I have lectured more than one person on Google specificity this year, but I can only suppose I’m not a good lecturer because nobody wants to believe me. Read my lips: Google wants to pigeon hole your page. Accept it, find the trust, and exploit it. A fool with conviction is an easier mark than a fool on the fence.

So today I noticed Google sending me traffic for a composite query “Christine Dolce video caps”. I used to call it “latent semantic imaging” but nowadays I just call it Google nonsense. Look how hard Google is working to satisfy this very specific user query “Christine Dolce video caps“:

johnon.comThese screen caps are from a proxy out of the US East Coast. … Christine Dolce nude no photo and no video. Christine Dolce Nude no photograph …
www.johnon.com/define/christine-dolce-naked - 31k - Jul 26, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages

That’s SERP 1, item #3 after #2 was indented. So the second most relevant result was created by Google out of the context of my page. Clever Google edited the content to create that nice snippet that genuinely appears to be about Christine Dolce video caps on my site.

We’ve had this debate before ealier this year. Someone said we SEOs no longer deceive Google, but instead deceive users (via baiting and such) and it’s the users that convince Google of the relevance. I call BS. Lookie here… Google is so keen on specificity it will even fabricate a snippet to achieve the appearance of a relevant result (and then serve it up at the top of the SERPs as well).

Needless to say this shit doesn’t convert. It’s good for no one but MFA publishers and porn sites.

On the web you get to pick your audience. If you are brick & mortar, and you move online, your audience is defined for you. But Internet pure-plays like, oh, say a blogger self-help site, get to pick their audience. Look at the blogger community as a pie, and grab a slice.

So do you want to go after the nicey-nicey bloggers? The newbies? The upper-crusty bloggers? Or maybe the nasty, cult-like ones. Your choice. Pick your poison. And if you have a personality that matches your selected audience, you should do well in serving them.

One caveat that comes to mind today though, is that it is pretty damn hard to hide your true self when you blog. The more you hide it, the less credible you are for your audience. Nobody likes a poser. They’ll rat you out eventually.

What if you don’t hide it, but try and keep it under wraps? Like, pretend you hate bloggers, but want to monetize an audience of bloggers? Pretend you built out a web site to cater to bloggers, and you try and keep your true dislike for them under wraps. I say that will never work.

Every time you slip and reveal a wee bit of that negativity, someone in your audience will identify with that and give you some positive feedback..some positive reinforcement for it. “Dude, you are right about that”. Since most everyone else in the community let that little error of negativity slip (while noting it for the record for later re-evaluation of their trust in you, by the way), the only feedback you got was a reinforcement for the negativity. That stuff starts to work on you. We all need reinforcement.

Over time I guarantee your audience will devolve into an audience of like-minded people. The positive ones will move on, because they pick up on the bad vibe and prefer not to experience it. The others, the ones like you, will come back for more of themselves. More external validation. And there you have it. You reap what you sow.

In a flip of the words, look at the hit count for mentions of suicide on MySpace:

Google shows 29.1 million pages for site:myspace.com
Google shows 1.86 million of those include the word “suicide”
If you remove “goth” you still get 1.75 million, so that’s not it.
Adding “depressed” didn’t do much to the count (62,000), nor really did “depression“