I applied for a Business Process Patent years ago because it appeared to be a way to protect a business model that larger, more aggressive competitors could co-opt. It wasn’t. I never knew why, and never got a straight answer from the patent attorneys I dealt with, but it was clear that large aggressive corporations could get business process patents and I could not.

Ten-plus years later, we see the USPTO revising how it awards such patents. We have discussions of how the changes might effect things like Google’s patent on PageRank. Man, if I ever needed a student of the law who could also explain things in the good English that we search people understand, I need one now.

Someone once suggested we should be paying more attention to Amit Singhal instead of always listening to Matt Cutts. Google just published a statement from a “Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google” named Amit Singhal. Last June, Singhal said that Google made about a half-dozen adjustments to Google’s ranking algorithm every week. Now the count is up to just shy of a dozen per week, but those Google engineers have a handle on it:

We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The “keep it simple” philosophy has served us well.

So Google’s engineers can look at a SERP and they know why each page ranks where it does? Amazing. Given all of the factors, and all of the data one would need to consider to make such a determination, these guys at Google are simply that good? Remarkable.

Sorry but I don’t buy it. There are many obvious cases, and cases where select factors have overriding influence, but in most cases, in order to know why a given page ranks where it does, you must do some very careful review of evidence (content, structure, back links, history) no matter who you are. Yes they probably have great tools, but no, they don’t know why any given page ranks where it does.

You can determine for yourself if the following statement is a lie, deceptive, or just evasive via “tricky” language:

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.

Hubris and humility matter a great deal in this world. Until I learn of ex-Google engineers rockin’ the SEO world with their magical powers, I’ll maintain my cautious skepticism of the value of  Singhal’s communications.

Whenever I interview or otherwise evaluate an SEO, I eventually find my way to The Flash SEO Question: Name 3 ways to SEO a flash-heavy web site for Google/Yahoo!/MSN, not including “make an HTML version”. I consider it a Fermi question for Competitive Webmasters.

Now Google has formally announced it is indexing the contents of Flash web sites. The Official Google blog announced it as an academic achievement (Google learns to crawl Flash). The Google Webmaster blog practically denies ever having been unable to properly handle flash, with it’s version Improved Flash Indexing. Adobe attempts to take credit with “Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web“, even though it seems to admit what it seems to have always vehemently denied in the past - that Flash websites were failures because people couldn’t find them.

The accurate reality? Google has been struggling to understand Flash for years, has read and indexed the readable text portion of Flash files for quite some time. Last year Google started exploring Adobe’s Flash SDK for better understanding of the meaning of Flash content. Good SEO consultants have devised ways of helping Google understand Flash web pages for years as well, using various techniques beyond the obvious “create an accessible version for search engines”. Some of those methods work very well. Others are risky, because they permit Google to classify them and whenever Google classifies something, it suffers in the risk/reward department.

So why does this “news” scare me as an SEO consultant? A few reasons:

Google says it will not find nor index Flash that is loaded by “certain” javascript which it does not read nor follow. This statement maybe a lead in for future /enhanced discrimination against js loaders, which have already received a fair share of PR attention since they are effective at cloaking Flash content and thus are ripe for abuse by unscrupulous competitive web publishers. It is true that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, but it is also true that Google highly prefers algorithmic approaches to content censorship over anything more cognitively challenging. Hence they are all too often happy to pass on bunches of perfectly good apples in order to avoid one bad one or even the risk of a bad one. I’d love to debate the importance of naturally ocurring acetylsalysilic acid with Google’s engineers, but I doubt they have the patience for my analogy. The truth is that we use js loaders because they are a reliable means of loading Flash in all browsers, under webmaster-controlled conditions. Google’s statement that it “might” not folow “certain” js is all a gray cloud of uncertainty. We can’t trust Google if we don’t know what it is doing. We shouldn’t let Google dictate web technologies to protect Google unilaterally. Let’s not let that fact get lost in the F.U.D. of SEO vs. Google.

Google Gospel Spreads Fast in Web Land. I can already hear the gears of misinformation turning as designers and even so-called SEOs prepare to tell clients “Flash is okay now, Google indexes it“. Truth is Google is trying to understand it, which is more important than indexing. This brings a new frontier to SEO for Flash; a frontier of research that has very little to do with indexing of the content within existing Flash files or the content in Flash files built the traditional way.

SEO for Flash just got more expensive, because it got more sophisticated. Flash websites have always been expensive because they look good and work poorly. Clients of Flash web sites think the site is all included - looks good and self contained within the Flash. But for web sites that demand a search presence for marketing purposes, the up-front cost of a Flash web site is a small fraction of the total cost of making a Flash website perform as intended on the web. Flash-based navigation has never worked well, unless heavily supported by program logic. Where SEO for Flash used to be limited to a reasonable set of success metrics, we now have an opportunity to help Google much more as it seeks to understand what the Flash content means for the user. Flash now plays an important semantic role, where it used to be ancillary. The first thing smart SEOs need to do now is block Google from indexing Flash, simply because we don’t control Google’s interpretation of the meaning of Flash content. I don’t think that is what Adobe intended.

It is early yet, but someday Google will understand a Flash-based mortgage calculator is just that… and grant it relevance accordingly. Until then, SEO for Flash is once again a competitive arena in need of research and SEO attention. Until that hard work has been done, I’m sending Flash back down to the minors for basic training and evaluation. If you have your own, add them in the comments. I’d love to hear your meaningful thoughts on the subject.

Google desperately wants you all to create unique, original content. It needs the ad real estate, but perhaps even more it needs the continuous expansion of creative content to feed the growth of the ad business. Everything we’ve seen out of Google for over a year reflects the Goog’s serious commitment to advertising over search. About a year or so ago, from my own perspective, the sensibilities shifted to a more overt recognition that it was ad space, not accuracy, that mattered most to Google search. Trust, freshness, historical significance.. all of these things mattered most to advertising. Even as search industry TalkingHeads debated how these “signals of quality” led to better SERPs, we repeatedly saw how they directly led to increased ad revenue to Google not as much through more ad impressions as through more commitment from advertisers to the Google platform.

Cloak it any way you like, but the message was less fraudulent clicks, more lock-in of users about which we know more than ever. So even if stalwart historical journalsitic sources generated reams of spam pages deep within their domains, it was “quality” and it ranked because it was good for “economic expansion”. An advertiser branded with the idea that The Denver Post was a quality advertising avenue back in the day, would not object to a large presence of ads on the online Denver Post, even if they were mostly spam pages.

The cloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal and greedy it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us.

Now we see Google sponsoring development of unique, creative content, Hollywood style with the signing on of the Family Guy guy Seth MacFarlane. Expect to see search talking heads proclaim Google is able to be television if it wants, Google is going after Hollywood when it’s ready, Google is replacing newspapers with classified ads and now cartooning, blah blah blah. But the truth is, Google needs unique creative content and knows how to position it. This is a comic widget. Google knows that Widgets work. Facebook works. LinkedIn works. Dilbert works. Copyright is a problem, webmasters who want to fight over their nickels are too much work given the big picture of creative content driving the expansion of the web, and perhaps most seriously… anyone can build a search engine.

I wrote about this last week… you only own what you control. Google may have grown as a robber baron, but it intends to stick around as the industry matures, and apparently this is a good time to test the waters of sponsored creative content before inflation kicks in. Even the best companies suffer when their activities fuel inflationary fires, and this will fuel inflation. Watch how rich this Guy gets. If you think giving away free CDs hurts the recording industry, wait until Google decides to sponsor music videos. Let’s just hope Google has better taste than those conservative families that bought up all of the FM radio stations back in the eighties. I still can’t believe they play 4o year old “classic rock” all day long on so many FM radio stations around the country even today…with ads of course.

Yahoo has acknowledged the importance of TheCloud, and obviously Google knows TheCloud is coming. Trust me, I don’t write Apache directives and rewrite rules because I enjoy it. I write them because it enables me to profit from my work without sharing 90% of the monetization with Google. I used to configure web servers pro-actively, as a means of publishing on the web. Now, thanks to Google, I write those arcane scripts as a defensive measure, protecting my revenues. Web publishing (separate from content creation) has gone from the profit side of the enterprise to the expense side very, very quickly. More quickly than IT, even. One day we will look back at how silly it was to host our own content, and how unbelievably brutal it was for Google to step in an scrape it all into a private cloud long before the PublicCloud was available to us. Until then, what choice do we have?

I can’t stand to think of the future in the SEO world, where we will no doubt see a new generation of poets and copywriters proclaiming that SEO is simply “unique creative content” but at least they have one aspect of that correct. Content means a helluvalot to Google. In fact, I bet in many cases your content means more to Google than it does to you. Think about that… one man gathers what another man spills.

I’m always thinking about web and Internet from a competitive perspective, because that’s really what we are doing when we optimize, seek search traffic, buy links, and forge alliances with like-minded website network operators: competitive webmastering. But that concept is not always palatable to people. There are plenty of pie-in-the-sky web publishers (and SEOs and marketers…) out there dreaming of an open, free world where “information wants to be free” and “the Internet belongs to everyone“.

Truth is, even if most of us try and make that true, a few will take advantage of the resulting “opportunity” to cash in while we don’t. That starts the cycle… and soon it’s all me-too bandwagoning. If that sounds too cynical, well, that’s because it is cynical. So what.

If you want to know who the future abusers will be, look at who the abusers are now, and who have played the role of abusers in the past. A big secret of human behavior is
“past performance is indicative of future behavior”. That part is not cynical — it’s factual.

I don’t give way specifics in an obvious fashion on my blog, because, well, I compete with almost everyone reading this blog. We are all competing for attention. No sense handing your competition the ammunition it needs to take away your opportunity. However, I am happy to allude and hint. And here’s one for those working the web the way I am working the web. The newspapers (past and current abusers) are priming their pumps even as everyone says they are a dying concern. No, not the obvious. Newspapers are never about the obvious.

Take a look at this quote form a newspaper site producer, who pulls photos from the news wires and republishes them as the primary content, attractive to readers:

Q: Were there any issues in getting permission to publish images that large from the wire photo services? The photos on the Big Picture must be twice the size of any other news site.

A: We looked at the contracts pretty well and couldn’t identify anything that prevented this sort of thing. The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that’s only about 2 inches wide, so we’d appear to be within that limit.

Those who know me personally, or who have had time one on one to discuss things in depth, know my passion for certain visual arts, and my belief in a certain specific future related to some of those arts. It’s coming sooner than expected. Things will be a changing, and acts like these will force that change. The only safe harbor for the competitive publisher is competing, which means acting now. The abusers will continue to react to change by attempting new abuses, and continue to reveal their intentions due to their need to manage risk. Sadly, they will also continue to lobby politicos and misrepresent the truth, which means we still have to a lot more than simply good or hard work, but we have to start with the honest smart/hard work part. And remain vocal, where it has influence.

TAM Airlines (TAM) is the largest airline in Brazil, and has been expanding operations. They used to compete with Varig in Brazil, which owns Varig.com as well as Varig.com.br, the Brazilian equivalent, and GOL. Airline web sites are notoriously badly configured for SEO, and these are not exceptions, but TAM airlines doesn’t even own TAM.com. For a major airlines, this is very unusual.

American Airlines naturally owns AA.com. British Airways secured BA.com. Japan Airlines, known as JAL, naturally owns JAL.com. They also own the necessary variants of their names, such as AmericanAirlines.com, and BritishAirways.com.

Looking further, Dutch airline KLM of course secured KLM.com, their natural domain. Northwest Airlines can be found at NWA.com. Even South American airline Lan Airline has secured lan.com for itself, which must have been difficult given the generic value of LAN in the computer field (local area network — the domain surely had very high value). Truth is, if you are competing in the global travel space, you simply MUST secure your brand as the customer perceives it. Most airlines know that.

The Polish airline LOT Polish Airlines owns LOT.com, another strong generic domain that had high value to others. LOT knows the value of that domain as a brand. Delta Airlines is found at Delta.com, despite hundreds of non-airline businesses operating under strong Delta trademarks. Continental Airlines owns Continental.com, even though there are very major companies in other industries also operating with the name “Continental”. Why do you think Continental Airlines owns it? If you are a serious airline, you simply must own your name, no? If you visit a page of the Airline Blog that covers Brazil, you will see numerous contextual ads from travel agents and travel companies putting the TAM brand right in front of the consumers. Do they know the value of the TAM brand more than TAM airlines?

So TAM Airlines doesn’t know this? Or maybe doesn’t care. I would find it very hard to believe that the IT systems company near “Mount Tam” in California, the current registrant of TAM.com, would hold out for a higher price than a major International Airline could afford for an exact-match, 3 letter dot com. I don’t know the owner of TAM.com so I can’t be sure, but seriously… if Pizza.com went for just over 2 million, how could a 3 letter exact match for a significant International airline be too expensive to buy out from a small IT company? The online Pizza business last year was billion$ strong, and expected to double in the near term. Anyone could launch into that revenue stream immediately with a 2+ million dollar purchase of THE generic domain in that market. That’s less than the cost of producing a SuperBowl ad, and there was no trademark at risk. For TAM Airlines, with TAM.com an exact trademark match as well as a consumer brand match across languages, it must be worth buying, no?

United Airlines owns United.com, as we would expect although honestly I would not be surprised to learn someone else owned United.com since it is so generic and such a common trade moniker. Yet, United Airlines owns it. Smart move, or simply an essential necessity? Southwest Airlines owns Southwest.com. Swiss International Airlines owns Swiss.com. Spain’s Iberia Airlines owns Iberia.com. I personally know 2 restaurants in high-tech neighborhoods with that name. There’s no way the name wasn’t an early target for many companies. The United Arab Emirates airline “Emirates” is, of course, at Emirates.com. Australia’s Qantas Airways owns Qantas.com, of course, right? They were also smart enough to get Quantas.com, which is how I know them because my language doesn’t like Q’s without associated U’s.

Like I said I don’t know the TAM Airlines people nor the TAM.com registrant, but I think this expose of TAM airline’s sloppiness is a good reminder that companies should research their brand situations today, rather than tomorrow. I’m betting a handful of domain investors will call the current owner of TAM.com now, looking to bet that it has unrealized potential.

We have a joke here in our offices about domain name valuation. When a client says “We don’t have our brand as a domain name, but we want to try to acquire it. How much is it worth?” the only answer we can give is “We can’t say for sure, but it’s worth more today than it was yesterday“.

Think Tank is happening and I am now looking forward to it. I can personally vouch for the quality of Dave Klein (DK), who has put this together. He ran a charity poker tournament last fall that was nothing short of great, and several off us encouraged him to follow his instincts after he suggested he would like to host a quality gathering of movers and shakers in this Internet industry. I have full confidence, and I just signed up without hesitation. Those who know me know that is a rare thing.

Serious domainers looking at developing their empires should consider this meeting. I expect it to be on a par with T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Miami last year in terms of the quality of the invitation-only participants, with a focus on empire building using this Internet thing, as opposed to any specific aspect of that (such as SEO or domaining). I can think of a dozen of you who would both contribute and benefit from this meeting, as it is planned. It’s in a quality location, run by a quality host, who is the real deal when it comes to no b.s. this-stuff-matters. No sessions, no speakers, and a non-disclosure requirement. Good stuff.

If you didn’t get invited just follow these steps and tell DK why you belong. Be specific and don’t hold back - if you move millions of eyeballs per day let him know. If you own or monetize premium domains let him know… something like “I’m an entrepreneur and I have a thousand domains” will not get you past the cut, so don’t be shy and tell Dave just why you expect yourself to be considered valuable to the other attendees. If you know me personally and think it will help, tell him how you know me and then continue to make your case. Rest assured that simply knowing me will not be enough!

I think I share a vision that we’re all in this to meet up, listen and share ideas to make good things happen. DK has planned this as NOT an elitist event, but one that is indeed limited to the people who will make it an effective, productive, and inspiring experience for all of us who attend. As an attendee I myself want it to be inclusive of the brightest minds, the freshest thinkers, and the people who don’t just talk the talk but have and continue to make things happen on the web. As far as I know this is a full-boat, invitation-only event which means nobody’s sponsored and nobody’s participating to hawk their wares or write gossip columns..and DK has declared no audio or video at the event (too bad it had to be said, but I’m glad it was).

Most of the smartest people I know in this Internet entrepreneuring space are not in the SEO/Internet marketing industry, which is why I wrote this post. You know who you are. This event is billed as by and for Internet entrepreneurs, not just SEOs and marketers, so please consider hitting Dave early with an email, according to his request, to get an invitation. He’s a great guy and worthy of your consideration. I hope to see you there!

There was another SEO conference last week calling itself “advanced” and once again there was controversy about whether or not it was advanced. I stayed mostly out of the debate this time (as well as the conference), but I must note that an in-house SEO from NPR.org put it well when he said this about what it means to be “advanced SEO” (emphasis added):

SEO used to be perceived as a collection of tactics — use H1 tags, make a sitemap, add meta descriptions, get rid of JS obstacles, etc. That’s a pretty one-dimensional view, and even a few years ago most companies looked at SEO as just a project engagement. In the past, I saw so many engagements fail due to lack of stakeholder buy-in. The fact that we even got hired in-house speaks to how much has changed. Advanced can mean a lot of things. I think it does mean a greater understanding of how our work touches everything from development to usability, design, ecommerce, and analytics. We’re also coming into our own as strategists and online marketing managers. There is no one-size-fits all way to handle even fundamental tactics. We can argue whether PR sculpting is advanced. From a technical standpoint, it may or may not be. What is advanced is (as Nathan suggested) following a rigorous decision process as to whether it’s the best use of your time, bang for buck, and if so, how you would measure its results. I’ve spent months analyzing engine data, the search landscape, web analytics, our customer profiles, you name it. One of the major “advanced” initiatives I’m undertaking is drilling titles and alt tags with our writers. Why is that advanced? Because I’ve looked at my resources, my opportunity, and my expected outcome and in my long-term strategy, this is the right short-term move for my specific situation, for our team, for our site. Advanced does mean staying abreast of the cutting edge of tactics. Advanced also means the set of critical thinking and soft skills to actually get things executed in organizations of all sizes.

Javaun Moradi said that well. An “advanced SEO” is considering much more than on-page and network factors, and is deeply involved with strategy as search strategy defines the opportunity pursued by the web publication under consideration.

But we need to be smart here, and not just accept what an in-house SEO practitoner says is true. As forward-thinking or strategically-involved as Javaun might be over at NPR, he is in a job, and his job has a defined role. This may be his perspective, but I’d like to hear his boss’s perspective. His boss probably has a view of Javaun’s role as SEO in the overall goals of the publishing effort. He would also know if there are SEO consultants involved (SEO consultants maintain that focus on the strategic role search startegies play in web publishing). I would not be surprised at all if Javaun and some of his greater colleagues in SEO world believe what he wrote. However, I would be surprised if he continued to stay in his role as an in-house SEO, given his insights, of if his boss would pay him enough to keep him there.

SEO broke out of the chains of procedure years ago. Task SEO shops have drawn fire from the SEO community for several years now, for their failure to accommodate the strategic needs of their customers. That SEO is not a list of tasks is not new, so the fact that “advanced SEO” is not a list of advanced tasks should not be surprising, either.

The surprise is that so many attendees of SMX Advanced are debating whether the SEO tactics presented were advanced or not. To me, that is the proof that SMX Advanced is not the sort of SEO Conference I need to attend. Concepts, yes, but tactics, no. The pro-SMX people may not like to hear it, but the Search Engine Strategies show has the right name for the topic at hand.

I just completed 4 hours of SEO industry research, and I am marvelling at how this SEO business is inverted when compared to other industries. In the tech and manufacturing worlds, the mantra is “better faster cheaper“. Over time, what is available to us is better, we can do things faster, and we pay less for what we get. Not so for SEO. It gets harder and costs more over time, largely because it takes more work to achieve the required quality and quantity of results. And if you signed a fixed term contract, I am willing to bet your SEO is getting worse over time, not better.

SEO is very competitive, so it makes sense that over time, any particular market will become more expensive for marketing successfully. It is harder to get attention in a more crowded room. But that is also true for tech and manufacturing, yet they still enjoy better-faster-cheaper. We don’t.

I just “hit the web” for some updating and spent over 4 hours “catching up” on my SEO / marketing skills, since it’s been a week since I last “studied up” like that. I come from a background in health care and research, where Continuing Education is the norm and a requirement. Let me tell you, Nurses, Doctors, and Clinicians have it EASY compared to search marketers. If someone gave CEU credits for the SEO research we have to do just to stay current, I’d probbaly log 300 CEUs per year compared to nurses in New York State, who are required to complete 4 CEUs every 4 years. And I just chatted with a handful of my peers over at the SMX Advanced Search Marketing Conference in Seattle, where I confirmed that I am quite certainly competitive as an SEO and search consultant.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this “seo is changing fast and it is very costly to keep up” scenario is that more and more SEO “firms” are requiring yearly contract commitments, which clients are signing. I can tell you that my four hours of research tonight confirmed for me that 3 of the methods we have been deploying for SEO success during the past year are no longer profitable. Subsequently I am taking action to remove those from our arsenal, since they are no longer cost effective for our clients. Are those “SEO firms” taking similar actions? Of course not. I doubt many of them are even aware of the changes, and of those that are, many are simply going to stop putting in the time yet with those term contracts, still collect the fees. I’m willing to bet it is that slippage that fuels some of their profit margins. That is how they are able to offer low rates…

In our office (soon to be known as UpperLeftPlacement) We have a queue of potential SEO activities which we consider “hot prospects”. It comes our of our own research, across our own network of sites in various markets. It’s a very dynamic list, and represents our entrepreneurial SEO brain trust. What might work, what someone else suggested works or might work, what we see working on our sites, or what we see working from our testing — it is all on that list. Tonight I confirmed that 2 of those are indeed more effective than available alternatives, and safe, and so they are being added to the operational toolbox. For some clients, those tactics will be at work as soon as tonight. Other clients require some discussion and a more formal approach, which will be added to the agenda for the next meeting or conference call.

Which brings me back to the point of this post. Better/Faster/Cheaper is not the case for SEO, largely because of the management of change, as opposed to the change itself. The more time we have to spend explaining the new ideas, demonstrating effectiveness, and estimating time requirements, the more expensive it is to act. And the more expensive it becomes to act, the harder it becomes to compete. Our “overhead” is the time we spend not on SEO… and as that increases, the SEO cost effectiveness is challenged. In a business driven by bottom line success metrics, that’s an important fact. SEO success, by its very definition, is threatened by the very change that necessitates the deployment of the SEO.

See the problem? This industry is broken, and it won’t fix itself. The visible solution to the conundrum of SEO costing more over time, for lesser results, is churn. As clients address “failure” by moving away from the SEO who apparently failed them, they seek another SEO because, well, they know very well that they need SEO services. The new contract includes what they really need (now), but typically has a fixed one year term as well. What will happen in 8 months?

The SEO consultant model is the only one that works for real search marketing, which is expensive and time consuming. There are many tasks associated with execution for which firms and agencies and service providers are very useful.. even necessary n some cases, but the SEO functions cannot be clearly specified over a term contract. If you can negotiate time commitments from good people, it can work, but if you’re contracting for services, I just don’t see how it’s going to end well.

Update Tip: By the way, if you’re using a DOM script to highlight the existence of nofollow on web pages, it might be time to update your script. I’ve been seeing more and more sites using the “external nofollow” attribute pair for anchor tags, which will be overlooked by DOM scripts set to filter strictly for “nofollow” (including some of the more popular ones). Best not get too comfortable in the reliability of your toolset, eh?

A security firm is releasing a report stating .hk, .cn, and .info domains are the most “dangerous” when it comes to threats of malware. Whether you like McAfee or not, search engines like Google and Yahoo and MSN are very likely to incoporate this “trust” factor into their operations, if they haven’t already done that. We know Google doesn’t like .info as much as .com, and this new “evidence” appears to confirm whatever rationale Google might give for that. I fully expect Google to have more data available on the topic than McAfee anyway.

Of all “.hk” sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of “.cn” sites and 11.7 percent of “.info” sites that way.

We had some SEO conversation on this at dinner last night, at a waterfront restaurant near the SMX conference center (it didn’t earn a mention by name). Our questions concerned the way that Google integrates links into its analysis of sites, and whether links have a direct contribution or an indirect contribution. My position is that Google maintains these signals of quality on a per-domain basis, and uses them to judge measurable factors such as links. So, a link will be trusted in proportion to the trust it has established for the two domains involved in the link. (Note I didn’t say linearly…) Ditto for age and other considerations… some of which are market or SERP (definition of SERP) based. Of course this is an oversimplification, as URLs with inbounds likely earn their own considerations, secondary to the hosting domain, but I basically view these signals as grading the measures… trust is applied to ranking factors.

So does it help to be on a .info toplevel domain? No. Does it hurt?

Think through for yourself, how you would deal with the real world if you were Google, and you knew that a “respectable” company like McAfee agreed with your own determinations that .hk domains are more than 3 times as likely to host malware as .com domains, even though there are fewer of them. At the very least, in times of trouble, you would err on the side of caution and not-trust-as-much those evidently less-trustworthy domains, right? If you had cause for concern, would you consider that bias? Probably. If you didn’t want to expose your own internal research as public justification, you can now refer to McAfee.

Yet the .info domain space, for example, has very ligitimate appeal to audiences worldwide. In some cases, a keyword-match .info site can compete with an established keyword .com at a small fraction of the domain acquisition cost. In some cases, a .info can be more valuable than the .com, to users, because the .info launches with real purpose and content while the .com is parked or otherwise undeveloped. But, and this is the strategic SEO part, that .info will need to cultivate an environment of trust (which will be applied to its signals of quality, such as links) in order to do well by Google.

This looks like an issue for the registrars of the TLDs. Maybe they need to work to maintain the integrity of their domain spaces, if they want them to maintain value in the real world, just as neighborhood associations work to uphold the property values in their own communites.

I think the real concern involves sketchy practices or even legitimate web publishing which may appear to be questionable, even if due to human bias. Religious and political sites, for example, where the humans are already unfairly biased against objectivity (some might say “blind”), should probably avoid the .hk and .cn top level domains when serving the non-local markets. I certainly wouldn’t publish an ad-supported chiropractor information site on a .info, if I had other options for more trusted tld’s (more trusted, in a post-McAfee report sense). But I would certainly be upset if my quality chiropractic .info website didn’t rank well simply because it was on the .info domain. Google already trusts blatantly anti-alternative medicine zealots, despite knowledge of their anti-quackery quackery, simply because many humans like to be contrarian, like to believe conspiracy theories, and like to support causes that sound like underdogs. This McAfee “study” provides more fuel for such trust claims, and people’s assignment of authority to such reports is a very real factor to consider, deserved or not.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080604/ap_on_hi_te/tec_dangerous_domains

http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/