Loren Baker highlighted an interview of Aaron Wall over at PingPongPie, a web site I would not have otherwise discovered. Aaron said:

The SEO industry used to be a tight knit community, but as social media has become more popular and too many people have been fighting for too small of a pie the industry has devolved primarily into nothing but a bunch of self promotion and attention whoring.

I enjoyed that. I also felt pangs of sympathy when I read this opening statement for the interview:

Aaron Wall is a well known SEO personality, while he is still “relatively” new compared to the likes of DaveN or Greg Boser…

Ouch! Talk about pre-qualifications. I wonder, for how many years will Aaron Wall be labeled a newbie like this?

I value my last 4 years of Google SEO experience much more than any old guy’s experience spamming Looksmart and Excite between 1996 and 2001, including my own. Oh sure my many years of SEO-oriented IT practice is hugely important, especially in the context of today’s Google-centric web publishing (I started on the Internet in 1986 and the web in 1995), but we should not be counting years of “SEO experience” chronologically and linearly assigning authority. There is so much more to it.

Starting an interview with Aaron Wall by discounting his 5 years of modern SEO while name dropping 2 old-timers reeks of patronage and politics. I’m not saying that’s what it is; I’m just saying that’s what it looks like.

We all know that public figures and the people behind the institutions we pretend are individuals promote their own interests. We know they pay others to make them look good. We know they sometimes pay others to make ugly things go away or at least look prettier to the rest of us. In fact, most of us would rather have that than the alternative: an ugly world where we see politicians promoting selfish evil agendas, companies promoting pollution and labor extortion, or governments speaking plainly when they admit that many, many people will be hurt very, very badly for some larger, more obtuse political gain.

We’d rather think they are benevolent and hard-working, and leave the ugliness for those who look more closely.

Now Google, via YouTube, is once again changing the way we communicate. Just as they severely influenced the way we plaster ads all over the content we choose to publish, and how we choose to publish what we publish (based on Google quality scores, for example) they are now forcing us to actually say what we would rather promote on the side. Yes, YouTube is now open to speech spamming, and this will forever change the way we appear in public.

If I told you that by merely saying the words “payday loan” at some point during your video, your video will appear (and rank?) for searches on YouTube (Google?) targeting “payday loans”, would you do it? Would you pay some one to say it? Previously, you had to come up with some excuse to title your video with payday loan. Now, videos containing political speeches that mention payday loans appear for searches on “payday loans”. Wow. What an innovation, eh Google? I personally just can’t wait to hear keyword spamming in audio tracks, speeches turned into audio spam, and “name dropping” taken to all new lows.
The world she is a changing again. People are going to start to mention the unmentionables, every single chance they get. Spam is about to take center stage, thanks to our often overly-literal and under-sophisticated (in a social sense) PhrienDs at Google.

First, let me highlight an amusing snippet of text from a creative agency that claims to include SEO in their client work:

“Many of our clients have spent countless marketing dollars with little success.”

You have to love the irony. That is the “copy” on the website of an agency looking to earn your business. Beautiful.

Anyway… Marchex just made a new move into local, further blurring the boundaries of domaining, SEO/search marketing, online local, and web development. That alone is news, and should be interesting to web entrepreneurs, especially the ones that work in small business search marketing (like me). When a large company moves into your space, you should pay attention. They represent your competition in many ways, and are likely to be on the phone already calling your clients and prospective clients using large inside sales teams… one of the most effective business-building weapons and oddly the last resource you are likely to build yourself.

I’ve always looked forward to the day online yellow page companies would start offering web sites for their clients, and this is one step closer. So naturally I took a look at Marchex’s example of a small business profile page for local small business promotion, which was a dental office in a local city-region here in Washington State. The business profile is homed on a Marchex local domain DentalCareIssaquah.com. The business paying for placement on that domain is a dental office in Issaquah, who already has a moderately expensive web site at IssaquahDental.com (built by the aforementioned “creative” agency, by the way).

Their own web site presents a pretty Flash interface with an HTML version, and is moderately SEO’d… not nearly up to my standards but at least obviously attempted. The point is these dental guys have spent some real coin, including spend designated specifically for SEO aspects of web publishing, but are also presumably paying Marchex for the new “local advertising platform” on their primary local business profile page for Issaquah. Marchex integrates pay-per-call, click and lead tracking, maps, etc.. all into that profile page, so we can assume Marchex has serious hands in the revenue stream for leads generated by that profile page.

The dentists are handing over the Keys to the Kingdom, the way we see small business owners make that mistake time and time again. Marchex offered an upscale dental practice as an example for good reason - Marchex knows where to go for the high-impact, low-hanging fruit of revenue sharing.

Reminder: You must own your website and your lead gen channel, or at least own a point of leverage for that channel. You must control your pubic profile, and you must own the revenue stream from your search marketing.

If you look more closely at the dentist website, you see it has been “optimized” for local search via keyword stuffing of alt tags and title tags. Nothing too ugly, but obvious nonetheless. The content has clearly been “made accessible” to search engines via readable text HTML versions, but those are presented via techniques which fail usability tests — the intent apparently to satisfy search engines, not users. Navigate to the site via a Google search (which shows HTML landing pages), and if you don’t find yourself left sans-navigation with no options but to step back into the Flash site in less than 2 clicks, let me know and I’ll revise this post.

Look around the web and you will find a collection of second-rate footer “sponsored links” back to the dental website, resembling spammy paid links (e.g. at the bottom of this broken page fulltoothwhitening.com/best-teeth-whitening/a55.html). I would not be surprised if the good dentists think they have engaged “SEO” for their site, given all the evidence of spamminess. Too many “SEO” firms these days offer such garbage as SEO.

By “partnering” with Marchex, these small business men have handed over a portion of their web presence to a company that has invested heavily in their own market. Marchex acquired — and prepped for local business success — a collection of domains like DentalCareIssaquah.com. Today that domain is offered to this dental practice, but tomorrow when they stop paying Marchex’s preferred rate, that domain will indeed be offered to the next bidder. Thanks to Issaqua Dental’s continuing investment in Marchex, that hyperlocal domain owned by Marches has increasing asset value in that local market. Clearly Marchex is a competitor. What a great business strategy! Compete with local small businesses while marketing yourself as their partner, collecting a share of their revenues!

Why they decided to partner with their competitor (Marchex) I don’t understand. They did not “max out” their own opportunities for online local (scan the 1st page of Google and see that this practice is not listed in many ranking online directories, for example). They did not reach a top level of SEO, and from the SERPs they don’t dominate for their own primary local searches. They have demonstrated a willingness to invest in their website (even if they perhaps picked the wrong creative agency). So why hand over to Marchex authority on their brand name, business practice name and address, and practice keywords for a contracted deal that includes (I am presuming) a revenue share?

I have to assume they got tired of competing. They picked the wrong SEO firm, and have a misunderstanding of how search engine optimization works for dental practices. Sadly, they consequently stopped building asset value on their own website domain, choosing instead to add momentum to one of the more serious competitors - an online yellow page player. Tsk tsk… that is the kind of mistake that costs you later.

The right thing to do? Pay the online yellow page people for what they are good for - directory listings pointing to your website. Links to your web content, in the proper context to help you get more business. Don’t allow them to co-opt your business name in search engines unless they link to you directly. Make them use something else - and keep the good terms for your own web site. Don’t offer them revenue share - but instead make them bid against each other for your business. Keep them out of hyper-local, by owning hyper-local yourself. That’s why you got that domain name in the first place, and that’s why you publish a website and spend on content.

So my advice is don’t quit now, but do consider changing strategy with respect to local SEO. If you are willing to pay Marchex you must have some sense of the value of a lead… and I am willing to bet that you can get leads more cost-effectively without Marchex than with them, especially when you consider the costs of investing in your competition.

Why would Marchex - a company that paid over a hundred million dollars for a domain name portfolio - be courting you for a monthly fee for a business listing? Think it through… a lead broker represents a pure play on a supply and demand market. If that market is small… say hyper-local, how does a lead broker maintain the leverage he needs to support high prices and revenue share? There’s only one way - you hand that leverage to him when you agree to overpay for it.

It’s time to go back and re-execute the last 12-24 hours of your social relationships, so that they can be re-captured by Twitter. It seems twitter lost a whl enuchof data, and reset people’s “follwoing” lists to zero. Jason Goldman responds to a whiner thread here, admitting that they had to restore user data from a 12 hour old cache and things are still not right.

Here’s a quiz for the Social Media addicts:

1. What percentage of Twitter users who have had their following lists deleted will rebuild them instead of simply leaving Twitter?

2. How frustrated will people feel after they start rebuilding today and Twitter restores an old cache over their rebuild… again?

3. What does Twitter consider a higher priority: eliminating the Fail Whale or maintaining data integrity?

4. What else, besides $20 million dollars, do you need to recruit quality programmers to a startup in SF?

I applied for a Business Process Patent years ago because it appeared to be a way to protect a business model that larger, more aggressive competitors could co-opt. It wasn’t. I never knew why, and never got a straight answer from the patent attorneys I dealt with, but it was clear that large aggressive corporations could get business process patents and I could not.

Ten-plus years later, we see the USPTO revising how it awards such patents. We have discussions of how the changes might effect things like Google’s patent on PageRank. Man, if I ever needed a student of the law who could also explain things in the good English that we search people understand, I need one now.

They don’t pay me anything, and so I don’t participate. How much do they pay you?

I’m willing to accept discussions of how much value you get from LinkedIn, if that is what you prefer. I have little expectation that anyone can highlight much real value, although I am sure there will be a handful of “I made a connection that turned out to be worth millions to me” lottery stories and get-rich-quick dreams. in my cirlces (even extended circles), anyone I have ever asked has said pretty much the same thing - “I never saw any value from it“. Of course these days there are some who try and explain it as “it’s social media… you participate and then people know you and you get to be a guest blogger or interviewed on blogs, and your name becomes known… and well you’re part of the conversation… and well maybe you just don’t get social media eh?” I’d rather not go there but if I am forced to I stop when I get to the part about LinkedIn making a fortune and Social Media people working hard for other people for a living. I suppose there are some parallels to that awkward moment when your boss offers you a title instead of a raise. Anyway…

With LinkedIn now partnering with the New York Times, LinkedIn becomes a bigger competitor to search, and LinkedIn members become a more valuable commodity to be pimped by LinkedIn to advertisers and influence-peddlers like the NYT. Ka-ching.
When I am offered a cut, I’ll reconsider participating. In the mean time, if you want to know who my friends and associates are, who my vendors and clients are, what I studied in what school when, where I used to work and what I like to read, well, you’ll have to pony up for drinks, bribe my b.f.f., or hire a private dick, just like old skool.

I don’t have time for this, but I have time to blog it in case anyone else is noticing the same thing… it sure seems to me the new Starbucks WiFi from ATT/SBC is throttling usage at the gateway router. Open Firefox and right-click yourself a bunch of new tabs off your favorite news aggregation page, Techmeme, or your Feedreader, and watch as the connection chokes your throughput. Do it enough and you’ll have to log in again.

It was bad enough when Starbucks took the bait and switched to this new ATT/SBC service, probably drinking the we-can-do-better Kool Aide from the people who allegedly brought us illegal wiretapping. the same people who created a need for the Net Neutrality Movement.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m a paid subscriber. I pay Starbucks every month for unlimited use.

Starbucks shows promise for turning itself around, but I’m afraid the WiFi is really a deal breaker for the mobile consumers like me. I switched to wireless broadband but the groups I meet with still rely on working, accessible WiFi and that includes clients, realtors, and even (gasp) a health professional I met with recently regarding some SEO development work.

Loyalty aside, if the WiFi no-worky, nothing else matters much. If more local municipalities start requiring Starbucks to list the calories in their Banana Javachip Smoothies next to the prices, they’re going to wish they had done more to keep their caffeine-guzzling regulars in the corners. Maybe they can still save the day if they act aggressively and continue to document how much the ATT WiFi sucks, as I am doing here.

Related:
www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Hints-That-UsageBased-Billing-Is-Coming-96276 , ww.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/07/tech-crtc.html

Wordpress 2.6 keeps track of revisions, which is fine, except it does so with a new POST or PAGE ID in the post or page table every single time an edit is saved. For me that’s a total pain, as I craft preconfiguration scripts for Wordpress installs on themes which utilize “sort by” and “order by” on posts and pages. So need to turn off revisions or my ID lists get filled with garbage during setup.
To turn off page revisions and post revisions, just set WP_POST_REVISIONS to false in your wp-config, or in your wp-settings if that suits you better.

In an age when most major media outlets are providing outrage-of-the-hour content, one should not be surprised that the community built around that is also comprised of illogical, emotionally charged drivel flavored with a smattering of generally useless regurgitated trivia posing as genuine information.

Reminds me of a few online communities I know and used to like.

Attribution note: That was a comment posted by “Bunny” (no web address) in a discussion of the importance of community for media. Too bad the hosting website didn’t allow back links for commenters, because if they did I could credit the source. Since the comments belong to the commenter (and not the site), I see no need to link to the site that hosted the comment, and since they don’t allow out links, I choose not to offer one back. The article wasn’t that good anyway… this comment was the best part.

Old but great quote from Kieren McCarthy on the very strange world of IDNs, those “international” domains made up of characters not found in the typical “English” keyboard:

One of the things about researching IDNs is it makes you feel so uneducated….When you start looking at the issue at IDNs though, you realise that even your best languages skills often aren’t up to the job. I kinda like that. I love feeling stupid. Reminds you to keep learning and to never start believing you’re wise about anything, just slightly better informed than you were.

I totally agree. And I add, researching IDNs in *any* language other than the one or two you grew up with will show you quite clearly just how “clever” the domainer mind really is. We tend to take for granted how easily we “just know” that foldingchairs.com is worth more than foldingchair.com, and deckchair.com or patiochair.com are worth more than ChaiseLounge.com, yet that determination is actually non-trivial.

Hat-tip to successful domainers - you’re brilliant. And for the rest, there is still hope, right?