This post is subtitled “careful what you wish for” or “know where you’re headed”.

Credentials aren’t everything. God knows our world is pretty messed up these days, and it clearly got that way via the actions of a few generations of very credentialed leaders.  From Ph.D’s to Grand Poobah’s with every sort of title in between, our “civilized” society has run a-muck with titles and credentials.

In an almost wicked reversal, our immediate environment is overrun with fake credentials. Nowadays I can place an advertisement into Fortune.com and then add the Fortune Magazine logo to my website with a claim “as seen in Fortune”. Or I can buy a set of glowing testimonials from seemingly real people for my product, without having to have any customers or even a product. It’s crazy. And it’s supported by a community of consumers behind the curve.

We don’t always need credentials to prove trustworthiness in fact, ability, experience, or legal rights. Some of the most worthy people in the universe are formally un-credentialed (and should stay that way, IMHO).

Truth is, I am actually one of the credentialing contrarians. I walked away from a nearly completed doctoral dissertation in Engineering, forgoing the Ph.D. credential after doing all of the work to pass the qualifiers, complete the formal requirements, produce ninety percent of the research and most of the dissertation work. I was a Ph.D. candidate and walked away, specifically because in my eyes, the credential failed my real-life value test. I simply didn’t want to be what I was becoming.

But sometimes, we do need some third party validation.

Statisticians lost alot of credibility in the past 100 years for numerous reasons, including alot of funny business. Today anyone with a copy of SPSS can claim to be a statistician. No one is defending the title. Not every consumer knows that an undergraduate degree is not enough to be a research statistician. Even a graduate degree is rarely adequate for research statistics work. And some people exploit that ignorance.

I’ve known Ph.D.’s who, armed with a basic grad school knowledge of statistics, invested in expensive statistical modeling software and became hyperlocal “stats gurus” in their niche communities. They bought every new advancement made by others, and brought the new idea into their own niche community. Have software, be successful. Many, many times their work was crap. Not many times, that was obvious to their peers.

Not too many people actually like statistics, so if a local guy appears to be able to get the job done and is willing to take the heat on critical review of the results, otherwise thoughtful scientists, researchers, and leaders choose to pay the man and move on.

Psychology went downhill the past century and took a lot of clinical research with it.  The field of “neuroscience” is split between scientists and pseudo-scientists, with a lot of hucksters in between. Behind the scenes you sometimes find Engineers (capital “E”, meaning they graduated from an accredited Engineering program with an Engineering degree) working in research laboratories (such as labs doing neurological research).  That credential ensures the Engineers know the fundamentals, and degreed Engineers don’t tend to make fundamental mistakes. It’s not a guarantee, but 5 years of passing hard undergraduate courses in Math, Science, and Engineering does not leave too many Engineers ignorant of the fundamentals of our physical world.

But you also see a ton of “neuroscience” laboratories doing the same sort of research, with technical experts doing the Engineering work. Specialists. Many are quite good at all the things that need to be done. Digital circuits. Analog interfacing. Computer algorithms. Fundamentals of measurements and statistics. Some of the greatest developments have come from such labs. However, an awful lot of ignorance has also stemmed from such labs, where outside opinions are often eschewed, local expertise can be overly revered, and cultures of “our way” may prevail.

Not too many scientists do great work in isolation. Peer review is important, and unfortunately, lesser-credentialed individuals are too often shut out of formal peer review processes.

In SEO, we are seeing a new age of Scientism with new applications of advanced statistical techniques coming out of so-called “research” projects. Is it valid? Does anyone know? Can anyone even check?

Is it safe to simply “pay the man” for his work, and move on with new metrics and new techniques that someone assures us are trustworthy?

History shouts “NO!” in response to that question. Where there is trust, there is an exploit. And the old adage remains true… “follow the money”.

Before you believe in new tools and techniques proffered by for-profit salesman backed by un-credentialed or questionably credentialed scientists, technologists, and statisticians, ask yourself if you can afford to trust them. If the data are incorrect, what is your downside risk? If the data are correct, where will it lead you?

If you chase search engine rankings via correlation analysis of the Google search results, where will it lead you? If you can reverse engineer the ranking algorithm by such observation analysis, to place your documents into the #1 spot, where will it lead you?

If your web site belongs there, such actions leads to success for you and for Google. If not, it leads to increased scrutiny and algorithm changes, as Google corrects itself and drops you out. If that sounds like success to you, you are chasing the fast money at the expense of stability and awareness of what actually mattered. That’s not professional SEO, and I am not addressing that.

The key to understanding the risk of correlation analysis is that even if it were valid, it assumes no basis for ranking. It works on the status of ranking sites, not the basis for their ranking. If Google were a dumb, static algorithm that might be useful. But Google is not dumb, and not static. Google broadcasts its intent to produce a user-meaningful SERP, and Google outlines characteristics of both quality URLs and URLs Google considers to be unworthy of ranking.

As dynamic as the Google SERPs are, I have a hard time believing any correlation work is worthwhile. Google engineers have frequently commented on the way the SERPs are incrementally built using filters and data from different places, under specific circumstances. In research, these are “environmental factors” and must be controlled when doing experiments. Correlation studies on data sets by definition do not control nor attempt to compensate for such factors.

I simply can’t afford to allow baseless observational analysis to drive my expensive SEO activities.

So what can be done? Certainly new techniques and analyses can be useful.  How can we manage the risk that the for-profit tool vendors may be full of baloney? How can we leverage our professional status to hedge our bets that these published “ranking factor” correlations are worth trying?

Credentials. Both hard credentials and soft credentials.

First, openly ask the question “Is he qualified to do this work?”

Why not ask? A few undergrad courses in statistics is not adequate to engage in research in statistical modeling of data as complex and valuable as Google’s index. Asking aout credentials isn’t damning. Why not ask? A serious researcher, when questioned about credentialing and demonstrated abilities, will at least seek to achieve adequate peer respect over the long term via credentialing or formal demonstrated achievements (such as published papers and peer recognized citations).

Very few are so gifted that they don’t need any additional training over time, and very few stable personalities will defend themselves with no basis. Or, we can see the sort of independent labs that evolved in neuroscience…specialists working on special topics that expect to be trusted and do not subject themselves to outside scrutiny. If we see that, we can be wary.

I can’t imagine a for-profit tool vendor unwilling to place a seasoned, respected, credentialed individual onto the public board of advisers if the staff are not adequately credentialed to satisfy our need for assurances. Sometimes that is all that is needed… let someone known, respected, and with an earned reputation worth defending, stand up for the work. They won’t do it unless we ask for it, so why not ask?

Second, ask to see real data that supports claims. It is usually trivial to produce data sets that others can use to verify findings, as that work had to be done anyway before such claims could be put in front of the public.

It is also pretty easy for you to grab your own data and ask “does it hold true with this real world data I have?” Is the claim reasonable to me in my work? if the tool fails to deliver on your real world data, you know not to trust it with…that’s right…your real world data.

Everyone gains when new research reveals new understanding, and when people ask questions. Only the for-profit sellers gain when consumers unquestioningly accept the hype and open their wallets, or encourage others to do the same.  In the long run, quiet acceptance of claims made by profit motivated sellers eventually leads to a field of pseudo science that no one believes, including your paying clients.

I know a guy… he says he’s a domainer. He has about 3200 domains registered. It is like a collection. He collects domains. Not killer domains, just unique, probably-would-still-be-available-if-he-hand-not-reserved-them domains.

Now I am not new to domaining. It is big business, and a very strategic part of web publishing. But time and again I meet self-described domainers who “own” collections of domains like this, for investment purposes. The only problem with it I see is the domains are not worth very much. In fact, I doubt they are worth the registration fee. I refer to them as bottom tier domains, the ones at the bottom level of the value scale.

But it’s his collection of domains, not mine, so I don’t want to be judgmental. I don’t own any really big-time valuable domains myself. And to be honest, one or two of his choices may someday have real value. At less than $10 cost per year per domain, only a relatively small percentage need to achieve thousand dollar value to justify the endeavor from a financial perspective. But again, that’s not the point.

I always wondered why people become bottom-tier domainers. I think I’ve discovered why, after talking tonight with him about his domaining.

Before domaining, he had a computer and AOL Internet service and loved it. Then he got off AOL and onto “the real Internet”. But he didn’t do anything with it. He didn’t know how to use it, didn’t know where to go to do anything meaningful. He thought it was awesome every time someone sent him to a new, cool site. He had a few sites he loved to monitor, and he used Yahoo finance for checking stocks. He read the New York Times online. But he wanted to participate, not just read. He wanted to play a role in this cool new revolution called the Internet.

He tried blogging once.. it was a Blogger disaster. He was his only known reader. He tried to have a website made, but had nothing to put onto it and the designer gave up out of frustration (he says she’s still waiting for his content… 3 years later). He invested in a small web business with a neighbor, but lost his money on web development and no site ever materialized.

But he says that when he registered his first domain name he felt a real sense of accomplishment. It was satisfying, like a successful shopping trip. Different though, in that he now had something no one else could also have — a unique domain name no one else had yet “invented”. He invented another. And then another. He told me that in the beginning, he got an idea for a business printing official ownership certificates for registered domains, sort of like those wall plaques you get for approved patents or gold records. He said he would have paid well to get one for each new domain he invented and registered.

Now, 3000 or so domains later, he uses the Internet every day for Facebook, and to check on his domains and renew them. He owns a piece of the web, he says. And he has lots of development ideas, for later, and for discussing over beers at meetings and during Internet Entrepreneuring seminar coffee breaks (he goes to a lot of entrepreneur and business networking meetings, looking for the right partners for future projects).

So domaining was his entry into participating in the web. I don’t think it even matters what domains he started with… he just needed to start, and domaining provided the avenue for his successful independent foray into material participation on the Internet. Funny how he didn’t have Facebook back then. Listening to him speak about his experience, I suspect that if he had Facebook then, he would have found the same satisfaction, without registering domains.

Now he’s facing a new dilemma… he has almost 300 domains up for renewal each month, and doesn’t have a way to fund his domaining “business” anymore. It’s not an easy problem to solve, because he doesn’t want to give away any of his inventions.Would you?

Sort of funny: I’m reading a website that ranks for HealthCare Seach Marketing, and it’s an ad agency that’s “all about building relationships“. Okay… I get warm fuzzies when I read that. Customers… relationships. I get it. But in healthcare, I start thinking hmm… maybe not. Well..

So I figure sites like WhatDiseaseDoYouReallyHave.com (not a real site…yet) might be about building relationships. Or WebMD and the Mayo Clinic info site (which cost millions to build) are about the health infosumer relationship building. They want people to think of them as references. Sort of. Really, though, it depends on web site goals. And many of these sites seem to have goals like the following:

• generate ad revenue (ad impressions and clicks)
• generate sign ups for a white paper or free trial (lead gen)
• issue framing (influence the way an issue is viewed by the market)
• brand placement
• marketing (expand ability to achieve above goals)

So honestly, if this is “relationship building” it’s about 1 minute relationships. Shorter even than, say, the World’s Oldest Profession.

Of course much health marketing revolves around “community building” these days, which has been thrown under the bus by Social Media (thank you for doing that, Social Media. I’m so tired of hyped up, shill-filled health ailment communities).An awful lot of healthcare search marketing is about lead gen (move them to the phone or get them to stop by), or audience building (get them to sign up, register themselves, claim their profile).

One area where relationship building is everything is influencing the influencers. That is truly all about the relationship. Unfortunately, it is ultimately all about money, too. Oh, sorry. Not “money”, per se, but rather currency. Like it or not, most influencers already know they have some authority and in today’s economy, money currency talks.

Healthcare Search Marketing - Relationship Building One minute at a time, or One Shekel at a time.