SEO 2.0 Blog

As a search engine junkie, I’m always pulling for the new guy. Although I’m still an unabashed Google fan, I can’t help but root for any underdog with a good idea (check out my posts on social and vertical search , and Cuil ). I love competition in the marketplace.

If I were Yahoo and MSN, I’d be very concerned about the future of my properties – despite recent, roadmap announcements. If I were Google, damn right I’d be more proactive.  I find myself breaking the mindshare (or mind control? Hmm…) of Google more often, and using non-traditional search engines or platform engines. That is, if I find them effective. The refined results can often be pretty good for my tastes.

Here’s a few I found - some of which I use.  What do you think? Ready to make the leap? (it’s probably inevitable). Shopping, meta, social, and vertical engines abound…

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My wife IM’d me today and says, “did you hear about the new Google?”.  Seriously.  So Cuil is making the rounds in a big way today, with a flare gun.  I’ve been finding posts on mainstream sites like CNN, and even MSN (Pulitzer would be proud!), it’s one hell of a launch when the headline is Ex-Googlers launch Cuil.  With a 120 billion page index out of the gate,  Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) is really risking something with this huge grand scale ‘first impression’.  So far, it doesn’t look like the gamble is paying off in the search blogosphere.  Reviews have been poor to lukewarm (my favorite so far being over at Search Engine Land).

I found some bugs.  Not sure if it was due to an influx of new traffic, but a lot of searches didn’t resolve around 11:30am (eastern).  The “About Cuil” link didn’t work, either, but is restored now.

Also, for having more indexed pages than Google, I found it very thin in variety.  In a blended search world, I appreciate this engines layout, but it really does lack media blending.  Pages that seemed to rank well for their ‘relevancy’, as is the selling-point of this engine, didn’t seem to be all that relevant. I do very much like the Explore By Category feature, and look forward to that improving (it was my favorite feature of the SearchMe.com engine, but I’m not sure Cuil is quite as diverse here).

In searching for “Bill Sebald”, I found some pretty unrelated things - some seemed to be tied in through links, but not all.   One listing on the front page pulled up Bill Slawski’s Twitter page.  I’m honored to be mistaken for Bill Slawski (though he may not like it), but this is not giving me the warm and fuzzies about the reliability of this engine.

Cuil stumbles out of the gate, but looks like a potentially strong finisher in a race that has stalled in the last year.  I’m rooting for it. Not sure yet how much human power is in here.  I think there has to be a decent amount of hand-work, which I like.  The ‘user privacy’ angle is pretty impressive, though I wonder how they’re going to monetize this.  I hope they can find a way, so they can improve quickly. And by quickly, I mean this week.

Here are some more screens:

Suggestion functionality is standard.

Explore By Category Can Give Some Options For Savvy Searchers.

Update -

So the Cuil bashing got pretty nasty.  And rightfully so, unfortunately.  But sometimes bad press can be better than no press, and turning this puppy around quicker than a Puff Daddy shooting scandal is always a possibility.  I like this post called Lessons From The Great Cuil Failure.  Some great analysis here!  And I definitley agree - excuses are not a great way to smother this fire.

“The search landscape is evolving” - sure, we hear that everyday in this industry, but when you log on to Google, it’s hard to drink the Kool-Aid.  I have to admit, I think I’m finally starting to feel the “hype” thanks to some inspiriting things from the Yahoo camp.  When Yahoo said they were going to “Open Up”, I didn’t think they’d kick the barn doors open this wide, this fast.  This is exciting.  On the heels of SearchMonkey, Yahoo recently announced BOSS, another component of their “Y!OS”, or Yahoo Open Strategy.   I think vertical / social engines are finally going to get their 15 minutes, and I couldn’t be happier.

From Yahoo: BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

BOSS is an effort to update the model, and develop a stronger footing in search.  If you think about it, search engine progress has been slow lately, especially compared to the evolution of the rest of the web.  The best way to make fast, impactful headway is to peel away from horizontal search, and test out new Web 2.0 breeds of vertical search products.  Traditionally, there have been heavy risks and costs associated with this kind of venture.  With BOSS, hopefully the tides can turn, and a plethora of attempts that weren’t previously possible based on these concerns, may suddenly ascend.  Sure, there will be casualties, but it’s much less likely to be Yahoo if they’re the backbone to all these ventures.  Yahoo is probably thinking, “If we can’t beat them, we can be their engine.”

With social computing slated to reach everything from cell phone platforms, webmail accounts, video game consoles, and desktop applications, it’s logical that it will hit search in a big way.  The ball is rolling – the new engine Me.dium is a social search engine running off BOSS, and is ultimately supposed to be a crowd-controlled engine.  Does that mean the noble intention of a human-maintained engine like Mahalo can be improved with social search?  I would think so.  I’m already pretty happy with the vertical search in my favorite social networks – I’m finding myself checking properties like Answers.com, LinkedIn, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Mixx before hitting Google when I know the kind of results I’m looking for (which is most the time).

If there’s one truism about the web, it’s that things move incredibly fast.  A site like eBay was nothing as a start-up in 1995, and a household name in 1998 – in web years, that’s incredibly fast, especially considering that was more than 10 years ago.  The novelty of bidding, and the value of discounts, feedback, and communication ultimately made the spirit of purchasing online seem less like a fad.  Granted, there was still a lot of fear about fraud and security then, but once those safety concerns started to quell (mainly in part to eBay’s efforts, Paypal, and users’ word of mouth), millions of people were at least semi-consciously accepting online ecommerce across the board.  All ecommerce, from Amazon to shopping verticals/engines, were benefactors from this new phenomenon.   The web is always accepting of the next big cultural influencer, and is usually poked by the last big sensation - in this case (as of 2008), social networks.  History suggests it is going to happen fast, and sudden.  In today’s web-world, a 10 year span is a 1-2 year span; or, a blink of an eye to a busy human-being.

So what if horizontal search continues to fall behind, and vertical / social hybrids become household names?  What does this mean for search marketing?  Well, it certainly suggests marketers will have to be on their toes, but this should still offer many new branding and ROI opportunities if leveraged correctly.   It will most certainly lead to a higher likelihood of targeted, converting traffic.   That’s a huge benefit.  Your pre-qualified visitors will be even more qualified.  SEO 2.0 will likely become the norm, and leave the beta stage it’s in now.  The idea of marrying SEO and communities may seem difficult, but it simply requires more marketing and visitor understanding than traditional SEO provides.  SEO will simply have to morph in tandem with the search engines, and leave behind some of the general exposure tactics.  Not only will a vertical and social affect the actions of your users, but it will likely start to play a more important role to your CPC quality scores, too, as visitors will start to become accustomed to improved results and search experience.  Some research firms think vertical search might draw a billion dollars in revenue by the end of 2009; hundreds of new engines are already popping up without the help of BOSS now, but this may grow exponentially making these huge profits a real possible.

It’s an exciting time to be on the web.  It will be great to see what hands the other search properties are holding.  Last week Google showed their hand with their testing of social computing in their platform.  This is just the beginning of something very, very cool.

So there’s noise that Google’s going to buy Digg.  Is this breaking news?  Not really, unless you consider “breaking news” anything as old as March.  But the rumor part seems to be becoming less of a rumor according to TechCrunch .  A few days ago, news about a signed letter of intent started to circulate:  Google will aquire for $200 million-ish .  Like most engines, acquiring is part of Google’s big plan.  Monetizing these services with ads typically follows.  With Digg, this might be the biggest purchase yet in terms of mindshare (the previous winner being YouTube, but this was a bit befor YouTube was the bohemeth it is now).  Google bought Picasa, Blogger, Writely, and several others.

Digg uses Microsoft now for ads.  I’m not sure if they’re still using Federated Media in conjunction.  Obviously, MSN gets pushed out of the plan when Google steps in.  Plus, Google will likely start importing its other products and technology into Digg.  My question is, on the heels of my last post about Google’s social interface (that’s now testing), how much of Digg will go into Google’s search engine?  Is there technology that Google can leverage, or is it just simpler for Google’s engineers to develop it themsleves than shape to fit?  Maybe the Digg brand is the real driver.  When you think of social in any sense, you think of Digg (definitely not Orkut).

I think it all sounds pretty, well, normal, but I hate to see the purity of Digg disappear.  It’s a little like a big business swallowing up a pioneer, like record labels did with the Sex Pistols, or Wawa did with my favorite corner store.  No matter what good comes from the big, new, shiny neighbors, some of the charm is gone in this independent social-space neighborhood.

A little bittersweet for me, I guess.

Image from web connoisseur.com

A couple people in the agency were blessed by Google today.  They got to try out a new social-driven interface.

This could be huge.

We knew Google was coming with something like this.  Once you’re logged in with a google account, you’ll have the options to remove listings you don’t like, change the orders, voting, add comments, and more.  PLUS - there’s a link that you can see how OTHER people organized the search for themselves.  Sound like tags.

Will the voting affect the natural search?  I have to think it might… since Google always says they’re about recommendation signals.  But would a thumb’s down hurt your rankings?

I also have to think that the traditional relevancy will stay very important to Google.  They put too much stock into their algos, and this kind of social search could be gamed.  But looks like the SEO 2.0 philosophy is going to start paying off.

Click here to see the new interface.

Click here to see the social part (a little buggy yet…)

More on TechCrunch.

Here’s a relatively light-hearted post at Stage Two Consulting about what Social Media actually means.  I enjoyed the frustration, because sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t see the wildly rampant (and growing) misuse of this term in some of the forums, blogs, etc.  In my case, frustration loves company.  I found the post, and the comments, to be useful… like a support group. 

I think Amanda Vega made a great point in the comments. 

As SEO takes the (long) corner, and the web matures, there’s always going to be a need for reshaping.  SEO has a funky name in some circles, mostly from those who lump all the bad in with the good. To me, the things that really stood out about SEO were the connections it could make to people who are specifically looking for connections, and the idea of actually helping engines be more, well, human.  Humans helping robots helping humans.  It’s not as noble as DMOZ or Mahalo, but stands to work much, much better.

So last year, as SEO 2.0 started to make some noise, and the basic concepts started to bubble up, I was hooked. I took it to my agency. I define my consulting around it. I adore sites like seo2.0.onreact.com (who in true SEO 2.0 spirit are bringing the SEO community together with requests for definitions) who work at getting this new philosophy out into the SEO space. Maybe one day fewer people will look at SEO less as spamming, or a ‘throw darts at a map’ tactic, and more as an actual attempt to improve user value legitimately, and bringing to life the legend of storybook search engine goals.

Here’s an easy SEO tactic.  It’s one of those, “Hmm- why didn’t I think of this before” type of moments for most people when I share it.  It’s easy, but it’ll have more branding power than actual “algorithm influencing” power.

So we know that getting links is mucho importanto.  But think about this - if you’re signing up for anything social these days, you’re creating a “profile page”.  These profile pages are nothing more than websites to search engines, and they compete on their own in the SERPs.  Links back to your partner site not only count, but the better your profile is optimized to be relevant to your partner, the MORE that link counts.  Since your profile page could theoretically now get served more often for targeted queries (because of good SEO), you’re casting a larger net in search engine land!  Your new listing can accompany your main listings, and give a little more branding and mind share.  Remember, a high presence in search engines semi-conciously tells people that you’re important because the great Google says so.

You just need to watch for results.  You want to make sure your profile page doesn’t trump a BETTER landing page, like one on your actual domain.  The profile pages won’t do much for your SEO goals, unless your only goal is getting any kind of SERP exposure.

Let’s say you have a progressive client, and have a Twitter account that you’re running them (or Facebook, or any blogging platform, etc.) - or maybe this is something you want to do for yourself and your LinkedIn page.  Optimizing their profile page, and targeting the kind of audience that best suits you, may really help get you more interest and traffic out of the SERPs.  Get some good keyword research going, and spread your profile around through links, comments and signatures.  With SEO, sometimes the little things go a long way.

Wiep is a cool blogger.  About a year ago he experiemented on his SEO blog with something I was intrigued by.  He linked to a Matt Cutts blog post that was playing with the spammy phrase buy cheap viagra online to make a point.  The post wasn’t exactly optimizing for this term - Matt was using it as a sample, and other commenters were having fun with it.  In the end, the phrase was repeated several times.  In Wiep’s post, Trust + keywords + link = Good ranking (or: How Matt Cutts got ranked for “Buy Cheap Viagra from a year ago, he noticed this, and decided to link to the page in his blogroll with that exact phrase as his anchor text.

Damned if Matt Cutts didn’t briefly rank third for buy cheap viagra online.  Briefly.

I remembered this post because Wiep followed up on this post - Viagra Link Test: One Year Later.  Looks like the ranking is back.

The basics of SEO sort of explain this.  Authoritative sites, with trust, reputation, etc., and PR from external sources gave Matt this ranking.  But where’s the relevancy?  What about those other 200+ factors that we webmasters/SEOs don’t know about?  They don’t seem to be in play here, unless there’s something about Matt Cutts and Viagra that we don’t know about either.

Maybe this is isolated to a small percentage of fringe cases, but with all the webspam out there still (even though it has gotten much better in my opinion), you’d think Google would have this sort of catch for this.  Something’s clearly not working.  In the original experiment, one link pushed this ranking to #3.  Now, with at least one current link still to this page, is this really enough PR to rank the term?  Does this mean external links might just have too much power?

I remember rumors of Page Rank being devalued even more.  I forget where I heard it.  It was months ago.  I thought it was a good idea, and this experiment reinforces it.  Trim back the external, and maybe turn up the internal.  Here’s why I think this:

1.  Link Spam, which is now out of hand with all the other spam , could drop.  So should bad link bait, comment spam, and pay-per-posts.  Ugh.  This won’t be going away as social media just gets bigger - nope, the reverse will happen.

2.  Engines would be forced to retune their overall algorithms, instead of putting thumbs in the dyke (hey, Microsoft - this isn’t working for Windows, either, by the way…).  I think a retuning could lead to a whole new property value.  I think the web is just about done with Google 1.0, and demanding Google 2.0.  It’s going to happen, so let’s get to it.

3.  Engines could get more semantic.  If they’re ever going to start serving human language outside of the box, they need to start reading human language.

4.  Speaking of human - the human element may come into play even more than before (c’mon Google, you can afford it… I’m not talking Mahalo, but kick up the hand-work a few more notches, if only to catch these kinds of algorithmic slip-ups).

5.  Not all webmasters are SEOs (most of them aren’t) - they’re trying to create sites that are user aimed, even if they’re not exceptionally good at it.  So giving extra attention to internal linking efforts in order to show the pages that webmasters think are good.  Aside from the splogs/trash affiliate sites, etc., most spam tactics are outside of internal linking.  Even if they start to spam internally, Google algorithiims should still be able to discount thin value.

With the surprise news that Adobe hooked Google and Yahoo up with a special reader for the spiders (which allows the engines to parse the .swf files and index/follow deeper content), does that mean the SEO’s PE special weapon can be abandoned?

I’m still going to stick with it for a while for my SEO blog and my clients’ sites. Google is adopting the reader first, and has technically been lightly reading some flash files already, but anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows that a lot of these properties launch with half-powered products all the time. Their track record isn’t stellar, so why not a ‘better safe than sorry’ approach?   I don’t think I would consider dropping PE until at least a few more months after MSN jumps aboard.  I’m not sure I would cease building products for the PE method (depending on the cost vs. value), and simple on-page coding is so easy - it seems like a no-brainer.

What about the other engines that will never be this advanced?  Do you care about them?  In preperation for vertical and social searching, I think it’s wise to consider what they could become.   I think this news is going to spark a huge influx of flash sites, but I’m thinking this still seems like a bad idea.