it can actually help them advise their other forms of media buys. That's right, search is not only an effective and efficient medium for their clients in its own right, but it is also an important tool for agencies because it provides insight about their clients' customers. Specifically, search behavior reveals how a client's customer thinks and how he/she uses language in his/her thought process.

Returning to Babej, were we to search for [Uncommon Wisdom], [the Coke side of life], or [Force of Good], respectively, we would find nary a Wachovia or Coke product in the natural or paid results and only the Beetle integrated enough to prepare a site beforehand that would connect the messages in the mediums. Clearly all three megabrands wish these to be the sentiments consumers carry to their products- yet at least two major agencies were asleep at the wheel in tethering them to the reality of Search.

I suspect they remembered to cash the checks, however.

At the Intersection of Language and Creativity is Search
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February 15, 2006

An Open Letter to Search Engines

Dear Search Engines,

Here's a word for you: Relevance. I know you have it. And I know you know people want it. But here's some difficult news. They're not getting it, because you're making it too hard for them.

I know, I know. You're trying to get the word out. You have "advanced search" pages. You have APIs. You have tabbed searches for tiered results. You have these and a ton of other features that NO ONE USES, because despite more-or-less-accurate fantasies about how important you are to the world, you refuse to understand that people, while not exactly stupid, aren't exactly as "search literate" as you need them to be.

What's that, Google? You say you're getting the word out in the world's 8th most popular blog? I'm sorry, I guess I had trouble hearing that over the din of NO ONE KNOWING WHAT A BLOG IS. That's like saying your brand of calculator is the most popular among Hyperbolic Topology Ph.D. candidates. Woohoo!

Part of this isn't your fault; it's ours. We fill your comments and trackback sections. We write article after article about search engines. We spend days telling you what we think about preferential treatment of subdomains, or the mishandling of 302s, or how to measure effectiveness of site-wide links, and you start to believe that we represent a significant portion of potential users (we don't). Even the dreaded MSM is jumping in - a sure sign of the social dissemination of your technology, right? You can't even wend your way to the Times Op/Ed section without seeing half a dozen articles about how cool search is. But don't be misled: Most of these articles are mind-numbingly shallow, and they're mostly read by people who know thrice as much as the authors themselves. Not a lot of additional reach there, unfortunately.

Here's the bottom line. The most popular searches in your very own search boxes are actual URLs. Did you hear that? PEOPLE SEARCH FOR URLs IN YOUR SEARCH FIELDS SO THEY CAN SEE THEM IN YOUR SERPs AND THEN CLICK ON THEM. Does this sound like a group of people who are looking for a way to restrict search results to a specific TLD or find out how much they weigh in a popular British/Irish format? (By the way, would you call that "13 stone 8"?)

Search engines, here is the brutal reality: you're trying to get your message out in a world where 17% of HDTV owners mistakenly believe they're watching a high-def broadcast simply because they own a high-definition television. What's the moral here? YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS STUFF TOO SIMPLE FOR PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND.

• Spend less time posting to your official blogs and more time putting your message on tray liners at fast-food restaurants.
• Spend less time speaking at tech conferences and more time buying a few TV spots to showcase your features. (When people see something on TV, they want to try it. When they see a tiny link to it pulling them away from a comfortable place, they don't. Pontiac should not understand this more than you do, but it does.
• Spend less time catering to corrupt governments and more time creating ad inserts for Sports Illustrated or Parenting or Marie Claire or whatever publications target the users who aren't fully exploiting your capabilities. Trust me, that's just about all of them.

Your employees have spent a lot of their time creating some very cool search features. It's time that some of them spent their hours thinking of innovative ways to educate searchers. And remember, counter to your intuition, "innovative" means "less technical." Users who know how to use search engines correctly better understand engines' potential for solving problems and are even more likely to associate specific engines with relevant results. And the managerial subset of that group will really understand how important it is to have a viable search engine presence. When that happens, everybody wins.

An Open Letter to Search Engines
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February 13, 2006

Are You Strong Enough to Buy My Media?

Taking aim, unlike Cheney, Bart Feder sprays his target with the type of gunshot that stings even after one bids adeiu to the ICU- the bitter, acerbic report obtained when one points one's barrel at the white elephant crossing from old media to new, squeezing the trigger:

...Bart Feder of FeedRoom was openly disdainful of the "big fat lies" that network TV media planners and buyers rely on--that is, Nielsen ratings. "They're lies, and what's more, everyone knows they're lies," Feder opined.

Later, he dismissed skepticism about the Internet as cultural inertia: "There might be doubt that someone is actually looking at an ad online--that you don't know anything for sure. But they haven't known anything forever! Are you telling me the Nielsen numbers are more trustworthy than click-throughs and so on? I don't think so."

Ah, the Nielsens. Those 5,100 households strong that define what stays and what goes nationally- the arbiters of the least common denominator of popular culture, if you will. And how many, you may ask, arbit what stays and what goes in a major city like NYC, for example, whose greater metropolitan area houses 22 million people? 500. Even more depressing, from a truth in tracking standpoint, is that the 56 markets that are metered thusly leave out 30.34% of the country.

This is at the heart of the chasm between old media and new. Lie to me- I promise, I’ll believe is a refrain that has enabled such hassle-free media buying in the old world that the prospect of the meta-tracking convergence will bring scares the household shares out of the old guard.

Advertisers, likely, want the truth. You know that if you are in SEM, down to the most infinitesimal set of click-throughs. But old media, like Col. Jessep, will protect them from it as long as they patrol the wall between online and off.


Are You Strong Enough to Buy My Media?
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February 06, 2006

The Ineluctable Organic Moment

Gord Hotchkiss, along with having a really cool name, recently and brilliantly captured in words what has heretofore remained known but unspoken in our odd little industry: the genesis of organic interest within a company, or what we'll coin The Ineluctable Organic Moment:

Here's the typical scenario: marketing has been convinced to try sponsored search. They're generally happy with the results, but then they read an article or attend a conference where someone (and I happen to be a prime culprit) tells them that 70 percent of the clicks actually happen in the organic results. "Wait a minute," they say. "I'm spending $4.28 a click and I could get more traffic with a free listing?" They immediately run to the nearest computer and see how they rank for the terms they're currently buying. Nothing on the first page, or the second, or the third. Ah, there they are! Number 48 for their term--stuck in no-man's land.

I quote at length but for me it was a Popean what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed epiphany. Moreover, an adverb used expertly but almost to extremity by Al Gore in a recent speech and one which I will attempt to employ for the first time in a published fashion at risk of dangling a modifier, it hearkened me back to what I believe was the first public sharing of The Ineluctable Organic Moment, although again, ne'er so well expressed as Gord's accomplishment and, certainly, as yet unlabeled.

The Scene was Auditing Paid Listings at SES Chicago 2003, and going off-topic we began to approach this elusive, unnamed entity. Danny Sullivan, being Danny Sullivan, pursued it as a subject to be pursued and was able to coax out the 85% number that became part of SEO Mythos for a good while.

Whether we have fallen since to the 70% quoted above or none of us knew what we were talking about at the time remains open to discovery, yet it is still quite a tilt in the favor of Organic. And quite a moment, ineluctable.

The Ineluctable Organic Moment
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January 30, 2006

The Query Chilling Effect

The Old Grey Lady, admittedly, has seen better days and truer articles, but occasionally some interesting reporting can still occur, as if by accident. Today was one of those occurances, the paper of record suprisingly taking a closer look at the chilling effect the Big Brother Brigade may be having on queries sans any of the balancing opinion "it's really, actually good for us in the long run" cowardly CYA fluff they usually feel compelled to supply (ok, there are a couple paragraphs like that, but less than normal for de rigueur journalism):

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a "rent boy."

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy - a young male prostitute?

...and...

Ms. Hanson, who did the "rent boy" search, said that although she was aware that personal information was not being required in the Google case, she remained uneasy.

She pointed to a continuing interest she has in the Palestinian elections. "If I followed my curiosity and did some Web research, going to Web sites of the parties involved, I would honestly wonder whether someone in my government would someday see my name on a list of people who went to 'terrorist' Web sites," she said.

I point out the above not only to thank the New York Times for reporting something I'm sure made the editors a bit squeamish, not having fallen back onto the safety net of talking points and all, but also to remind us all that as we move to Internet 2.0 a significant fight we must wage is the battle against totalitarian urges naturally inclined to wrestle away control of our information medium, reducing it to the propaganda channels our other media have largely become.

Note that both instances in which a chill was felt above were simply in the course of further educating oneself, the great promise of the internet and search, with "all of the world's information" available and all- this great leap forward in the ability of humans to access information, any and all information, is what most troubles the totalitarian mindset. Loss of control of information is the loss of control.

Let's not lose ownership of the world's information, because once it goes down the memory hole it is not likely to come back.

The Query Chilling Effect
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January 23, 2006

When Is Sex Worth 14 Million Dollars?

Apart from the Wagnerian fantasies some of the more romantic of us may wish to hold fast to, it appears that sex is worth 14 Million dollars only when it has a .com extension appended to it. And the value has less to do with the search for sex than the manner in which the search box has supplanted the URL bar for a great number of users.

Erik addressed this earlier last week when he noted the Nielsen//NetRatings Top Search Queries for November, confessing:

I guess I shouldn't always be so shocked at the number of people who use the Search box to type full or partial URLs.

If we consider these searchers to be the least common denominator of search, and I'm not saying that we should (not that there's anything wrong with using the search box that way, of course), then it's also not too far of a logical leap to assume what single word might be the least common denominator that group types in the box.

That knowledge and 14 Million Dollars may just buy you a viable business model.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

When Is Sex Worth 14 Million Dollars?
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December 19, 2005

You Think Your Keywords Are Competitive?

List fanatics love the last few weeks of every calendar year. Search engine freaks are no exception, because that's when engines release their top searches of that year.

Yahoo and Lycos are the first to make their announcements. Following are their Top 10 searches of 2005. (Please check out the sites too, because they sub-categorize searches and show some very interesting data.)

Yahoo Top 10 for 2005:

1. Britney Spears
2. 50 Cent
3. Cartoon Network
4. Mariah Carey
5. Green Day
6. Jessica Simpson
7. Paris Hilton
8. Eminem
9. Ciara
10. Lindsay Lohan

What did you expect? "How to be a good citizen"? "Best foreign films"? Grow up.

Lycos Top 10 for 2005:

1. Paris Hilton
2. Pamela Anderson
3. Britney Spears
4. Poker
5. Dragonball
6. Jennifer Lopez
7. WWE
8. Pokemon
9. Playstation
10. Hurricane Katrina

Just to show you how far we've (not) come in six years, following are the Top 10 Lycos searches for 1999. The more things change...


1. Pokemon
   
2. Britney Spears
   
3. WWF
   
4. Dragonball Z
   
5. Pamela Anderson
   
6. Star Wars
   
7. Backstreet Boys
   
8. Poetry
   
9. Halloween
   
10. Blair Witch Project

That's right. A full 50% of the top 10 terms from 1999 are still in the top 10 six years later. (This assumes we can call [WWF] and [WWE] the same term. If not, I'm afraid I'll have to hit you with a folding chair.)

FYI, [Y2K] was #20 in CY99.

I'm hoping that Google Zeitgeist will release some interesting lists in the next week or so as well. "Stay tuned," as they said long, long ago.

You Think Your Keywords Are Competitive?
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December 14, 2005

Who's Doing the Work Here, SEM Friend?

Search Insider has a fascinating interview today with a secret SEO agent, codenamed Rohit, operating out of India. Rohit handles search engine marketing outsourced from the U.S., but you may be surprised to find out that his clients are not whom you might think, or rather your SEM may not be actually who you think it is:

He's not willing to share his real name or the name of his company with the press. Due to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), he cannot disclose the names of the leading SEM firms who employ him and his fast-growing company.

Call me naive or a purist, but I simply didn't imagine outsourcing was occurring at the top of the SEM pyramid, especially considering the involved subcontracting disclosures normally required in contracts involving fortune 500 companies. Yet Rohit claims:

We are currently working with large SEM agencies in the U.S. who either hire full-time resources from us or outsource projects in full or part to us.

-and-


If you talk about our agency itself, we have a team of copywriters. There is a proper process we follow. It's not just picking up a project and optimizing it. I can tell you, some of the best brands' websites are being worked on by people out of India.

Now I'm in no way against Indian enterprise, yet I do think when you pay for a brand, especially an SEM brand which can carry a higher price tag because of the perceived value of that brand, you should be actually getting the brand's actual product.

Who's Doing the Work Here, SEM Friend?
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December 12, 2005

Speedwagon Nominated for Best of Search Blogs Awards

Search Engine Journal just announced the nominees for the 2005 Search Blogs Awards, and we are quite excited to be on the list under the category of "Best SEO Blog." Other categories include "Best Search Engine News Blog," "Best Search Engine-Owned Blog," "Best Search Engine Marketing and Contextual Advertising Blog, and the "Best Blog Search Engine Blog."

Following is the list of nominees under our category, "Best SEO Blogs:"

• StuntDubl
• FishSEO
• SEOMoz
• SEO Speedwagon
• TextLinkBlog
• SEO Black Hat
• SEO by the SEA
• Jim Boykin's Blog
• Link Building Blog
• Stepforth SEO Blog
• Matt Cutts' Blog
• WebGuerrilla
• SEO Book

You can rate the blogs here. (We would encourage nothing less than voting your conscience.) Most important, if you look through the list of blogs in this and other categories, you'll walk away with a list of sites covering (and covering well) nearly every narrow niche of the SEO/SEM field.

And with that (sniff), we're all winners.

Speedwagon Nominated for Best of Search Blogs Awards
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December 06, 2005

To Tag or Not To Tag Your Vegetables

Coming on the heels of the much ballyhooed Tivo announcement that ads will now be searchable, it was titillating to follow David Berkowitz's prognostication of where this would all spill.

In the second-to-penultimate paragraph of this erotic thriller we reach what has to be a climax for all in our industry:

Searching within a map, a PDF, and even a PC desktop was much more cumbersome only a few years back. A former iCrossing colleague, Sara Holoubek, often illustrated the imminent pervasiveness of the Internet by noting how computers will one day be commonly built into refrigerators. By that example, searching the contents of your kitchen from a refrigerator-based console is hardly far-fetched (and given the difficulty I had finding ingredients when baking a kugel last weekend, it's a development I'd welcome).

The cold water splashed on this rock and roll search fantasy? I suspect spam will be a problem.

To Tag or Not To Tag Your Vegetables
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December 05, 2005

The Google Discussion Panel You Shouldn't Miss

Charlene Li wisely suggests that we take a look at SiliconValley.com this week. Some of the best known minds in search are coming together - online - to discuss the "Googleverse."

If you haven't at least heard of most of these people (or what they're involved in), I'm not sure how you ended up here:

• Stephen Arnold
• John Battelle
• Michael Bazeley
• Nicholas Carr
• Cindy Cohn
• Doug Edwards
• Paul Ford
• Gautam Godhwani
• Charlene Li
• Om Malik
• Matt Mullenweg
• Gary Price
• Rich Skrenta
• David Vise

The discussion is read-only for people like you and me, but looking at the crowd above, it's hard to imagine that they'll leave any major topics unaddressed.

Following is the day-by-day agenda. You can access any day's posts from this page:

• Monday: Search and Ads
• Tuesday: Google and the Desktop
• Wednesday: Google as a Network
• Thursday: Ethics and Trust
• Friday: The Big Picture

If Google affects you (or perhaps, if you're interested in knowing how to affect Google), this is a discussion you probably shouldn't miss.

The Google Discussion Panel You Shouldn't Miss
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November 29, 2005

A Ping to a Fellow Local Search Agnostic

Well, not quite. The title of the article alone, Local Search: Just About Ready, belies Gary Stein as a full stop short of agnosticism, as does the happy ending the local search cultists I have noted here and here will find no less gratifying:

Ultimately, we should expect local search to now attract attention (and money) not because the engines simply see a new application for existing technology, but because the work has been (and continues to be) done to make the experience fit the need.

Yet I ping a salute to Mr. Stein today as among the familiar up-tempo local search house beat he is the only drummer duly banging it slowly, and at the very pitch the rest of the band has always been unable to perceive:

If consumers see the value of using local search above using the Yellow Pages or 411, it becomes a much easier sell to advertisers.

Bravo. As I've said before, local is small business and small business is primarily local, and therein lies the current adaptation problem: not until local search supplants, rather than just augments, the physical yellow pages will small business move their small advertising budgets from the latter to the former.

And then, the sounds of an angelic choir.

A Ping to a Fellow Local Search Agnostic
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November 16, 2005

The Cult of Local Search Needs a Compound

Ok, at least it's not the same crackpot local-search-explodes-beginning-next-month mythology we've become used to like failed Seinfeld spin-offs. But you have to wonder what kind of local The Kelsey Group was smoking when they made this prediction:

THE ANNUAL VOLUME OF LOCAL commercial searches could surpass 20 billion queries during 2006--roughly 20 percent of total Web search, according to a new forecast by research firm The Kelsey Group.

20% of total search would indeed be fertile ground from which to erect the local compound, yet Kelsey (the Group, not Grammer) acknowledges something doesn't mesh currently with their rosy prediction:

At the same time, spending on locally targeted search ads accounts for just $500 million of the $7 billion market projected by the end of 2005.

When oh when will the true local search faithful be delievered? What say ye, Kelsey?

...local search ad spending lags because advertisers haven't worked out the logistics of making efficient buys.

Ah, logistics. Doesn't that get us all in the end?

The Cult of Local Search Needs a Compound
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November 09, 2005

Repeat After Me: Local is Small and Small is Local

We hear it almost every Month: surely, I tell you, next Month will be the birth of the biggest thing we have ever seen in paid search: LOCAL!

And if not next, then surely the Month after that!

And yet, just as we hear it each Month we also come across shortly thereafter an item like today's from Online Media Daily:

"Two-thirds of small businesses are confused about online marketing," said panelist Greg Sterling, an analyst with the Kelsey Group. "Nobody is advising small and medium businesses how to get in front of the online consumer. Consumer adoption of the Internet... has been far greater than corresponding use of online marketing by small business."

There really is no mystery here. Local is small business and small business is primarily local, and therein lies the current adaptation problem. Many of these companies have as their only budgeted marketing item an annual ad in the (local) yellow pages. They've not only been doing it that way since the birth of their business but also cannot afford any external marketing on top of that.

Local will become truly LOCAL! in the online world of advertising when the physical yellow pages no longer work, which will be right about the time when the last man performs the last search in the last physical (local) yellow page book for a given industry in a given locality. Then a Month or two later companies in the given industry in that given locality, their phones having stopped ringing, will supplant yellow page advertising with LOCAL! paid search.

Can you imagine the articles we will see then?

Repeat After Me: Local is Small and Small is Local
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October 31, 2005

Where is my Data Point Ceiling?

Furthering what I hoped was a Big Thought last week, that search visibilty means that anything digital is suddenly available to the whole world, we have more news this morning about Search as excavation tool, uncovering and re-discovering data points that heretofore, in conversations, meetings, and even solitary ponderings, from the stone age to our very recent history as a paper-bound people, would just never have been able to become visible enough to bring weight to a decision:

IBM and Google Inc. are collaborating to make it easier for office workers not only to search for local documents and personal e-mail but to delve deep into corporate databases, the companies said on Friday.

I don't think anyone would ever argue that one shouldn't assemble all the information and weigh it before making a decision. I just think that with news like this we are getting closer to the first time in human history where such a conception is actually moving from aphorism to reality, and not just for the elite. We have to consider that search technology is evolving in the direction allowing everyone, everywhere, at any time to fully be able to say any decision has indeed, and quite literally, been made with all things considered.

We will still make bad decisions, and often. But how will a more informed people alter the course of human history and, at what point in that history will humans have reached the ceiling above which no further data can be weighed in a given decision?

This is the departure point for worry about the implications of artificial intelligence, as the artificial part of that phrase will likely include the ability simply to weigh more data points, and more quickly, than humans in a given decision. Search can be the equalizer bewteen the two, because we will both receive the same outputs, yet one not need be a science fiction buff nor Vegas oddsmaker to realize one team will be heavily favored...

Where is my Data Point Ceiling?
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October 28, 2005

Scanning The Future of Copyright

In our insulated SEM world, we often forget that search extends beyond appearing on page one of results. Clicking to page two, three, or forty-three, for that matter, digs into index matter unknown to all but the few tortured, brave souls who venture into the great beyond (page one).

Yet the fact that this deep index matter is available, even at these rarely clicked latter pages, means that it is indeed visible, and can be made visible by anyone with a scanner. This is quite an exponential leap from the days when librarians first had to worry about whether or not a given page from a book could be photocopied. Quaint times indeed.

It's search visibility that forces the intensity of copyright squeamishness. Coming on the heels of Google's blowback from publishers, MSN's similar book scanning project was announced with an important copyright caveat:

MSN is hoping to avoid similar problems by only targeting works in the public domain or uncopyrighted material. The company said in a statement that it would respect all copyrights and work with rights holders to agree upon protections for copyrights.

Search visibilty means that anything digital is suddenly available to the whole world. This was true in theory from the start, but as relevancy continues to improve the challenge to conceptions about copyright becomes greater and greater.

What did the xerox machine say to the search engine?

You've come a long way, baby.

Scanning The Future of Copyright
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October 27, 2005

Intrapromote to Sell SEO Speedwagon Box Set

This limited-edition set brought to you by Intrapromote is the perfect way to commemorate the 100th Speedwagon post! Now you can relive your favorite moments from the first 100 episodes with friends and family members, at an affordable price! Bonus features include editor’s notes from the original airdates, rare behind the blog footage, alternate endings, deleted posts, and rough drafts. The commentary track provides insightful tidbits from the Speedwagon players, and the zany bloopers and site gags are chock-full of joyful exuberance!

Some of the Classic Episodes You will Find in the SEO Speedwagon Box Set:

• Baseball's Magic Number
• So You Want To Be A Search Engine Marketer?
• SEO Consultants Convert Sherpa SEO Buying Guide into Laughter
• SEO Ponderings: To H1 or Not To H1
• Implementing a 301 Server-Side Redirect
• Pay-Per-Call Frenzy

The SEO Speedwagon Box Set, a collector's item due to hit stores just in time for the holidays, will be this year's perfect stocking stuffer. Reserve your set today and also receive a *free SEO Speedwagon shirt!

*while supplies last, shipping and handling not included

Intrapromote to Sell SEO Speedwagon Box Set
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October 25, 2005

The Search for Lingua Franca: Engines, SEO, and Real People

Imagine walking into your local car dealership and hearing a conversation similar to this one. The salesman approaches a couple and begins to extol the virtues of the gleaming, midnight-blue sedan in front of them.

He covers all bases, making sure that no feature is left unexplained, no spec left unquoted:


• Horsepower
  
• Mileage
  
• Turning radius
  
• Cargo volume
  
• Passenger count
  
• and on and on...

When he finally takes a breath, the couple look at each other, then at the salesman.

"But what can I do with it?" the woman asks.

"Yeah," her husband adds, "do we sit in it? What does a car do?"

In this context, such a conversation is silly and impossible to fathom. But in SEO/SEM, growing evidence shows it happens all the time. Some recent examples:

• A forum at DigitalPoint describes the fallout of the current Google update, nicknamed Jagger. One specific post gives curious insight into the surfing habits - and search understanding - of a certain type of user:

  My customers are more elderly people and I found out they do not know how to bookmark a site for example so they are using Google like bookmarks in their browser. What is happening now is, these customers just keep browsing the search results until they find my site. I had 3 customers complaining as to why I have moved my site in Google, which they find very inconvenient.

  No search marketer, whether on the agency side or client side, who has explained his or her job to a befuddled friend or relative, should be surprised by that consumer behavior, yet I still was. To suggest that the 80/20 rule applies to search engines (i.e., that 80% of search engine users focus on [or even know about] only 20% of the engine's feature set) is likely a large understatement. It's probably closer to 98/2.
  

• ClickZ reports that few publishers or online agencies know about Google's ability to serve AdSense ads on RSS feeds, which comes as no surprise, the article points out, when you combine a topic the public knows little about (contextual advertising) with a topic they know nothing about (RSS).
  
• Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodney recently attended the Direct Marketing Association Convention and found out that many DM experts know little about search:
  

  In talking to some of the Search Engine Marketing folks that were in sessions on Saturday, I discovered that the vast majority of DMA folks are very, very, very new to Search Marketing. I'd go so far as to say many of them are incredibly clueless about the process, benefits, costs, etc.

So are engines getting ahead of themselves offering ads on RSS feeds when the vast majority of their users won't venture beyond the main search box?

Yes. Industry-wide, both engines and SEO companies need to engage in a massive program of search education. In our interaction with the public - whether we consider them potential searchers or potential clients - search engines and the tagalong search marketing agencies often commit the same big mistake: We're droning on about torque when we haven't adequately explained what a car is.

Once a critical mass of users understand and embrace the myriad ways that search results can appear, memories of a seven-fold increase in profits will seem like the "lean times."


add'l thanks to Threadwatch and SERoundtable

The Search for Lingua Franca: Engines, SEO, and Real People
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October 18, 2005

SEO Consultants Convert Sherpa SEO Buying Guide into Laughter

I'm going to talk about picking the right SEO consultant one more time, then I promise to let it go, for now at least.

A thread at Search Engine Watch called Reputable SEO Companies popped up about a week ago, just as I was talking about the same thing. A lot of the information in that thread echoes the caveat emptor philosophy, illustrating points like those that Todd Malicoat has mentioned in the past.

A recurring recommendation from the thread is to purchase the Marketing Sherpa Buyer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization Firms. We agree. It's a great publication, and it's well worth the small cost if you're looking for an island in a sea of confusion.

With a great deal of help, I've put together Intrapromote's Sherpa Guide application materials for the past several years. Their editors always boast that filling in the online questionnaire takes "about 45 minutes," but that's utter nonsense. To do it well takes the better part of a day, and I believe that prospective clients of all SEO companies benefit from that labor.

Each year we look very closely at the questions that Marketing Sherpa asks SEO companies, because the way various companies answer the questions makes up the core differentiation between them. That way, if you're looking for a very aggressive company that offers cloaking and doorway pages, or one that will not, it's easy to find.

So this year, as I filled out the application and looked through the questions about our methodologies and reporting capabilities, I stopped at the section that asked if we were able to report on the clicks, traffic, and conversions of our clients' competitors.

With the Alexa Toolbar or some other extrapolating tool, you could argue that you have a rough estimate of the traffic of a competing site. (You may not be right, but you could argue it.)

But competitors' conversions? Surely that's a joke - a tripwire carefully laid out by the ornery Sherpa editors to catch SEOs who aren't paying attention, and simply check every box they see. Right?



The stunning fact is that of the 126 SEO firms in the Buyers Guide to Search Engine Optimization Companies, 18 claimed the ability to offer clients a report of their competitors' conversions. Let me rephrase that. Nearly 15% of the surveyed SEO companies claim to be able to give you information about your competitors that can come only from the competitors' web analytics and ROI tracking software.

Forget white hat or black hat. If they can legally show competitors' conversions, that's a Technicolor Dream Hat.

But they can't.

SEO Consultants Convert Sherpa SEO Buying Guide into Laughter
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October 14, 2005

The Dawn of the Media Credibility Gap

Search friends frustrated by the media mix's slanted dollar bias toward TV will see the first sign of the windsock shifting finally away with the Yahoo study finding search results overwhelmingly the most credible among college students:

The findings, presented Tuesday in New York, included the conclusion that 81 percent of college students rated search engines as the best source of information; friends and family were rated best by 64 percent of students, while just 34 percent said traditional media was their best source of information.

The almost 50 point spread between search and traditional media portends the shakeup of the media mix to come for this next generation. Sure, TV will always offer the quick fix of tens of millions of eyeballs at a moments notice, but TIVO-related challenges aside, I think we are seeing in this surveyed generation quite a new phenomenon: the expectation of an algorithmic, non-human, objective element as the ultimate winnower of credibility that immediately discounts information sources not born of this component. Read: paid advertising.

Cynicism has and always will be the cherished rite of passage of attending university, yet we must not forget this is really the first generation to graduate having grown up on search. If the algorithm has been your standard of objectivity from the start it's difficult to suddenly fully trust the human, all-too-human element of pay-for-play. PPC separated to the right will become as figurative as it is now literal, I believe.

The Dawn of the Media Credibility Gap
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October 07, 2005

An August Google - Instead of Vacationing, We Search

We at The Speedwagon were not surprised by what should have been the
surprising NetRatings find that searches increased 10% from July to
August. We saw an early indication of this when our travel clients,
historically down in August in Search Visitors versus the rest of the
calender, all held steady or jumped. This after having prepared them,
as a good Search Marketing Agency should, for the coming downturn in
August for travel industry searches when people are traveling rather
than searching for travel. Don't fret and don't freak, you would have
heard us caution, let us look together and see how this has occurred
each of the last 5 years in your stats and understand it will bounce
back again in September just like it always has- it is a function of
culture, not on or off-page factors.

We were wrong, but wrong in the only way you want to be wrong in
client counsel- wrong with benefits. Consider it a major element of
our industry's Hippocratic Oath, if there were one: First, do no harm.
And if you do no harm first, not only will clients be prepared for
likely historical trends, but also pleasantly surprised when they do
not materialize.

Oh, and doing no harm would also make spamming virtually impossible...

An August Google - Instead of Vacationing, We Search
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October 04, 2005

Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?

SEO clients, I don't envy you.

Everyone's out to get you, and I'm not kidding. Your competition is tough - almost as tough as your affiliates. Search engine optimization firms are full of worthless, shady criminals. Can you believe any of us when we talk about "SEO Ethics" when behind your back, you're the object of scorn and ridicule? And don't get me started on cost. We're either prohibitively expensive or suspiciously cheap.

Nervous laughter aside, once companies make it through the minefield of selecting a decent SEO firm, they often become their own worst enemies. Doug foreshadowed it a few weeks ago, but it was reinforced just last week as Chris Sherman summarized the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF):


Just over a third of respondents said that there were no obstacles to implementing search engine optimization. However, fully 64% of organizations outsourcing natural search engine optimization to an SEO firm encounter obstacles within their own organization that got in the way.
The two biggest obstacles were lack of human resources to implement changes (34%) and lack of outsourced IT budget (17%). However, this suggests that if a company lacks human resources to implement changes or a budget to outsource them, they are not being well-served by their current search marketing firm.

The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. Notice the lack of judgment in Chris's use of passive voice. He's not saying that the SEO company is giving the shaft to the client - only that, empirically, when the client does not make the recommended changes (for any reason), it is not getting its money's worth.

The study itself ably points out why recommendations aren't made, and the fault lies with both SEO firms and potential clients. In addition to the two reasons quoted above, some of the key factors preventing the implementation of SEO firms' changes include:


• Upper management decision not to implement the recommendations
  
• Branding issues / restrictions
  
• Agency failed to educate my company on the required resources to implement recommendations

So who's guilty here? The potential client, for not doing its homework and asking the right questions, or the SEO firm, for poorly explaining the processes and resources required? Yes and yes.

So let's get this out in the open and put it behind us. In most cases, organic SEO is going to consume significant staff hours on the implementation side - your side. While we will work with design and marketing departments to reach as effective a compromise as possible, we're going to push for more content. And one of the most important things to realize is that in most cases, our recommendations, while itemized, are a package, and they rely on each other for overall effectiveness. If you make the title and content changes to 900 pages but refuse to allocate the staff-hours to the URL crawling and indexing issue, you've wasted our time - and your money. And you'll continue to call us worthless, shady criminals. And we'll continue to mock and scorn you. Let's not let that happen.

Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?
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Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?

SEO clients, I don't envy you.

Everyone's out to get you, and I'm not kidding. Your competition is tough - almost as tough as your affiliates. Search engine optimization firms are full of worthless, shady criminals. Can you believe any of us when we talk about "SEO Ethics" when behind your back, you're the object of scorn and ridicule? And don't get me started on cost. We're either prohibitively expensive or suspiciously cheap.

Nervous laughter aside, once companies make it through the minefield of selecting a decent SEO firm, they often become their own worst enemies. Doug foreshadowed it a few weeks ago, but it was reinforced just last week as Chris Sherman summarized the iProspect Outsourced SEO Metrics & ROI Study (PDF):


Just over a third of respondents said that there were no obstacles to implementing search engine optimization. However, fully 64% of organizations outsourcing natural search engine optimization to an SEO firm encounter obstacles within their own organization that got in the way.
The two biggest obstacles were lack of human resources to implement changes (34%) and lack of outsourced IT budget (17%). However, this suggests that if a company lacks human resources to implement changes or a budget to outsource them, they are not being well-served by their current search marketing firm.

The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. Notice the lack of judgment in Chris's use of passive voice. He's not saying that the SEO company is giving the shaft to the client - only that, empirically, when the client does not make the recommended changes (for any reason), it is not getting its money's worth.

The study itself ably points out why recommendations aren't made, and the fault lies with both SEO firms and potential clients. In addition to the two reasons quoted above, some of the key factors preventing the implementation of SEO firms' changes include:


• Upper management decision not to implement the recommendations
  
• Branding issues / restrictions
  
• Agency failed to educate my company on the required resources to implement recommendations

So who's guilty here? The potential client, for not doing its homework and asking the right questions, or the SEO firm, for poorly explaining the processes and resources required? Yes and yes.

So let's get this out in the open and put it behind us. In most cases, organic SEO is going to consume significant staff hours on the implementation side - your side. While we will work with design and marketing departments to reach as effective a compromise as possible, we're going to push for more content. And one of the most important things to realize is that in most cases, our recommendations, while itemized, are a package, and they rely on each other for overall effectiveness. If you make the title and content changes to 900 pages but refuse to allocate the staff-hours to the URL crawling and indexing issue, you've wasted our time - and your money. And you'll continue to call us worthless, shady criminals. And we'll continue to mock and scorn you. Let's not let that happen.

Hiring an SEO Company: We're Ready - Are You?
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September 20, 2005

Battelle's "The Search" on FT's Short List

John Battelle just announced that his recently released book, The Search, has been included in the Financial Times' list of finalists for "Book of the Year." Congratulations to John.

No word on whether the winner of the FT prize will be awarded a free, invisible text link from the Financial Times site...

Battelle's "The Search" on FT's Short List
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September 14, 2005

Pay-Per-Call Frenzy

It appears the SEO industry is entering a new era of search engine marketing with Pay-Per-Call advertising. Pay Per Call is a performance-based system that charges advertisers on a per-call basis as opposed to Pay Per Click which charges advertisers a per-click fee. This new form of SEM could and most likely will be HUGE!

Several months ago, FindWhat was the first search engine to enter the Pay-Per-Call arena and since then, AOL jumped on board. Both companies currently utilize Ingenio’s ingenious pay-per-call model and it seems to be working well for both the search engines and advertisers.

Other search engines wanting to embrace Pay-Per-Call are Google and MSN. Rumor has it that Google and MSN are gearing up their technologies to add Pay-Per-Call to their arsenal for advertisers, but no beta or launch dates have been published or forecasted.

I don’t understand why one of these engines didn’t just buy Skype while they had the opportunity. By not moving quickly, they have lost acquisition potential for this top-tier Pay-Per-Call service company as eBay recently purchased Skype for $2.6 billion dollars.

I have a feeling eBay is going to take Pay-Per-Call beyond search advertising and create even more performance-based advertising potential in areas we can’t even imagine just yet. Time will tell.

There is no acronym available for this new SEM model, so I think I’ll call it PPP (pay-per-phone-call).

I will follow up on this new advertising platform as time progresses and look forward to seeing this new SEM model flourish in the months and years to come.

Pay-Per-Call Frenzy
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September 07, 2005

SEM Study: Too Little ROI Tracking in Employee Evaluation

iProspect and JupiterResearch just announced the iProspect Search Marketer Performance Study.

The gist of the report is that too many companies (about 60%) use the same short-sighted metrics to evaluate the people in charge of their SEM campaigns that they use to evaluate the campaigns themselves - typically rankings and traffic, as opposed to genuine ROI/conversion tracking. The study finds, however, that as SEM budgets increase (it uses $1M as a fence), the likelihood of using ROI to evaluate marketers does increase.

It's good information and I strongly recommend a look. I do, however, take slight issue with how some of the data is presented. The study was based on responses to the following question:

Which of the following natural or paid search marketing metrics are taken into account when your company is evaluating your job performance?

In addition to the option of selecting "ROI from search marketing" as a choice, many of the other choices seem to represent potential subsets of ROI tracking, such as "Return on advertising spend," "Number of leads generated for products sold online," and "Customer acquisition cost." Respondents were free to select as many choices as needed. However, it seems possible that when given both vague and specific choices, the respondent might choose only the most specific metric, which might artificially lower the number of companies that appear to use ROI to evaluate job performance.

Finally, another possible response to the survey question caught my eye: Brand impact. Some studies have shown that brand impact via search results is, in itself, a viable return on investment - particularly when the brand site does not have an ecommerce component, and particularly when the sites displaced on the results page are either amateurish enthusiast sites or derogatory in nature.

Still, though, take a look at the study.

SEM Study: Too Little ROI Tracking in Employee Evaluation
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August 31, 2005

Useful and Useless SEO Forums

People sometimes ask whether I (or we as a company) spend time contributing to SEO-specific forums. In fact, a few of the SEO directories to which we belong imply that regular contribution to such forums is a factor in whether a company is accepted into the directory. We have no specific corporate policy about contributing - it's pretty much left up to the individual, which seems to work fine.

But don't infer that we don't follow the good forums. It's fairly common water-cooler chatter to hear "Wow, can you believe what [insert online personality] said at WMW today?"

Following is a list of forums that I find particularly useful, both in researching specific SEO phenomena, as well as keeping a pulse of the industry in general.

• WebmasterWorld


• Search Engine Watch


• High Rankings


• Threadwatch

But if you're looking for a complementary list of "useless" forums, you won't find it here. Truth is, they're all useless -- sometimes. A useless forum is one that lets its threads devolve into bullying, unhelpful shouting matches that take the thread in a different course than was originally intended. There are a few consistent attitudes that bury any potential help a forum thread can give:

1. It happened to me, so it's universal. Many forum posters are way too quick to assign causality to specific techniques. They changed their h2 to an h1, and the next day, they shot up the page! Was it the heading change, or the new pages crawled the week before, or the new incoming links recognized three weeks prior?

2. I haven't noticed it, so it's a myth. Sort of the inverse of #1. Typical of the ongoing debate about the existence of the [google sandbox].

3. Why would you do that? It's frustrating to read a thread that begins with the question, "Will tactic [x] work?", followed by incessant questioning of the posters motives. Just answer the question.

* Note: I once followed a forum thread that debated whether as an industry, we should embrace the anglicized plural "forums" or the more latinesque "fora." Some impressive arguments on both sides, all of which roused the old copy editor in me.

Useful and Useless SEO Forums
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August 08, 2005

SES: Updates

I attended sessions mostly about numbers: User behavior (Enquiro spoke, with lots of followup details) and SE market shares (Google is twice as big as Yahoo. Yahoo is losing mkt share. MSN is slowly deflating. AOL is in a death spiral. Sell your AOL stock.)

The Future: Local advertising is 20% ($100B) of the US $500B ad mkt, yet only online local ads are only $4B. Lots of opportunity, esp. at the cost of Yellow Pages, newspapers, and radio. Instead of global SEO/PPC, we may see more specific SEO/PPC.

More Future: Microsoft Vista Longhorn (the next MS OS). Coming in maybe (maybe) a year. Remember the Netscape Browser Wars? (Which incidentally, started ten years ago today, Aug. 8th, 1995, when NS IPOed.) MS killed NS by embedding the IE browser into the OS, so everything in the OS became webified. Here we go again. MS will attack Google by adding search to everything in the OS. Yahoo gets 73% of its SE traffic from its portal (in other words, people start at the Yahoo site, and from there, go to Yahoo Search). MSN gets 61% of its traffic from its portal. Thus if MS adds MS Search to the OS, they could get a substantial default user stream.

The main SEs have flattened in growth; they see future growth in various specialized, vertical, local, and personalized search tools. So we'll see an explosion of such tools (such as housingmaps.com, etc.) This means mkt fragmentation.

I have more notes; I'll write those up later.


SES: Updates
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August 06, 2005

Live from SES: Tuesday Radio Interview

Starting this Monday, Aug. 8, is SES, the SEO/PPC tradeshow in Silicon Valley. My colleague Stephanie Cota and I will be there and talk with the exhibitors while they're still fresh. Want a report on what's new in SEO/PPC? Listen to us in a live radio interview: Tuesday (11a EST, 8a PST Aug. 9) on Univ. of Cinncinati's Business Talk webradio with host Michael Mercier.

Live from SES: Tuesday Radio Interview
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August 01, 2005

Ask Jeeves PPC Sponsored listings

The word on the street is Ask Jeeves is set to launch their own PPC Sponsored Listings August 15th.

Google will continue to supply PPC listings to Ask (Google PPC listings make up 70% of Ask' revenue)but, the Ask Jeeves sponsored listings will be above those from Google and will position keyword listings based on a keyword bidding process and clickthrough behavior.

Get ready to learn a new interface if you're interested in doing PPC with Jeeves. When the service actually launches August 15th, go here to check it out.


Ask Jeeves PPC Sponsored listings
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July 21, 2005

Google profits grow 4X

Google just announced their quarterly numbers. Profits increased 4X over same quarter last year. We'll hear lots of news stories about PPC, Adwords, and Adsense for the next week. More at Bloomberg News


Google profits grow 4X
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