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Archives for August 2006

More Craig’s List Censorship

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I am completely disillusioned with Craig’s List these days. I am seeing so much censorship I almost feel like it’s time to analyze just how much influence CL might have on the American public’s perception of their communities. Check out the RANTS & RAVES section of your local CraigsList. What do you see? Well, if your experience is anything like mine (in more than one market), what you see is a product of a significant amount of censorship.

So what is the agenda, CL? Who’s setting that agenda? Shouldn’t the public know something about how many posts have been “removed by Craigs List staff?” God forbid the realtors get behind the steering wheel of Craigs List… we would never get an honest opinion displayed for more than an hour on Craig’s List! Every Seattle post about how it rains every day could disappear, leaving only the posts about the beautiful sunny days. Every post about a bad egg in the home improvement market could disappear, leaving only RAVES about how easy it is to find a reputable independent repair guy. What happened to the consumer, Craig? Have the lawyers so scared you that you need to pull any post that someone complains about, however valid, or however it might be helping the consumer?

The last time I moaned about CL (see “Wanted: Craigs List Manipulators“) I got a call from a Customer Service person at CL. He left a voice message on my cell that to me sounded both condescending and disinterested. Why should I call him back? I can guess that:

  1. He will want to know more specifics about my experience with Craigs List manipulators. I am unwilling to share that, because I am quite confident no good will come (to me) by sharng the market and categories where I experiences CL manipulation. It is quite enough for me to recount that it takes a small handful of people to manipulate a forum using collaborative flagging. I can even demonstrate it.
  2. He may want to ask me questions to see if I was serious about seeking CL Manipulators. I clarified that in a comment. I don’t need any help if I want to manipulate CL, thank you very much.
  3. He will document anything I saw in case he wants to use it against me (thanks, but I have a lawyer for that)
  4. He may say sorry (gasp) or otherwise try and make peace. No, thank you. Just fix the problem. Oh, and the problem is:

Craigs List presents itself as a community resource, for the people, yet experiences a significant amount of censorship such that it can present a false impression for the readers without sufficient disclosure of that fact. Does burying scaredy-cat censorship behind a broad “terms of service” that says posts may be removed for any reason equal prominant responsible disclosure?

Is there no integrity at all among these millionaires? Betraying the public trust seems to be the career of the century. C’mon Craig’s List, you can do better or stop billing yourself as a pubic forum.

Danny Sullivan leaves Search Engine Watch

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The news of the day: Danny Sullivan is a free agent.

One of the biggest names in search, he started SearchEngineWatch back in the late 90’s around the time I first started focusing on search penetration as a competitive venue.  I was used to BoardWatch (no longer around), the defining website of the BBS world, and SearchEngineWatch fit right in as a fundamental news and information website centered on the emerging specialty of search. It was cool if only because it was focused on search, a field nobody respected at that time, but which excited all of us who played with it. To be honest, I didn’t pay any attention back then to who was running it or who was active in it. I wasn’t concerned with personalities…I was totally focused on technical aspects and performance.

The best thing for me will be seeing how Danny Sullivan redefines himself in today’s Internet/SEO world. That will be telling… and interesting.

Filed Under: SEO

Google GO words

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With all the current chatter about LSI and LSA I decided to re-emphasize something I dropped in a forum years ago : GO words. Not the Go Words defined here, but the ones I defined for myself when first analyzing Google’s love of semantic analysis. Sorry for re-using what appears to be already defined in the search world, but I didn’t know, and I was contrasting “stop” words which also seem to be named on top of an existing definition. (I didn’t say it would be easy).

Anyway, in SEO “stop words” were words which, if they appeared on a page, would cause that page to *not* appear in Google (either for the desired search or for all searches). A stop word was something like “rape”, which triggered some sort of filter and wreaked havoc with search inclusion back then. In those older days of SEO there were clear cases of unrecognized “stop words” causing pages to be dropped, and we SEOs found ’em and removed them. There were secret lists of stop words, allusions to secret lists of stop words, and all sorts of miscshpellingsh of stop words in order to keep the concept in the on-page text without tripping the censors filters. Sometimes stop words applied to certain queries, where the presence or absense of the word influenced whether or not that particular page “qualified” for ranking for a specific query. It wasn’t semantic analysis but censorship filtering back then. Today, these stop words would be considered either hard coded filter criteria or theme triggers that trip semantic set dynamics such that whatever LSA Google is doing in the algo, it is influenced by the stop word. You can see hard-coded stop words in action today with AdSense, with a minimal amount of effort (no, I don’t think the search engine and AdSense censor the same ways).

Once Google disclosed the tilde operator, we could play around inside Google’s synonym engine and that is where I was investigating stop words when I discovered “go” words. Go words (to me, at that time) were words which, if added to your page, caused it to rank for a query or thematic set of queries. I’m not talking about keywords specifically, but related words. Page without it, rank #30. Add the “go word”, and it rises to #3. Repeatable; testable. Go words existed and when you found them and included them, you were rewarded.

Because I’m not doing much real “work” to write this post I don’t have any “go words” to show you. I won’t reveal those I work with currently, and since I have many years in the niche markets I work, it is probably true that I still use most that I know about. In other words, I don’t have any throw-away competitive advantages to give you. I will say that it’s not too hard to find them, especially is you have SEO experience in your niche. They key IMHO is to know that they are out there, so that you can test without wasting your time. That is what I am offering here. No, I don’t mean to suggest that Google synonyms are “go” words. Synonyms are great for working with sets, finding overlaps, and testing pages against the current Google search index “corpus”, but in my experience Go words are rare and not simply threshold-triggering synonyms. When you find some you can test that fairly easily and see if you agree.

Now are “go words” hard-coded, filter triggers, or do they merely tip the scales of LSA-like algorithmic features? My experience is they are hard-coded, because a few very specific instances are just simply amazing to witness. However, I really can’t tell a badly tuned algorithmic dependency (a.k.a. “sensitivity”) from a filter or filter threshold setting… nobody but Google can tell you those details. My view is they are truly “necessary yet not sufficient” conditions for ranking at least in some cases. I would expect that as LSA etc. matures within Google, such things will go away. That will happen slowly.

It is refreshing to find a black/white “signal” like this in Google these days. Everything has become so graduated, when you find something with binary-like impact on the algo it is fun to exploit. When hunting, keep in mind that it really doesn’t matter if you find a set overlap threshold you can cross with 4 specific words, or a hard-coded trigger tripped by a single word: you are after the effect – put in, rank, take out, lose rank. Don’t get academic and miss the benefit.

Google says you don’t need a web site any more

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You don’t need a web site any more

These days, everybody needs SEO. Why? Because they need traffic, and the only traffic many business web sites get these days is the traffic that the search engines send to them. And of the search engines sending that traffic, Google sends the most by far. So the thinking is, if you want your web site to work for you, you need to get into Google and get those Google referrals. The businesses have tried that on their own and failed, so now they need a specialist. A “search engine optimizer” or SEO.

That is certainly one way to think. As a consultant providing SEO services to small businesses, I could whole heartedly agree. Hire me. It’ll solve your problems. In fact, everybody should hire me, and then everybody will have the #1 spot on Google, right?

Of course not.

But this sort of hyperbolic thinking can be enlightening. If everyone wants to appear first in Google for a search phrase that matches their target consumer audience (whatever it is, for-profit or not) then really all they seek is an *appearance* at the top of the Google search results (the SERP) for that search query. They don’t seek a web site, but an “ad” at the top of the Google results page. So why do they even have web sites? Conventional thinking is that the “ad” clicks through to a “page” that is on a web site. I honestly believe that the only reason the “sponsored listings” on Google look different from the indexed web pages is because it would be legally questionable for Google to do that right now. If Google could toss aside that constraint, the ads would look exactly like the rest of the web pages listed on the Google results page.
Exaggerating this line of thought further, *if* Google provided a big enough advertisement at the top of the search results, would that replace the need for a separate business web site? Hmm… some have suggested the web has evolved to the point where web pages are ads, and each page serves the business separate from the rest of a web site. Eventually some businesses would want to bring the traffic deep into their complex web sites, sure, but not all businesses. In fact, not *most* businesses. If you look at today’s web, the vast majority of business web sites are not the type that need deep user interaction. They need to extend an invitation to call, write, order, submit, sign up, comment, etc. Some singular action that is ‘the transaction”. And that might be provided by a large Google “ad” at the top of the SERP, if it was big enough and “HTML-y” enough.

Consider Pay Per Click contextual ads. They are placed at the top of the SERP, and induce a call to action. Limited in size to a few lines, they usually link to a web page somewhere because you can’t fit the whole sales pitch and order form into that little PPC ad. Due to the constraints of size, the call to action became “click thru to the rest of the story”. But how many of those businesses spending money every month on PPC ads would be fully served by a single web-page-sized interactive document behind the PPC ad? Hosted by Google? AJAX allows that to happen, doesn’t it? Urchin/Analytics? AdSense/AdWords tracking?

Today’s contextual advertising is expensive. Each click costs money, and there is a strong desire… NEED actually, for those referrals to “convert” to a sale or commerce activity. Some SEOs suggest that every “landing page” needs to be optimized for that singular “call to action” in order to increase “return on advertising spend” and “return on investment”. In other words, to make a profit after accounting for the costs of that web site and all those web pages. So if that is true, and those optimized landing pages result in sales, who needed a whole web site? They needed (and got) a single landing page that closed the deal. Hosted by Google.

BUT, those PPC fees (costs) were supposedly bid up on a market basis. So the costs should be tracking the…. costs, right? I mean, if the plan is to maximize ROI or ROAS, and a significant portion of the costs to be recovered came from producing the web sites and PPC campaigns (including handling the orders etc.) then the market should suggest that PPC bid prices level out right around where the costs are… minus the Google share. And if that were to happen, we competitive webmasters would need to reduce those costs in order to increase our profits (noting we can’t put any pressure on Google to reduce it’s share because, well, Google has a monopoly there). And Google, to increase it’s profits, needs to GROW outwards and consume more of the profits, by adding value… which is the same as reducing expenses on the client side. Are you with me?

So Google should host your landing page, and you may not need a web site at all.

Google has just announced (tomorrow morning, actually) they will provide web site building tools/services for small businesses. I have no further information yet, but the above scenario is interesting to me. What if Google extends the contextual ad business to handle the whole process, from ad serving in-context through conversion on a Google-hosted landing page? Those of you “in the biz” know what I’m talking about…the follow up on Writely, urchin, WHOIS, Toolbar, etc. The Grand Finale. Cyberdyne. Self awareness. Well, maybe not self awareness (yet).

Of course I don’t believe the above scenario, and I hope you don’t. but is should SCARE YOU. In the end, following this sort of “optimization” process, Google would simply assume *all* costs and become Amazon.com…. and you all would be “out of business” as they say. Of course my hyperbolic scenario completely ignores disruptive innovation that even I would be pursuing left and right if the scenario did try and play out. And we all know that Amazon has been around for years, and successful by almost all counts, and yet we still don’t buy everything from Amazon (yet). Why is that? is it possible that we might someday buy everything from Amazoogle? Think seriously about the theoretical consequences of this scenario, and you may realize why many SEOs (myself included) warn web masters very seriously about telling TheGoogle about your web sites and businesses (your stats, your secondary supporting domains, your conversion rates). Why do you share competitive data with a competitor?

Google-proof Javascript Redirect

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I think I have discovered the Holy Grail of SEO this time. A javascript redirect that Google can’t detect. Do you know what that means? It means you can put up almost 10,000 pages of keyword spam nonsense, interlink it on keyword anchor tags, and add this javascript redirect on every one of those pages back to your favorite landing page. Viola! 10,000 pages indexed in Google on your spam words, all sending visitors to your single optimized, money-making landing page! If you blanketed your niche market with pages covering every possible spamword, and each of those pages gets a mere 2 referrals from Google each day, that’s 20,000 visitors PER DAY to your sales page! If your page is anything like this one (and if not, you can copy it!) you can expect something like 30 or 40% of .1 per-cent conversions! At pennies profit per sale as an Amazon affiliate, that’s more than a few bucks per day profits, you see what I’m sayin’?!

If you act now, I’ll sell you this little gem for $47 but first let me tell you a long and drawn out story, show you many examples of people who say that it has worked for them (or will work really well if they buy it and use it!). And if you act TODAY, I’ll even send you last years MMF eBook FREE OF CHARGE!

Now if you don’t recognize the parody yet I can’t help you, but if you don’t believe this is based in TRUTH, the Google-proof javascript redirect is REAL. It’s a bit complicated for the newbie, but I guess it would have to be complicated if it to outsmarts the Ph.D.’s at Google. Anyway, it looks something exactly like this:

SCRIPT
redirTime = “100”;
redirURL = “http://www.homepage.tld/”;
function redirTimer() {
self.setTimeout(“self.location.href = redirURL;”,redirTime);
}
END SCRIPT

If you don’t understand that code, don’t worry. Even *I* didn’t understand it until I actually read it. And then I sat back in awe…javascript so elegant, so refined, even TheGoogle can’t detect it. Simple, efficient, no-server-technology-required cloaking. The SEO Holy Grail.

I’m off to see the Wizard. Ten thousand ten schmousand, I’m gonna put this baby to work!

Editor’s Addendum: Please don’t try this at home. This and most posts on this blog are not for newbies. In this case, for example, the javascript is a basic redirect – nothing fancy, not hidden at all. The only remarkable fact is that Google *doesn’t* detect it. Surely if you put tens of thousands of spam pages on your website, you will eventually suffer a penalty at best, and possibly a complete ban. Don’t do that, ok? The post is sarcastic, although admittedly recognizing the sarcasm may require more than a basic level of Internet savvy. That’s part of my point – on the Internet, be careful. Don’t believe everything you think.

Telegraph steals blogger content?

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Copyblogger is reporting that a Telegraph post attributed to telegraph writer Melissa Whitworth was actually copied exactly from the mediabistro blog, where it was published days ago. That’s wholesale copy of the entire first-person blogging, with no attribution, and beneath the byline of a telegraph reporter.

Why was it discovered so fast? She must have used one of those browser extentions that cut and paste full html, because the copied content included a live back link to copyblogger (!)

What might be the plausible denial? A hacked blog post? A policy of highlighting popular blog posts, and an error in attribution? Writer on vacation, and temp staff uploads wrong copy to under byline?

Latent Semantic Imaging (LSI)..3 years later

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Most readers know I loathe giving away free advice. That is just one way that I protect my clients. I often wonder where the beef is in many SEO blogs for that very reason. WHY talk about fight club, if you are a successful member? It doesn’t make sense to me.

What is Latent Semantic Imaging? The words on your pages and their interlinking (including anchor text) create a latent image of the content you are targeting. Talk about developer and fixer and temperatures and exposures and bulbs and timers suggests “darkroom”. Just as chemical “developer” turns an exposed film into a negative of an actual image, Google turns your talk about X and Y into an appearance in the SERPs on the topic of X+Y (if there is one). An exposed film has a “latent image” on it, which is revealed by developing. A web page can create a “latent image” of a topic, exposed by Google’s analysis of the content.
Now 3 and a half years after my close associates and clients heard me proclaiming the effectiveness of certain kinds of word analysis (which I called “latent semantic imaging” after the photographic concept of a latent image), webmasters and SEOs are discussing it and even gave it a new name.

And, the subject is concept density, it isn’t specific to Google, it’s based on word dependencies and LSA, and there’s no need to present synonyms or alternate spellings in the title, headers or body text. In fact, the less ‘bbq’ and its variants are used, the more important the word becomes. Rather than take ‘bbq’ and append words, take ‘bbq’ and find the word dependencies that bolster the concept of ‘bbq’.

That’s a snippet from “digitalghost” and he calls it “concept density” (Webmaster World doesn’t allow linking). He notes it is based in LSA (latent semantic analysis) which is great, but perhaps most importantly he and others note the difference between keyword stuffed content and latent semantic imaging:

Cut to the chase — I blended in many of these newly discovered themes, mixed them naturally into the page (some even became anchor text for internal links) and within a few days the url went to #6 from way down in the 30’s. Within a month it was #1. And given the realities of that market, it should always be #1 or #2, unless some other player enters the field.

That’s tedster (again no link, sorry – Webmaster World policy not mine!). He even states that he has known about this “ever since Google showed us the tilde operator” which is around late 2002-early 2003. See what I mean?

So why, competitive webmasters, is John talking about it now? What’s the angle? I am marveling, that’s all. When you see “how to get rich doing BLAH BLAH BLAH” it almost always means there is no more “mad money” to be made doing BLAH BLAH BLAH. The money in promotional books and make-money-fast schemes (MMFs) is EXCELLENT, but not “mad money”. So, when a method or technique stops earning mad money, and drops to the excellent level, it makes economic sense to sell the technique instead of using it. There are adjacent reasons as well… you want to be the first with an ebook, so you jump in a wee bit early. You also want to side-sell it, which is easiest if you have a first-mover advantage. You also can discredit the copycats, etc.

So it is interesting that now, in August of 2006, 3 1/2 years after I started using it, high-profile webmaster and seo people are now talking about a technique that has worked well in Google… until recently. GOTCHA. Yes, it has changed recently. Two months ago, Google started tuning the knobs on internal anchor text and semantic theming, or whatever you want to call it. Google also appears to have ramped up some internal human editing, and my test sites for latent semantic imaging show quite a bit of variability these days. No more “mad money”. Here come the MMFs?

In this case, latent semantic imaging is not dead by any stretch. But it is now more competitive than it was, and surely Google has a handle on much of it’s influence on the algorithms. Matt Cutts of Google has apparently chosen this area to begin his public SEO work. What does this mean for me and my clients? Nothing. I moved on over a year ago, out of skepticism that it could continue to be so easy. My lazy study of LSA (latent semantic analysis) 3 years ago told me it was computationally too difficult for real-timeuse, although it mightbe very useful as a tool in the Google algorithm. The only way I would be able to use it (if I were a Google search engineer) would be as described – as a latent imaging method. That is what led me to my research. But what we have been doing for these past 3 years has only exploited the lazy approach… certainly Google engineers have more time and talent for this stuff than I do. Surely after 3 years they will have learned to tune it.

It was simply not sustainable, so it was inevitabe that it would get “tuned”, and in my view inevitable that it would be so tuned improperly. To an honest SEO that’s par for the course… you use it for what it is worth, watch the search engine get a grip on it, and keep ahead of the curve. Tedster is a very well respected practitioner… and you can see he’s been “playing with” latent semantic imaging for years before admitting it now, and even now only because the cat appears to be out of the bag. C’mon folks, do you really think that after 3 years playing with the technique, he hasn’t learned more than he’s revealed?

New term? Concept? SEO technique? Nah. New attention, yes. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain…

Now that explains alot

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I just read an older post by incrediBill, that revealed he once programmed IBM 360 assembler. Wow. It’s clear now where all that anger comes from, and the hyberbolic distortions of justice and righteousness that pervade his blog.

Not only did I manage to survive my 360 assembler days without nearly as much personality damage, but while using early versions of WASM I actually *optimized* 360 assembler (not for search engines or footprint, but for clarity and portability). I credit those days with the incredible patience I now have for all-things-Internet. Compared to variable-free IBM 360 assembler (CONSTants make the world go round) this stuff is a walk in the park. Of course my assembler was academic and research work, and I am sure it was nothing compared to the work old Bill did when he changed the world back then.

I’m much younger than incrediBill, but yes, I coded punch cards for Fortran JCL runs and used computers before there were CRT terminals available to “average” science and engineering folks. Back then some guys had government contract credentials that gave them a free pass to the front of the card stack, but the rest of us learned to use less abrupt social engineering methods to get our stacks re-run promptly (and quietly… I bet that pissed off Bill back then, too). And when we couldn’t bribe the JCL technician, and here comes that patience thing again, we simply had to make damn sure our code was good.

How to be Web 2.0 Cool

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Once again I’m trying out some Web 2.0 applications, and once again I am struck by the style. A few observations:

  • I am going to have to extend my name. Two names are not enough in Web 2 land. Problem is, I only have two so I’llhave tomake up the rest. Something like John Brandon McAllister Andrews should do it. or John Peter Sniple-Smith Andrews maybe. I’ll have to work on it.
  • I have to personalize my testimonials. The bland, corporate ones from magazines and websites are no good anymore. I need ones from real people, hopefully people with 3 and 4 part names. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they come from, because that doesn’t have to be listed. They just have to sound impressive.
  • Remove the Dog: it’s no longer hip to tell people your work environment includes dogs, massage chairs, and a video game room. Now you need to tell them that either you don’t wear shoes, or you wear flip-flops or some high-end sandals. Oh, and Zen rooms and fountains are in, not video games.
  • Metro-sexual meet Web 2.0 : Urban is in, but not the black on black or sleather New York urban. No, we’re talking urban as in Austin or Portland urban. Urban with parks, bicycles, and useless but expensive desktop accoutrements that used to be limited to California and New Mexico mysticism. Most things that glow or gently cycle are ok (lava lamps, glow spheres, dipping birds) while flashing, flickering, or vibrating things are out. Dress? Super casual, but branded super casual, of course. Now which expensive hair gel can I get to give my hair that perfect, no-hair-gel look?
  • I need to update my style sheet, again. In fact, maybe I’ll update it every week. That seems to be the trend. Stale is the new orange, or something like that.
  • Be sure to describe yourself and your team on your website, using ego words like talented and brilliant. How else would anyone know?
  • Offer business advice. No, it doesn’t matter if you’ve only been in business for a year or so, or if you have one-big-hit and nothing else to suggest you know what you are doing. Nobody cares about that. Just state something like “I have vast consulting experience” and let the buyer beware. After all, you said you only were doing this for 2 years, so if they thought “vast consulting experience” was more than you got during your two years on one or twoprojects, it’s their stupidity, right?
  • Lead with your Designer. Web 1 was the age of the programmer. Designers were stupid. They couldn’t code, and they couldn’t manage embedded templates even. Variables? What are variables? Ah, but with Web 2.0, the designer is everything. Lead, CEO, CTO, you name it. And designers hire designers so you can be sure the architect has a design background, and so does the accountant. Tell the client this is all good. In fact, say it’s cool. Make up something about “getting it”, and show some large icons with transparent gradients. Oh, and be sure to call your simplified pages sophisticated. Don’t worry about the contradiction. They won’t call you on it, because they don’t want to be called stupid.
  • Lose the Concern, ok? I need to change my Privacy Policy. No longer do you state how strong your protections are, or how serious you are about customer privacy. Nowadays you simply say it is what it is, and if you want to participate, accept it. I need to cultivate that air of arrogance, that I don’t give a crap if you don’t like it swagger, and project it from my policy page. That is so much easier than actually trying, right? I mean, if I can simply tell them hey, if you put your data here, it might not be safe and let them assume responsibility. Duh. So obvious.

Now back to those apps…

AOL wants to dig up the yard looking for Gold

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Out of the “unbelievable” department comes a report that AOL (the company that accidentally-on-purpose released all that private search data) plans to bulldoze the yard of some folks in Massachusettes, looking for gold and platinum bars that an AOL spammer may have buried there. What??

Yes, they prosecuted one of the Spam Kings for spamming, and the spammer didn’t show up in court. So AOL won by default, and was awarded $12 million in damages. Let’s not forget this is Time Warner AOL… the big company that owns all those office buildings, magazines, newspapers, etc. You know the one. The people who mail dozens of CDs to people (expensive and environmentally unfriendly junk mail). Yeah, they sued someone for spamming, and got $12 million, if they can collect it.

Anyway they want their money, and are willing to dig for it. Just like they don’t want to let you cancel your account.

See what I mean? Google’s lovin’ the nearby’s

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On Monday morning we saw signals of Google’s knobs turned too high on nearby word associations. I suggested that you :

Go ahead and talk about keyword one and keyword two today and tomorrow. The anchor text doesn’t matter as much as the distance to the nearest neighbors today.

Today the SERPs are all full of mashup winners… like Portishead at the top of Christine Dolce search. Check the cache and you see

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: dolce

The top spot for Chrstine Dolce is the portishead myspace page. Many, many MySpacers list Christine Dolce as a friend, and Portishead as a fave. As does Christine Dolce herself. Does that justify a top rank? Really, Google. Synonyms are so 2004.

Where was that bit about people linking to you having no effect on your rankings….

Google serving porn ads?

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Try it for yourself. Put this adsense pub-id onto a porn page, and damned if you don’t get racy porn banner ads from Google. The full Google AdSense script is :


Thanks to my favorite adult webmaster incrediBill for the tip.

PS: Hey Google: Why do you let scrapers put AdSense ads onto illegal copies of websites? It just messes everybody up, you know?

Ayyye, me fickle mistress The Google

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When clients and associates talk about SEO they sounds so deterministic, causal, and definitive. They often make statements like “much of the SEO advice on the web is untrue” and “very few SEOs realy know what they are talking about”. It’s easy to get defensive but there is no reason to: the client’s are venting. They need SEO, don’t understandit, and are fearfulof engaging an SEO. That’s understandable.

It’s also understandable that they don’t “get it”. SEO is about committing a rather advanced set of attention resources to a rather fickle beast: the search engine. If there were a hard-fast set of SEO rules, don’t you think those web-based SEOs would have gotten their lists of do’s and don’ts corrected by now?

The fallacy is in the concept of SEO advice on public web pages. That simply cannot work. Andif you think through the question “How else can an SEO establish some thought leadership in the minds of potential clients, except to post athoritative-sounding SEO advice on the web?”, you will probably reach the same conclusion pro-war industrialists have reached. You simply need to feed the people those things which you are fairly certain they will believe, and avoid the things that make you (and war) look bad. For an SEO looking to market his firm to clients, give them what they want to read, and don’t give them anything to question.

So back to that fickle mistress, TheGoogle. Today is Monday. A new week has begun. And my SEO team has been continuously watching the search space through the weekend, and into this glorious Monday morning. Had they written”SEO tips” last week, they’d be updating them today. Instead, we simly adjust our sites (and our client sites) in the direction that matches Google’s mood, and keep going. It’s SEO. It works.

So why don’t I tell the world what works this Monday morning? Duh. Because this is a competitive field, and we are competing. But I will simply say this: take a close look at the SERPs and see what the mood is for yourself. Are your sites prepared to adust and maintain rank? Do you have test sites (sensors) tuned to the various signals such that you can see them changing? Do those sensors of yours autocalibrate, or do you have to re-calibrate them manually? How long will that take?

Go ahead and talk about keyword one and keyword two today and tomorrow. The anchor text doesn’t matter as much as the distance to the nearest neighbors today. Go ahead, try it for yourself. I’m not worried abut the competition, because it will be different tomorrow. This sort of mood is self-destructive, so it won’t last. I can’t say they have a switch installed these days, but it sure seems that way. Bi-Polar Google? Maybe TheGoogle forgot to take her meds the past few days. Or maybe there’s a test underway. Whatever. That’s SEO. Rank today; rank tomorrow.

WordPress Sandbox: finally?

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The thing about CSS is, you start with plain content and style it until you’re happy. But humans don’t do that. They start with styled content, and modify the style until they are happy. So the perfect solution should be a basic style that can be infinitley modified, one little bit of CSS at a time. That would require all of the elements and content to be labeled so they could be styled after-the-fact. No easy task.

As a WordPress user since way back, that has been the Holy Grail of WordPress land. WordPress is a content management system; a container into which you put your content. As such, it started with a really simple style, which wasn’t easily modified. You needed to be a WordPress CSS person to modify your style the way you visually desired.

Using styles others had modified was always a hassle for me. Easy ones were everywhere (boring) and hard ones were a hassle. Often I wished WordPress would just give me content I could style from scratch, or else give me a decent and unique style “theme” i could adopt. And so on. I lamented over the lack of reasonable styling options with Version 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2, 1.2, and finally 2.0.

Along the way I tried Kubrick, the meta theme like systems, and the ajaxy mess you see here (terrible for SEO, if that wasn’t obvious).

So now we get Sandbox, which promises to reduce the content back to CSS-stylable content as it should be. It looks very promising from here. Oh, and it has some new thing called hAtom which (if I read this correctly) marks up the page content to make it directly syndicatable – that is, an RSS/Atom reader can parse it right off the page (no need for a feed). Wow. Now if that doesn’t mess with the search engines, nothing does. I’ll take the hAtom with an expectation that it’ll be a year or so before such a thing becomes manageable.

I’ll try out the sandbox theme as soon as it matures a few weeks.

MSN Search is what it is…. for now.

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Note to self: don’t bother with further research into MSN search. It is what it is.

That’s the competitive intel decision after reading this blog. The guy started there in April, and you know the only way Microsoft could hire this guy from technorati was by presenting opportunity. That means RESOURCES, of the financial and brainiac kind. What can you get done with some startup funds and some smart people – technorati. What can you get done with a committed behemoth like MS, given an opportunity to work there with a budget to hire and resources to innovate? Almost anything. They’ve got had tons of cash.

Some of the tips we get from the exit post on the personal blog:

I joined Microsoft in April excited to change the world and build an Internet-scale feed platform to power the experience of Microsoft’s hundreds of millions of users as well as opening up the feed experience to outside developers to leverage in their own applications. The opportunity presented to me was extremely unique and a way to change how the world interacts with syndication technologies such as RSS, RDF, and Atom.

See? Opportunity to steer the Microsoft machine at syndication. Wow. I’d take that job, too lol.

It sounds like it got off to a convincing start:

The Windows Live initiative got off to a huge start, with lots of new services created and an “invest to win” strategy in the new division.

but then, oh then what happened?

The stock plummeted on the announcement Microsoft did not have its costs under control. Microsoft’s market cap lost close to $59 billion in the six weeks after I joined

and with that plunge went… innovation?

What do you do when the market responds to your 6 month-old online services strategy by reducing your valuation by 1.5 Yahoos? Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well.

or at least short-term funding. It sure sounds like M$ sent out an all-hands-on-deck call for the next version of the stalwart enterprise apps, perhaps as a conservative thrust at regaining Wall Street (and big business) confidence in the Microsoft Machine:

I was able to borrow resources here and there, but there was no team being built around the platform in the foreseeable future. I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn’t want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship.

Yep. Say goodbye to innovation at M$ until Vista and the Enterpri$e Apps ship. What does that mean for Search? Duh. It is what it is. Label it Live! and embed it into the desktop, the browser, the Office Suite, etc… and that’s plenty enough work for now. So what does that mean, no serious changes until 2 years from now? That’s my guess. Hitting the nail on the head is this part:

It’s easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.

Old money will like the news; new money will just say “same old Microsoft”.

Wanted: Craig’s List Manipulators

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WANTED: Junior level Scammers and Spammers as apprentice Craig’s List Manipulators

Background: Craig’s List is a community classifieds web site with city-specific sections for most major United States cities. Within each city are sections for free classified ads in everything from real estate to computer jobs to pet adoption. Craig’s List has replaced the local classified newspaper for many local markets. Ads can be placed via a simple web form, and posted to Craig’s List within minutes by even the least sophisticated web users. The Craig’s List community is self-policing, with every reader able to “flag” ads as inappropriate. If enough users “flag” an ad it is removed by Craig’s List staff. Our testing has shown that Craig’s List classified ads work well in certain markets, for certain products and services. They work especially well in markets where there is little relevant competition.

Opportunity: We have clients in many market sectors signed on for ad placement on Craig’s List. We have determined that it takes but 21 sincere Craig’s List Manipulators to control a category within the typical US city on Craig’s List. Twenty one people collaboratively “flagging” competitor ads can effectively control a category, keeping the desired ads prominent while removing any competitive threat. We have several openings for Craig’s List Manipulators in several cities right now.

Position description: This is a collaborative position. You should have some knowledge of proxies if you want to work multiple cities, but any public access point will work for your local market. You do not need to be clever nor ingenious – you simply need to know how to recognize a partner ad, and flag everything else. SEO skills are unnecessary. This is an excellent opportunity for the stay at home mom or disgruntled small business owner with too much free time on his hands. Can’t get business? Mess it up for everyone else on Craig’s List and, in turn, our collaborative network of Craig’s List Manipulators will promote YOUR AD and KILL YOUR COMPETITION in the Craig’s List Classifieds system.This really works, and might be your best opportunity for success on Craig’s List.

Think about it: you’re either WITH US, or WE’RE AGAINST YOU. How long will your ad survive on Craig’s List once we move our manipulators into your market? Our research shows NOT LONG, because all we need are a couple of dozen lazy, low-quality product and service providers who can’t get customers the legitimate way, to join our collaborative network of CL Manipulators and SPAM! your ad is GONE faster than you can say “but…but….but…”

Apply today, as there is virtually no ceiling to this opportunity for participants, and a very, very strong incentive for every Craig’s List advertiser to join before they get shut out of their local market niche. Leave a comment with your qualifications and favorite Craig’s List market experience.

The VA: Leading the Way in IT

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A few years ago someone handed me a document describing the Department of Veteran’s Affairs IT organization. It was an impressive print from a nicely-done PDF file. It would have surely been all glossy if it had been one of the hard copy editions I imagined were passed around the higher circles of Washington.

I was the IT Director, and had been functioning as an intrapreneur for a few years getting the organization and it’s collaborators onto a long term vision for IT. This particular person had more than a few times erected fences to IT progress, and in this case was suggesting that the VA was a model of excellence. I took the report home.

Virtually everything about it rubbed me the wrong way. Huge expenditures, serious contracts with the major names (which cost millions in overhead) and very little “innovation around the edge” if any at all. A centralized system of command and control. The kind of system that forces just about everybody to quietly break the rules in order to meet their goals and satisfy their supervisors. The very sort of inrastructure that had enabled me to innovate in the first place — I often felt I got support from collaborators solely because they had been through combat with their own centralized IT and datacomm people, not the least of which was the VA itself.

So now when I read about yet another serious security breech at the VA, with 28,000 or so more personal records exposed (following the 28 million or so social security and medical records exposed last time?) I am laughing. I recalled giving a talk to researchers on local security, and highlighted how researchers went without firewalls because the central command wouldn’t approve the expenditure until the “next round of budgets”. Oh, and I also highlighted how the network manager of those researchers stated publicly in an IT magazine interview that he went without firewalls because he didn’t have the budget for them. That was the model, eh?

The first rule of fight club is…. oh forget it. Some people are only invited to fight club so that someone else has a better chance of winning without getting hurt. “Shame and Blame” environments and patriarchal management styles get you this sort of performance:

The bureaucratic infighting between Michael McLendon, deputy assistant secretary for policy, and Dennis Duffy, acting assistant secretary for policy, planning and preparedness within the VA’s Office of Policy, Planning and Preparedness, contributed to the 13-day delay in notifying senior department leaders of the theft of personal information on more than 26 million individuals

They do produce nice looking documents, though.

AOL Search data available for research: 1.9 million queries

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AOL released 1.9 million queries, from 650,000 AOL subscribers 10 days ago on an AOL research web page. Visitors could download the searches and “play with it”. AOL pulled the data today, admitting it was a privacy violation and something it never should have done.

Also according to the AP report,

The data file included information on what search terms were used, when the search was conducted and whether the user clicked on any of the results. All told, the file had information on 19 million queries from 658,086 subscribers from March 1 to May 31. The data only included searches conducted in the United States using AOL’s proprietary software, which until last week was available only to paying subscribers. Searches made over the free AOL.com portal were not disclosed.

I wonder why I missed this report on the various search web sites I read. Huh. Oh well. I would have downloaded the fle for sure.

On your Mark, Get Set, Falsify WHOIS!

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I have a one hour seminar called “On Your Mark!, Get Set! Falsify WHOIS! where I discuss the public WHOIS database, and how competitive webmasters might best approach that issue. I submitted that talk for the New York PHP Conference this past summer, but my schedule didn’t allow me to follow through. Maybe I will post it here as an article or eBook someday.

Anyway I came across an older post on Matt Cutt’s blog where he suggests web masters report missing or apparently false WHOIS data to the “authorities”. I’ve been around the SEO world for a few days, so I am quite clear on the serious conflict of interest that keeps Matt from sleeping peacefully at night. I recognize, though, that not everyone has had the opportunity to learn that about Matt.

So when Gloria posted her thoughts on merchants holding back their personally identifying information at the end of the comments on that thread, I had to respond. We can’t permit such an important topic to be closed by a heartfelt yet uninformed opinion. Poor Gloria has probably learned herself by now, but for the sake of historical clarify, I added my two cents.

Dear Gloria,

1. WHOIS data is provided to the entire world, via a widely distributed database, with no benefit provided back to the listed web master. Customer data provided via an order form on one web site is not so publicly distributed, and the information was traded to enable a transaction benefiting the consumer. In some states, that web master is also bound by law and by contract to reasonably protect the consumer’s information.

2. Customers are safe, except perhaps from the web site owner and the credit card company. A web site owner with a public WHOIS contact is not safe from any number of spammers and scam artists working the Internet, or political whackos, or religious zealots, or any other person even though the webmaster has never entered into any transaction with them. There is a very big difference.

3. I agree with those customers of yours who are afraid to use online ordering systems. However, I am often also afraid to drive on the New Jersey Turnpike during business hours – it is proven to be unsafe. Yet, in our practical world, many shoppers are probably better off trusting most apparently legitimate web site owners, and I simply have to be as careful as I can be when driving the turnpike if I want to function in this society. It is not a perfect world.

4. The customers who do what you describe – enter into private transactions with anonymous vendors – are making an error. That has nothing to do with the anonymous merchant. Just as a merchant can elect to sell goods above the suggested retail price (and some consumers will buy), a merchant can chose to operate anonymously. The drug dealer on the corner is an example of such an anonymous operator in the physical world. So is the flea market seller in many cases. People do buy from anonymous sources, on line and off line.

I applaud your consideration of this issue of anonymous WHOIS data, but I found virtually all of your thought points to be incorrect. I view that as the primary problem we have today: few web masters support a fully pubic and accurate WHOIS requirement unless they have a commercial incentive to do so (like Google’s engineers) or they are ignorant of the facts. n addition, very few consumers seem to understand their own responsibility for selecting reliable vendors, especially when they shop for price. The best work we can do is educate web masters and consumers.

Fortunately, Matt Cutts provides an opportunity to feedback such information on his blog. Otherwise, his commercial Google perspective would be the only perspective.

SEO Cannibals for the New Age

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One of the more interesting aspects of my work is competitive intelligence. Who is competing in the market, using what tactics, and with what success? When limited to online activities, CI shows you what they *have been* doing, not what they may be doing now. However, as I learned quite well during my 10 years working with neuropsychologists, past behavior is indicative of future performance when it comes to humans. People will do what they’ve done before.

So when I see an SEO in his late forties with a new yacht, I am desperate to examine his web properties and PR image. Where did he find his success, yes, but more importantly is his success built upon a foundation of outdated websites and a circa 2001 online business model? or even better, *one* outdated website in one vertical?

What are the odds that a comfortable #1 spot holder with a family of teenagers and a world-capable yacht will rise to a modern day SEO challenge to his top spots?

One argument is he has the funds to kick into gear and hire the best staff to retain that top spot in the face of a threat. True. But that human behavior thing suggests that he did not hire the best and brightest on the way up. In fact, it appears he kept things very close to his chest (including profits). Odds are very strng that he would do as he has done before, having been reinforced for the behavior with a yacht.

Another argument is that he will sell his holdings rather than fight, even if he doesn’t act until he is #3 and #4 in the SERPs having lost the top placement to my challenge. I accept that possibility, but it has nothing to do with me as competing SEO. All that does is further distract him from meeting the competitive challenge, or further underline this as an opportunity for me. A perfectly ripe pear hanging from a tree branch must be picked or it will rot. Someone has to eat it.

Modern day SEO can overcome many current top placeholders in the SERPs. I have had clients approach me after they watched their business lose the top spots to a newcomer over more than a year’s time. What were they doing for that year? You got it: watching their properties drop from the #1 spots, and watching the new guy get energized with his success as he rose to the top. What they see now is a new guy at the top, but they don’t see what he is doing now. What he did before is indicative of what he will continue to do – challenge the incumbants, compete, and dominate. What will they do now, after watching themselves get overrun for a year?

It’s not a pretty picture. I encourage them to hire some quality SEO talent and get out of the way as much as possible.

I wrote this post because I have always viewed SEO as a form of competitive webmastering, while many webmasters consider SEO as a set of tricks to rank in search engines. Webmasters don’t need to hire SEOs. Business owners should hire SEOs to out perform other webmasters.

Externalizing Piracy via iPod: Music Industry slower than Auto Industry?

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Hard to believe any industry could be worse at adopting innovation than the US auto industry. But, as usual, the RIAA member companies surpirse us once again.

Ford and GM are externalizing the costs of changing the music industry, by pausing adoption of sattellite radio and moving forward with iPod integration. You, the pirate consumer, can work out the details of paying royalties for every “performance” you host in your car. The car makers will simply assume a wee-bit of probably insignificant liability for “enabling” you to do that via an iPod jack. At $160 for a connector, it seems there’s enough profit to make it work.

MAC notebook wi-fi hack

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Yes, it’s “Hack a Mac in 60 seconds” and “Macbook easily hacked” and all about the Mac being susceptible to a remote wireless hack that gives the hacker complete access to the local machine.

Is it true? Well, not really. The hack attacks a device driver that is used by some companies wireless cards, and some Mac’s use those cards. Thus, some Macs are vulnerable. As are any PCs using vulnerable drivers. I guess it’s more fashionable to mention “Mac” than “device driver”.

This PR nightmare for Apple comes from it’s smugness – or rather the smugness of the “switch” commercials. The security researcher who deliberately tied the Mac to this security exploit stated that he did so because he was annoyed by the people in the Mac commercials. They seemed too smug about security. Hah. Smugness leads to PR nightmare. Lesson learned?

I didn’t go to Black Hat or DEFCon this year. It’s too damn hot in Vegas, and too darn nice here on the coast.

The video is here. The smugness is evident here. The most factual technical article I found in today’s coverage is here.

Update: I find blogging interesting because it encourages authors to publish before analyzing their thoughts, and sometimes that can be very revealing.  If these IT professionals are afraid of Black Hat Briefings, they should take a look at DEFCon. Oh, and shall we say “Mission Accomplished” for raising awareness of security issues?

Too Cool for Web Too

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There is no room for cynics in Web2.0

I was in a board room at the start of the first dot com boom, watching Price Waterhouse Coopers put on a Web1.0 face with a few ragged-headed , brash, linguistically-challenged yoots that “got” the Internet. The truth I determined during that meeting, is that the only thing they “had” over us was vast time-invested-experience *designing* web interfaces. They had orders of magnitude more experience than we did in Photoshop and HotDogPro. They knew HTML codes and javascript far beyond our levels. I figured they had done “home pages” day and night for months, while our staff had merely coded the things we actually needed. Our stuff worked but needed polish. There stuff was polished, but most of it didn’t really do much for anyone. Seriously, when it came to dancing bears and shoveling construction workers, these kids could code. Can you guess which the board thought was “better”?

Gotcha. The board sided with me. BUT, that was mostly because they were too skittish for the Internet itself. I got the impression they liked the ideas presented, but were cautious of controlling it like they were used to controlling just about everything else about their industry.

Enter Web2.0. I just watched a brief video of 2 guys in a Van touring “the valley” to promote their web site. Knowing the source of the video, I have to believe the poor quality of the video/audio was planned. But the words of the “two guys” brought me back to the boardroom. You know, the commercial about the board meeting where the stuffed suits glaze over during the presentation, but go wild when the kid says “oh, and we have a website“? Same deal. These two guys have a website. It’s a social web app (surprise surprise). It has cool features, like a calendar. Yup. And messaging. And stuff. And a van. Did we mention the van? Kewl.

There is no room for cynics in Web2.0. They just get in the way. Rock on doods.

Disclaimer: I am not old, I am a mere 43 years old. I spent a ton of years in grad school, so I am even less mature than my years suggest. But given that much of my generation has failed to take a leadership poisiton in anything, I find myself either too old for the 30 somethings, or too young for the ranks of the aging patriarchal defenders of our glorious military-industrial economy. I think it’s silly to pretend to be young, so I’ll be honest and not-play-young, which seems to make me look old. To me, California “Valley Girls” are from San Fernando Valley, not BlogHer. The cool Volkswagon vans are the Westfalia Eurovans, not the 1960’s “mini Buses”. Yeah, that’s me in the middle. Oh, and don’t call me “dude”.

Visualize the AdSense Profits…

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Over at MightyHitter we see how Google’s predictive advertising causes Chinese language ads to show up on (his?)  English language blog. I am willing to bet that Chinese character ads perform better than English character ads on an English website with a Chinese audience. Go Google.

That Google is serving ads based on the context of the pages that link to you is not news (ever hear of “relevant” inbound links?). It’s a well known competitive technique — spam your enemy’s site with inbound links from inappropriate content sites to stir the stew. But the fact that Chinese character ads are “invisible” to non-Chinese readers is interesting. I repeat… the ads are invisible. Niiiiiiiiiice! We’ve finally found a way to serve ads on pages that do not distract our audience! Oh, and the spammers could fill your leaderboards with ads that nobody can read. Hmmmmm…

Top Eight AdSense Mistakes Webmasters Make

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I just read one of the many “Top Ten” lists telling people how to make money with AdSense, and how to avoid getting banned by Google. I was inspired to make my own “Top Eight AdSense Mistakes Webmasters Make”.

1. Don’t do anything that won’t make Google richer.

Google is greedy. It’s all about the revenue, and that revenue comes from your web site visitors. So if you want to remain in the good graces of the Almighty Google, do everything in your power to send your traffic over to the Google advertisers a.s.a.p. You can hide the Google ads inside your content, making them look just like real links. You can lower the quality of the content on your page so there is no reason to stay on your site, and offer Google ads right in the middle were they become the only thing worth clicking. No matter how you do it, be sure and send all of your QUALITY traffic to Google.

2. Don’t do anything to remind your visitors that they are being monetized.

So don’t talk about the ads, don’t suggest people click on them, and if you couldn’t successfully bury them in your content (see the above item) then at least avoid talking about click thru rates or ad revenue. Google wants all that stuff kept secret. Like the brain surgeon that drives a volkswagon while he saves up for his early retirement to the French Riviera, best not to remind people someone’s making gobs of money off of them.

3. Don’t violate the Google TOS

That’s the “Terms of Service”. The Google Contract. The Final Arbiter of AdSense Success. The Source of The Ban. Yes, the Google TOS is your bible for success with AdSense, so follow it exactly. Don’t do anythng that violates it. Oh, and since it is a living document that can be changed at any time, be sure to read it every morning and again every afternoon. And, since it refers to another document called the “Google Guidelines” you need to keep up on that one, too. Don’t do anything against the Google guidelines. Oh, and since that guideline itself may be adjusted by Google at any time, be sure to read it every few hours as well.

4. Don’t Talk about Fight Club

The First Rule of Fight Club is… yeah you got it. Don’t tell anyone about your AdSense earnings. Google wants that secret, ok? I suppose legal proceedings like subpoenas would be exceptions to the rule, but I am not sure. Since you risk complete and total financial shutdown with no questions asked and no opportunity for rebuttal every time you violate one of the Google Rules, you should probably just refuse to comply with such things until your lawyer can chat with Google. That might take a while to set up, so I recommend every AdSense pubisher have a safe house ready just in case. A secret room in grandma’s house would be perfect, as long as it has an active Internet connection so you can check your stats. Nobody will find you there so you will be safe from outstanding warrants until you hear back from Google.

5. Avoid Excessive keyword Stuffing

Oh sure keyword stuff much, much more than you would on a regular page meant for humans, but don’t over do it. Remember, Google wants money, so the more search engine referral traffic you can get to a dead-end web page with minimal content and tons of AdSense ads, the better. Google feeds on profits and we all know that a big, fat, satiated Google is much nicer than a lean, hungry Google monster. You get SE traffic by ranking in the SERPs. And you rank in the SERPs by keyword stuffing, plain and simple. (Warning: this only applies to pages heavily laced with AdSense ads. If you don’t expect to place AdSense ads allover your site, do NOT keyword stuff. Your page will get dropped from the SERPs. I repeat: Only get keyword spammy with made for AdSense pages. Everybody else buy AdWords).

6. Don’t Rat out AdSense Publishers

This one is not hard fact, but it sure seems wise given the evidence I have seen. Never, ever rat on a publisher who monetizes with AdSense. On a related note, it’s seems to be “SEO Best Practice” these days to rat out everyone above you in the SERPs by reporting them to Google for even the most minor quality issues (see the item above about the Quality Guidelines that can change at any time… a great source of grey-area material to report as spam). So rat on everyone who ranks, *except* avoid the MFA sites because, well, Google likes money and if you’re really looking to get a share of that AdSense kitty, don’t rock the boat, right?

7. Don’t Bank on Your AdSense Bank

This is a big one, and the subject of more than one “SEO Secret“. You see those “earnings” in your AdSense report page? Well, tecnically they are not yours yet. They won’t be until a few days after you physically deposit the Google check in your bank accunt, and it clears. That’s at last 30-45 days from now, depending on your situation. Oh, and with all of the click fraud and related lawsuits, it might not stay yours. Can it be taken back? Sure it can. Unlike the RIAA which looks for a few grand from each person they target, Google gets rich taking nickels and dimes away from individual people, one coin at a time. It’s covered in hthe TOS as well. My suggestion? Multiple layers of corporations, some of them offshore, with a few rotated out via backruptcy and dissolution every 6 months or so. Better safe than sorry.

8. The Legs Feed The Wolf, Gentleman

Or something like that.If you have a site that earns something like $4 per day with AdSense, don’t try too hard to boost that. The Legs Feed The Wolf, and the little guys are making the Big Boys rich. As a LittleBoy, you represent a steady stream of revenue for the BigBoys as they skim their share off the advertising revenues. How many incentives are there to impose “Smart Pricing” on your site so you get peanuts for showing ads? Plenty. Somebody has to get the low-paying ads. How many incentives are there to actually hand you a lion’s share of those “earnings”? I can’t think of any. So be happy with your pennies and shut up, ok? You can make another 2,000 of those sites and make serious coin, right? That’s $8000.00 per day, for a mere 2000 times your hosting costs. Oh sure that sounds like a break even (at $4 per month hosting costs) but you can find a way to trim that. I know you can. And so does Google.

Modern Day SEO: Running Routes from USA Track & Field Association

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I think the US Track and Field Association have executed an excellent “modern day SEO” opportunity on their web site at USATF.org. As many of you engage is “SEO” for your web sites, and we touch upon the numerous aspects of Competitive Webmastering and some of the opportunities for your particular web sites, it is probably clear to you that SEO is an open-ended opportunity. You can’t do it all. You need to select something and execute, while supporting it with the basics of good structure, copy, and seo tactic. What is SEO? Well, we often marvel at the better question: What is NOT seo?

If you have heard me go on about “the conversation” and “two way communications with users” and “link magnets” and “link baiting” and the need for “semantically relevant back links” you may appreciate seeing a live example that seems to hit a high note, affordably.

running route mapWho is the USA Track and Field Association? The USATF might not be very high profile among local joggers unless something big happens in Track and Field. Yet they desire to reach all runners, not just members of their organization. How else can they grow their organization? Just as Nike wants to reach potential consumers in order to sell running shoes, USATF wants to reach the morning joggers as well as the weekend warrior marathoners and the semi-pro marathoners. How can they do that? How can they raise the profile of their web site? Yes – conversation, user engagement, link baiting…. the same modern day SEO factors we talk about in strategy meetings.

So what would make a good link magnet for track and field for the average American jogger? What might go viral among road runners? How about an interactive community of runners and joggers who share their local route maps via Google Maps on the USATF.org web site?

Check out http://www.usatf.org/routes/. Users submit routes of their favorite runs. Google maps provides a route map, complete with links to satellite maps and driving directions to the starting points. Comments and “ratings” are there for all to use and read. I created one in a few minutes at http://www.usatf.org/routes/view.asp?rID=56413 and while it ain’t perfect, it works very simply and I got that route in there with a minimal of fuss. No length sign up, no personal details, and it’s in. Of course I went to see it in the database, and by searching for Bellingham Washington, and found all of the routes my neighbors had entered. By reading the comments I feel community with my neighbors. This add-on to the USATF.org web site fosters a real sense of community, and a strong desire to back link and share, among people who otherwise may never have had any exposure to USA Track and Field Association.

Who did USATF attract with this? A very strong market demographic. The same one that Nike and RunningShoes.com want to attract. And that translates into commercial opportunities for USATF, which can generate operating funds for the “.org” portion of USATF. Got 20,000 road runners visiting your site and sharing route maps? I bet RunningShoes.com would take your call about direct advertising.

What did it take to implement the Google Maps feature? With a rating system and user feedback system? It may surprise you just how little this cost to develop. Again, it isn’t perfect, but it isn’t intended to be. USTAF is not in the mapping business. They are not in the interactive route publishing business. They are looking to engage a community of road-running consumers passionate about running, to get them to link to the domain, talk about it with their friends, and become aware of a non-profit organization that is supporting their passion as well as other missions (see http://www.usatf.org/about/). They currently have 176,000 back links to their web site and 55,524 routes entered by users. Very nice.

ENGAGE users from the target demographic. GIVE them something they can own. SPONSOR something valuable to them as a COMMUNITY. Think about it.