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?

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 :

<script type="text/javascript"> <!-- google_ad_client = "pub-5152131058373623"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90; google_ad_format = "728x90_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel =""; google_color_border = "A8DDA0"; google_color_bg = "EBFFED"; google_color_link = "0000CC"; google_color_url = "008000"; google_color_text = "6F6F6F"; //--> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> </script>

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?

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…

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.

Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) concern themselves with monetization. Monetization can include AdSense, but usually the SEO is not too concerned with AdSense because AdSense pays so little. However, once the webmaster is dedicated to monetizing with AdSense, a whole genre of SEO kicks into gear. A Made For AdSense (MFA) site is a very unique beast, and can be quite profitable. Google even gives training classes for optimizing sites for AdSense. One of the popular MFA topics these days is free ringtones.

I’m pretty tired of seeing so many otherwise intelligent people say that if you want to SEO get a standard blog platform and write good titles, use keywords, etc. At least one high-profile failed ex-SEO even tells bloggers they don’t need SEO (and then tells them to do all that SEO stuff on their blogs).

I’m not one to give away free advice when that advice provides a competitive advantage. That is dumb, and if you think anyone is doing that you just don’t see the other angle from which they are approaching the issue (raising their own profile because their tactics no longer work and they need business, or seeking clients because they like to do client work more than they like to do SEO, or priming the market for a tool that makes it easy to do an otherwise unprofitable task, or perhaps misleading the masses to preserve a competitive edge, etc). I especially don’t give away good advice to people I don’t respect.

That said I will say this: Google knows you’re a blogger.

If that doesn’t bother you, go ahead and continue relying on your blogging platform to get you rank. Go ahead building sites that are exactly the same as everyone else’s, and expecting to rank above them (huh?) It’ a content game… oh, wait a sec, it’s a popularity game, no… it’s a search-engine-friendly-platform game, or is it… no, wait… yeah. That’s right. Blogging is all about ego and popularity, and Google knows that. Google is playing that game. Google knows you’re a blog because it is trivial to see a blog when compared to a “regular” web site.

Agan, if that doesn’t worry you, you are not an SEO and you are not competitive. That’s ok, because if you are making money off of bloggers who don’t get it, you want that to be the case. If they “got it”, they wouldn’t follow you, would they? Remember that prior point about misleading the masses…

Go ahead, search for something. Look for the blogs. Look hard, and you too, will see the pattern. Search something else…look for the blogs. Uh huh. See?

Now if you run dozens of test sites across the major CMS platforms (like I do) and even more blogs and “regular websites” and watch them in the Google and Yahoo! SERPs, you would have known this already. But would you have done anything about it? Not if you’re a blogger. For bloggers, it’s all about the blog, and ME, and MY FRIENDS, and MY TRAFFIC.

Take a look at that blog traffic. Does it convert for anything except satisfying your ego and causing clicks on AdSense? Not really. It is so-calld “long tail” stuff that converts for the low-value opportunities in contextual advertising and affiliate sales. It is *not* the traffic that converts for brick and mortar retail products and high-ticket items. Search Google for “new BMW” or “BMW seat covers” or “BMW accessories” and you don’t see blogs. Some people say that’s because those searches are competitive and use real hard-core seo that is “spammy”. Bah. Look at them and you’ll see that’s not true. Work in that niche and you’ll see it’s not so competitive. Google has it under control. Those are profitable commercial searches. Bloggers don’t get those.

Can you get around the controls? Sure. Blog incessantly on popular gadgets or incessantly and in-depth on a very specific aspect of a niche (high end audio, for example) and the combination of trendiness and depth of content will overcome much of the control imposed by Google…until there is strong competition. But is that cost effective? Not usually. It takes a ton of work, a half dozen or more substantial content items per day, and significant audience management. And perhaps even a better question, once you have all that investment in keeping up on that front, will the blog platform be holding you back? Sure it will. You should see most successful blog networks re-deploying on custom code bases pretty soon for that reason.

Google knows you’re a blog, so if you think bloggers don’t need SEO it just means you think bloggers only need blog traffic, whatever that is. Since Google defines that, you’re a pawn in the search game, no? That’s not SEO.

I just did a search for “SEO” on Google. Here is what came back:

2 sponsored listings, which are actually paid advertisements with sales pitches. If you click them, Google gets paid.

#1 most relevant result: a set of links to the financial performance of stock market symbol SEO, a paper manufacturer.

#2 seochat.com, an SEO portal that started as a discussion forum many years ago.

#3 seo-ny.org, a non-profit “Sponsors of Educational Opportunity”

#4 Google’s own page warning you not to hire an SEO firm. They say things like “You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press” and “Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form…Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google’s spam guidelines.” What a load of garbage.

#5 seotoday.com, an old seo website last updated October 2005 (?). But is has Google’s AdSense ads on it. Go figure.

#6 wikipedia’s article on SEO, which was torn apart by real SEOs as a terribly ignorant report on SEO by people who admitted they had little actual knowledge of SEO.

Now we know people search SEO looking for search engine optimization. So we also know that Google is “managing” this result set, because there is no way it could be “objective” and get this set (actually, we know Google hand manages the SEO queries… it’s been going on for years).

Now here is a tip for you… the next time you need a name for a company that you will want to rank for it’s own name, just call it SEO. There’s no competition.

According to Reuters,

Web search leader Google Inc. on Thursday posted an industry-leading 110 percent rise in quarterly profits as the company dodged the slowing growth trend that has hurt rivals Yahoo and eBay.

Google increased profits 110%, with revenues up 77 percent to $2.46 billion.

Reuters compares Google to others, noting it grows 3-4 times faster than the other majors:

Debate is raging over whether Google — which enjoys growth rates three-to-four times faster than other major Internet companies — is vulnerable to slowing industry growth trends or is itself a disruptive force taking share from rivals. On Tuesday, rival Yahoo Inc. postponed an upgrade to an advertising system designed to compete with Google and its shares suffered its biggest one-day percentage decline ever.

With approximately 32% of  advertising revenues paid out to AdSense partners, that means webmasters earnings were up 110%  for the quarter, too. There are a whole lot of webmasters getting used to Google’s earnings growth.