Here come the Cutlets, where are the nuggets?

Matt Cutts is a Google employee. He tried to be a leader among SEOs interested in Google, but has failed at that. Instead, he has gathered (some say created) a flock of hyper-aggressive, almost righteous “Cutlets” who listen to his gospel and fill his blog with oddly naive observations and “evidence” of sites that are breaking the Google rules.

They have become known as The Cutlets.

History repeats itself. A long time ago someone discovered that chicken tasted bad. It was a pinkish meat that basically smelled bad. A plucked chicken always looked dirty, because the farmer could never get all of the quills, and those left behind made the chicken look like it had a 5 o’clock shadow.

One day a farmer decided that if he could sell chickens, he could make a good profit because chickens were easy to raise. So he changed the feed to improve the smell and lighten the color, and started selectively breeding only the lightest colored chickens. Chickens breed quickly, and over a reasonable amount of time this farmer bred himself a flock of white chickens. When plucked, you couldn’t see the left-behind quills because they had no pigment. He started selling it as a replacement for beef, and it took off. Chicken was cheap protein. Cheap cheep cheep.

Chicken became synonymous with white meat. Go figure. It’s not white meat. Most of the chicken is dark meat. That’s simply how nature intended the chicken to be. In fact, the dark meat is where the action is — virtually all of the flavor and nutrients that chicken offers is in the dark meat.

Anyway over time the propaganda that created the white chicken led to chicken breast meat sold separate from the chicken (for a premium). Yes, people are always willing to pay more for breasts. These became known as chicken cutlets. Just the select breasts, chosen to represent the chicken which actually is a dark meat bird.

Now you may recognize that chicken cutlet farming is not a sustainable business. You can’t grow a cutlet. Putting that aside as an exercise for the reader (what happens to the rest of the chicken if your gospel praises only the cutlet), how does a cutlet promoter maintain his business? Enter the “tender”.

Chicken Tenders are basically chicken cutlets cut into strips. Initially, the “tender” was created as a marketing vehicle to sell that portion of the cutlet that contained an unsavory white, stringy tendon. Most people cut it off and threw it away. A propagandist re-named that piece the “chicken tender” and sold it separately, at a premium. Any Engineer (the real kind - the ones who went to Engineering school) can show you that surface area increases “exponentially” as a cutlet is sliced into pieces. Since each piece gets breaded all the way around, the amount of actual chicken decreases as breading is added to cover the increased surface area. And bread is far cheaper than chicken. So nowadays every restaurant in America sells these strips of chicken cutlet, usually breaded and deep fried, at an incredible profit.

But of course there is more to the evolution of the chicken people are eating today. The cutlet didn’t only spawn the “tender” (or “chicken finger”, oddly enough). Not satisfied with 6 ounces of small white strips of meat representing a 2.5 pound mostly-dark meat bird (reminder: what happened to the rest of the chicken?), they created the “chicken nugget“.

Chicken Nuggets are probably the most prolific form of chicken in the modern commercial food markets. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s.. they sell far more chicken nuggets than hamburgers. The chicken nugget was marketed as the prime white portion of the chicken, at first, hence the reference to gold nuggets. Of course, we know it is really a mash up of all of those parts of that dark-meat bird that do not qualify to be chicken tenders or chicken cutlets. That’s right, the bones, beaks, wings and what not. The chicken nugget is the hot dog of the chicken world. Did you ever really look up close at what’s behind the secret recipe bread covering of your favorite chicken nugget? Yuck.
Of course no one with a taste bud would eat those things, unless you coated them with sugar. So now chicken nuggets are sold with.. “barbeque sauce“. Did you ever watch a chicken nugget lover pack his take out order with a few napkins, a straw for his coke, and a huge handful of “sauce”? Ounce for ounce, he’s eating more sauce and bread than chicken. Certainly more sauce than white meat chicken. But he’s paying a premium for that breaded crap. What a moron.

So Matt Cutts has begun breeding SEO Cutlets. History suggests the real profits are in the dark meat, where all of the volume and flavor is found. History suggests that those white meat advocates have an agenda, and the consumers of white meat harbor a secret insatiable appetite for dark meat covered in sugary goo.

Nobody knows how it will evolve, but one thing is for sure. When I decide to serve chicken at my table, it is an organic whole bird, roasted to perfection so the dark meat is properly juicy, the white meat is not all dried out (and is delicately spiced), and the only sauce available is the natural gravy one gets by serving only the best organic efforts. Nuggets are for fools, and cutlets are for sissies.

I posted about Chrstine Dolce Naked two days ago. There you go. After just two days, on a poorly-configured blog that is but a week old, on a domain that is about the same age, #1 in Yahoo! for Christine Dolce Nude and #3 for Christine Dolce Naked. Wow, look Mom, I’m an SEO!

These screen caps are from a proxy out of the US East Coast. When I hit Yahoo! from the west coast, I see DaveN’s Christine Dolce post just below me at #4. Sorry Dave, you don’t rank on the East Coast.

Wow look at all those myspace pages surrounding me in the SERPs. All those SEOs…..geesh.

I studied engineering. I chose bioengineering, because it was the hardest most interesting. I got a master’s degree and then went for the Ph.D. For that, I chose electrical & computer engineering because it was the hardest most challenging interesting. My dissertation topic was in brain imaging. I chose brain imaging because it was so interesting, and brain imaging of the motor impaired because, well, their brains didn’t work right. More fun than looking at regular brains, eh? Well, obviously since I completed all-but-dissertation and never finished that dissertation, I achieved my goal of finding something that was too hard for me. Eventually I found SEO. It’s harder more fun than that engineering stuff.

Over at DaveN’s blog today I see a response from a Google employee that is telling. I don’t really know DaveN. Having only met him once (briefly) and never having been drunk with him, I’m sure he’d say he doesn’t know me either. But despite his bull dog behavior on the SEO forums, he does have connections at Google and gets Google people to reply to his questions. He asked why his page would appear to rank for a phrase that does not exist on his site, and which seems completely unrelated. Those are the good questions. Here’s DaveN’s question:

also where the fuck did …christine dolce naked….that search term come from …???

and here is Vanessa’s response from Google’s Sitemaps team:

My early morning, under-caffeinated guess is that you linked to this threadwatch story (http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7076) in your “industry news” section and at some point, that may have been on the same page as links pointing to this post: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/03/21/naked-truth-about-shoemony/ and possibly some anchor text pointing to your site includes the word “nude” (the cached page info seems to indicate so). And when searching for christine dolce naked became a popular thing to do, your site may have been an early one to have all the keywords.

Sure enough, Dave then discovered an instance of such a link to a story on ThreadWatch about Christine Dolce’s MySpace page, and can explain the nude thing as well:

Yep I agree.. yahoo shows the outbound link in the cache on one of the pages, nice spot vanessa … the nide link will have been when i did the Naked Bulling thing

Wow. Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water (queue the theme from Jaws). Google is saying that a link on his page to a page about Chrstine Dolce (even without the words Christine Dolce on his site at all), and a link on his same page to a page ON HIS SITE about Naked Bull Riding (perhaps influenced or at least re-inforced by the use of the word “nude” in the anchor text used by other’s linking to Dave as the Naked Bull Riding SEO), led Google to assign relevance to his site for the virtual semantic “Christine Dolce Nude”.

Since any celebrity+nude search is at least mildly competitive, it should take more than this to rank (Dave’s blog was reportedly #5 and #8 in the US for Christine Dolce naked and nude). Vanessa suggests that AGE of content and/or links played a role at a time when POPULARITY of the search “Christine Dolce Nude” was rising rapidly on Google. In her own words,

when searching for christine dolce naked became a popular thing to do, your site may have been an early one to have all the keywords.

Personally, I love it when Google insiders think out loud after just waking up, before coffee. Maybe it’s best not to compare this to pillow talk and competitive intelligence gathering - LOL, but nonetheless it does show Vanessa’s stream-of-consciousness thought line. Priceless.

Every SEO should now be tuning their thought process in accordance. Your page links outwards to other sites, thus voting for their relevance to your topic. They are popular/keyword rich, and carry a theme that is less site-specific than page-specific (ThreadWatch is not a celebrity blog, but an SEO and marketing blog). Your SITE contains pages that other’s link to from their own keyword-rich content, using anchor text. Google puts the words together and subsets them looking for overlaps. Absent any pre-determined ranking factors (in the case of a sudden rise in popularity of a search) the presence of subsets across that keyword conglomerate gives rank. We knew most of that.

but fine points separate the practical from the theoretical. Subsets matching and overlapping is something Google can do fast… some parts of LSI we know from linear algebra are able to be computed fast, and we see AdSense doing well with that all the time - it enables contextual advertising. Other parts are too difficult to do in real time, and sure enough Google falls back on links and anchor text, apparently with a heavy page emphasis. No time for imposing restrictions or a-priori knowledge about a site, so the traffic flows to DaveN and the Chrsting Dolce fans are disappointed until enough of them query Google the same way (and click through???).

I would have expected Google to already have a pretty good handle on Christine Dolce…. it’s not like she got her 1 million MySpace friends and a PlayBoy shoot by staying under the radar. But Google likes a query to be unique, and a website to be very, very specific. Christine Dolce Nude is aparently not as similar to Christine Dolce as many would have expected in SEO world. And I guess Christine Dolce naked and Christine Dolce Nude, once analyzed and stabilized by the G machine, don’t stay that way (stable) for long (?). Interesting.

So what triggers Google to re-visit the query and impose restrictions or weighting factors? That might lead to “when”, which reveals whether or not we can expect to practically turn this kind of opportunity traffic into a reliable stream (via redirects, links, etc). We all know how to get it. Shoemoney can tell you what a few days of #1 for “free (insert hot new cellphone model here) ringtones” is worth. Google could really use those analytics, eh?

I also think the day of a SEO cooperative is closer than ever.