I’ve been spending my last year working in an agency in Philadelphia. I don’t get out nearly as much as I used to, and as a result, was totally oblivious to this great group of local interactive marketers. I hope to meet them soon. My new friend Chris Phillips invited me to the Internet Marketers of Delaware Valley. Affiliated with that is Search Camp Philly, a great sounding weekend for $21.00. Wow. I might have to leave Disney World early for that. Wife would kill me though…
I don’t feel so alone anymore! I know I have a couple local readers to my new blog. Definitely check this out.
update -
Wow. A lot of things happened since this post. First, I’m no longer married. And second, Cuil is dead. Finally went off line at some point in September or October 2010. I didn’t even notice.
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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).
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
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.
Bill Sebald - Ex-big agency guy, now focused on helping small and medium sized business. I've been practicing SEO since 1998. I started the SEO practice at a major digital agency owned by eBay and helped develop SEO products for one of the largest ecommerce platforms. I'm a proud member of the Philadelphia SEO scene. I'm passionate about search, writing, UX, CRO, and psychology in marketing.
Hang out with me at the SEO Grail