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?