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Debunking 8 SEO / SEM / SMO Myths

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

I've not updated this blog in a bit, and frankly coming across this post from Peter Shankman, and The Oatmeal's latest concoction of "hits-so-close-to-home-it-would-hurt-you-if-it-weren't-presented-this-funny," it's put me in the mood to make a few points on some things.

Here are a few popular myths, some of which may not have yet been given a good poking at:

01. Myth: Being really social online is the mark of a Social Media Marketing expert.

Prelude: "Those who can do, those who can't teach." (Yeah, it's a dogmatic adage but please bear with me for a moment...)

Fact: Socially, people usually converge and carry themselves online as they to offline, for the most part. Being really social online might make you Type A, outgoing or friendly, and it might even make you an evangelist (not to be confused with a promoter / guerilla cheerleader). It does not however, necessarily make you an influencer to any degree i.e. someone who has experience in methodically generating customer acquisition, if not at least traffic / buzz, without spending money on advertising. Beyond the obvious PR considerations, that's the real point of social media marketing. Principally, while it can often be about building relationships it's much less often about making friends, and in any case it's about doing a job. It's about doing things that help elevate companies' business, directly and/or indirectly. It's about getting customers and/or things that help make it happen such as measured, increased brand visibility and Web presence, paying mind of how social campaigns can easily and/or frequently crash and burn, or yield marginal returns (e.g. traffic, nonetheless limited actual leads).

Some of the smartest social media marketers I think I've ever known keep at least relatively low profiles. They don't spend a lot of time Tweeting or proliferating photos of themselves getting drunk at conferences (not that that doesn't have its place within limits), some don't Tweet at all, and as far as I can tell keep relatively small and tight, trusted personal and professional circles. They often don't like to spill the beans into the blogosphere when they find tactics - whether new or old - that are working for them because they don't want it ruined and rendered useless fast by copycats jumping all over it. They like to make a point of not spending their whole lives online, as well.

02. Myth: Having well-ranking personal sites is the mark of a good SEO.

Fact: Not all experienced professional SEOs spend a lot of time building up their directly-owned domains. Not all SEOs can technically be presumed to even have them (though it's highly unusual). Not all SEOs are self-employed affiliate marketers. Being an experienced SEO isn't the same thing as being an experienced self-promoter. Sometimes it means one has spent most if not all their career promoting not their own stuff, but that of others. Often, it moreover means one has spent much more time doing some things within the field of SEO than in others.

At the time of this writing, this blog's Google PageRank has dropped to "Unranked" / 0. Maybe it was something I said (Were I to ever get into any debacles running my mouth about something online, this would probably be the place). Maybe its PageRank will return in a couple days or weeks. Or maybe I need to audit its outbound links to see if they're pointing to places that might now be considered "bad neighborhoods." Or maybe it's just that I've only a little over a hundred inbound links to it, only a portion of which are passing PageRank and few if any of which contain keyword-targeted anchor text. Maybe you get the point.

That said, short of disclosing confidential information of course, all successful SEOs should obviously be able to speak to online successes they've had, demonstrate their expertise and/or be willing to have it measured and tested.

03. Myth: Being a frequent blogger is the mark of a good Social Media Marketer.

Fact: One can be a good social media marketer without blogging frequently, if even at all. When I first heard that statistics started appearing about a year or more ago that the blogosphere's growth was starting to slow, I was kind of glad. We're not living in the Information Age anymore. We're living in the Noise Age. There's a ton of great stuff on the blogosphere, but much of it is also a big echo chamber with - to put it diplomatically - spatters of spam. There's something to be said for publishing not just to uniqueness, but quality over frequency or quantity. Just sayin.

04. Myth: When it comes to building links, old-school methods like dofollow link exchanges and forum signature links are useless and have been for years.

Fact: Quite the opposite. Devalued, sure I'd normally say so... but last I checked, valuation of links was one of the trickiest and most nebulous things one could try to tackle in SEO. The point is, if one just buckles down and does one's homework, sure it's laborious and "low-end" but it can also be helpful, sometimes surprisingly so.

I do totally concur with the idea that one great link can trump a thousand not-so-great links. I'll also say however, that in recent weeks for one project, I took a site optimized for a particularly targeted and competitive keyword from the bottom of SERP 6 to the top of SERP 3 for that keyword on basically just a partial-weekend's worth of targeted link exchanges (start to finish). From there, I took it from the top of 3rd SERP to the bottom of 1st SERP over a week or two of making occasional postings in forums. These are all ranks that have been holding consistently, moreover, as served to searchers nationwide. Was making this happen particularly intellectually stimulating? No, but because all the domains involved had a reasonable amount of trust, history and unique, relevant content all in between, it got done. There probably wasn't a single domain involved without a PageRank of 4 or less BTW. Nonetheless, having improved ranking on the keyword has, for the one I was building links to, become pivotal for growing and sustaining its profitability.

05. Myth: SEO should be a strategic priority for everyone trying to build a successful site.

Fact: Not if the larger online marketing strategy doesn't include developing substantial content and domain(s) history, it doesn't. For example, I've occasionally had folks come to me asking about SEO with sites built mostly or all in Flash, which in some cases where basically campaign properties meant to drive traffic to something that lacked temporal permanence, an event like a concert or a movie or record release. Thinking about SEO is due diligence for online marketing. It's not something everyone needs to make a top priority of. Maybe it's taboo for me, a guy who sells SEO services, to say it. It doesn't make it any less true.

06. Myth: Search marketing, whether paid or organic, is all about catching existing demand and not about generating demand.

Fact: This can be true in strict theory, but that theory is so strict that it discounts the increasing intersection between SEO, PR and Social Media marketing. I mulled over this occasionally in recent months, after one brief discussion with a couple people working for a pretty hot company (and I do use the phrase very, very rarely) who posited this basic notion. I thought it had merit as a thoughtful point at first. Upon thinking critically about it at the application / production level afterward (where real work gets done), I have to call it at best heavily caveated, at worst significantly flawed and ignorant. It's the kind of thinking that can come off as authoritative and decisive to all sitting around a management table, nonetheless is dismissive enough to be strategically errant in leading to missed opportunities. There's a reason we have such a thing as "linkbaiting," even if for most of us 9 times out of 10 it doesn't automagically work if even at all. The best linkbait generates not just links, but also demand, because when people choose to link to something there's a chance they did so out of it being something they liked enough to want to see more of (and will hope for, from the found source).

07. Myth: SEO and Affiliate Marketing should be segmented / sandboxed, never mixed.

Fact: That's up to every advertiser running an affiliate program to decide for themselves. Keeping tracking between channels and campaigns clean isn't the same thing as blatantly ignoring or disregarding potential cross-channel benefits. Myself, whenever I'm working on the advertiser end, even though my main concern when working with affiliates is direct conversions I'm nonetheless extremely interested in the organic quality of their sites. Worst case, if a given individual affiliate sends me few or no customers but is still sending me link juice, that alone can still be worth keeping him or her in the fold. Plus, think about it this way: When both advertiser and publisher can each walk the walk (not just talk the talk) in a given arrangement, sometimes it can go a long way in building a potentially valuable relationship.

08. Myth: Having any kind of certification from Google makes one a good SEO, and/or is directly representative of any degree of substantive hands-on, real-world Search marketing or Web Analytics experience gained.

Fact: Google's Professional Certification Program for individuals and companies is for demonstrating proficiency in using Google's advertising platform (AdWords) and related services such as Google Analytics, Conversion Optimizer and Website Optimizer. Prominent members of the SEO community have occasionally openly and freely admitted that they're "terrible with PPC." I've been doing SEO and PPC since 2002. I didn't pick up my AdWords Certification(s), fortunately passing each respective test on first attempt, until just within the past week or so. Late bloomer perhaps, I'm nonetheless happy to have finally gotten it done.

* * *

Fact: This post technically contains far more opinions than facts.

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On SERPS ROI Quantification and Paid Links

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

In a guest post for Search Marketing Standard recently, Jaimie weighed in on the topic of microanalytics citing an e-commerce example, noting referral data can be used to map things like order values to SERP result numbers.

Though it's not quite to the degree of what Google has allegedly done internally... assign actual dollar values to individual organic positions as part of both selling and supporting AdWords... the basic premise of SEO being great ROI is more than just sound. Egghead's example shows how, with a bit of work, operational value can be directly attributed to an individual businesses' organic search strength. Those who are familiar with the more generalized facts about click shares (e.g. that the top 3 positions take >40%, etc.) do well to take things to the next level of wiring all the data together.

Moreover, it further validates the idea of links themselves as the key component of organic ranking carrying equity... That paid links are increasingly being put to the death grip doesn't negate that. It just means that compared to a year or three ago paid links have become riskier to try and harder to get any traction from (along the way, notable consultancies and customers who've been monitoring their returns over time have been gradually moving on more to other methods).

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Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

There are many rehashed posts on the blogosphere about misc. SEO 101 practices. When it comes to robots.txt matters, typically they cover topics like this:

  • Disallow vs. the essentially non-existent "Allow"
  • Directory vs. file exclusions
  • Global vs. agent-specific exclusions (ordering, which wins if both are used)
  • Wildcard matching: valid vs. invalid, supported vs. unsupported
  • HTTP vs. HTTPs
  • subdomains vs. canonical domains
  • "friendly" vs. "unfriendly" 'bots (allowing vs. blocking / blocking n' trapping)
  • vs. the meta name="" tag (which wins if both are used)
  • vs. security (how it's not a method, but can become a liability)

etc.

However, not a lot has been discussed to my knowledge about how to view robots.txt from a competitive SEM/SEO perspective specifically. A couple years ago, Graywolf discussed PPC Quality Scoring considerations related to robots.txt, and how to sandbox a site's normal vs. campaign landing pages nicely between algorithms that determine organic ranking vs. paid positioning (affecting metrics such as Minimum CPC, CTR etc.).

What happens however, if one is in a very headed competitive SEM/SEO environment? Or, looked at it another way, are you monitoring your competitors' robots.txt files? You should be. It's a common mistake to presume that only Webmasters who are total douches make disclosure slips in their robots.txt files such as disallowing private content that for whatever reason isn't (yet, ahem?!?) not protected by a username and password login. Beyond that, Webmasters sometimes list semi-private locations in their robots.txt files, such as the very examples in Michael's post.

On more than a few occasions, I've found my competitors maintaining a nice, tidy list of all their misc. campaign landing pages in their robots.txt files. When that happens it's a great way to weed out landing pages that might otherwise not have been found, such as obscure creative tests they may be running and/or designs they've tested in the past. Sometimes, sniffing competitors' robots.txt files can lead one to discover whole new components of their developing online marketing strategy, e.g. "Oh, wow! Look who's starting to target the Spanish market all of a sudden!"

Part of the deal is that robots.txt instances are content management issues unto themselves. Keeping them updated, properly synced with site content, is enough work as it is for many if not most site managers. Some Webmasters keep fully optimized about robots management do pay their dues (making very, very careful choices about how to use robots.txt vs. metadata in managing indexing vs. crawling (semantic flow) vs. caching, and put in the work on their builds accordingly)... but they are in the minority.

Join the minority, and let's go hunting.

Posted in Strategy, Tactics, Tools | No Comments »

In Defense of Click Fraud

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Whenever someone talks of click fraud, it conjures images of sweatshops staffed by low-cost third world labor... rows upon rows of computers operated by undernourished kids without shoes, repetitiously and mindlessly clicking away on Google AdWords and AdSense ads and what not.

I tend to be satisfied with working PPC from the advertiser and WH end of things, so can't speak from any kind of first-person paid search gaming perspective and won't try to form an opinion on how much of the popular perception is fact vs. fiction. However, I do have some thoughts on the whole angle that's related, of mechanized vs. natural-looking click activity.

Part of the popular notion of click fraud is rooted in the idea that it's better to have humans doing it than machines, so as to pull it all off under the engines' radar. While that's a logical idea obviously, at the same time it's worth noting that various commercially available SEO/SEM tools are increasingly coming out with "human emulation" features, i.e. ways to randomize their request operations and the rest periods in between. Therefore, it's a given that savvy developers running their own private tools (homegrown scripts) are already doing these kinds of things in combination with handy things like rotating proxy arrays, so this is one detail where the mainstream concept of click fraud breaks down.

The Devil's in the Details

On the larger level, the mainstream concept of click fraud also breaks down when we consider the potential for different scenarios. In other words, habitually treating click fraud as if it's invariably unethical is just like habitually treating cloaking as if it's invariably unethical. Dogma becomes a crutch; a short-cut around critical thinking either way.

A Hypothetical Situation

You're a marketer working under contract for Warner Bros., checking on your PPC competitive landscape for one of your projects DoingTheSmurf.com, a popular Smurfs (80s cartoon and comic book) fan site, as you do every day/week. All of a sudden: Shit. Even though your client is the registered owner of the trademark, here's an ad from some thin affiliate pseudo-spam site at ToonAttack.info... and then another at SmurfSaysWhosYourPapa.org... and then another at SmurfetteTease.com ...all of which are displaying "doingthesmurf.com" in the headlines/titles and/or other parts of their ad text! What's more, they're dabbling in displaying variations thereof such as "Doingthesmurfs" and "Doingthesmurf Com", and to top it all off they're doing this across Google, Yahoo! as well as MSN.

Naturally, the first thing you do is file a complaint about the parasites' infringement on your client's intellectual property, directly with the search engines. At the same time, you alert the Legal department, but you know they're going to struggle because steps have been taken to hid tracks. The squatters' sites tend to be just spam, ranging from crudely obvious to well-masked, laced with ads... and the Contact Us links on them lead to bupkis. Same thing with other things that are on the sites made to make them look legitimate, such as the unauthorized instances of VeriSign and BBB validation badges etc. ...When you check their WHOIS you find that half of the sites' domains were registered privately, and the other half has visible entries but all the info is (illegally) fake e.g. "First Name: Ima, Last Name: Playa" etc. ...Clearly, you and your Legal team will have a bit of work to do if you want to track the party crashers down yourselves.

At about this time...

  1. The Google rep assures you they're going to look into the complaint you filed, even though technically they're in Sales which is a different department of course... Also, it might take a few weeks for anyone who has any decision-making power on such disputes to actually read and/or act on your complaint.
  2. Yahoo replies to the complaint you filed with them via a canned email response that basically amounts to "Thanks. We'll look into it. Maybe we'll find something, maybe we won't. If we do find something, maybe we'll do something about it. Maybe we won't. In the meantime, frankly we really aren't in control of our stuff nowadays quite as much as might be ideal so now more than ever, we'd appreciate it if you could please consider us liable for jack when it comes to this kind of thing. O, and you won't hear from us again on this matter. Have a nice day."
  3. Microsoft, is seemingly asleep at the wheel as far as Customer Service goes, in keeping with your past experiences with them. The closest thing to a real rep you've ever gotten from them is on vacation, which isn't noted on her voice mail greeting but is noted on her email auto-responder. Her "In event of emergencies, please contact..." reference, their email address bounces back as invalid when you try. When you try their supposed phone extension you can't leave a message because their voice mail box is full... All this because, y'know... Microsoft naturally remains a desktop computing Goliath but is still catching up with all this Web stuff.

You're disappointed in the lack of support and responsiveness, enough so that your regard for the networks' TOS is compromised, at least until this is resolved. Until then the situation is intolerably corrupting your client's brand integrity, confusing their prospects and customers, and negatively impacting their traffic so ultimately their revenues. You're a skilled developer, at least moderately. What are you going to do, sit on your hands for a few weeks or more waiting for the large corporations you spend your advertising dollars on to get around to your issue? Of course not. You're going to take matters into your own hands teeth.

GNAPP!!!

By the time the week is out, you're going to be biting the bottom-feeders on the ass where they're not looking, and automagically clicking their ads into oblivion every witching hour, working stealthily efficiently. By the time they get into the office each morning, and before the majority of the human users they're targeting will be awake even (general geo-targeting can be easily determined e.g. [Pacific/Mountain/Central/Eastern] time zones vs. others), their daily budget and will have been already maxed out. "If only I had more money to spend!" they'll be thinking... Alas they won't, being bottom-feeders and all. Nonetheless, they'll sit happy as clams thinking they're getting awesome click-through rates. From there, it's just a matter of time until the engines finally put in the rules to protect your brand(s). You might need to play a bit of Azrael-and-Smurf with the illegitimate advertisers, but the chances are the bastards may not be paying attention much. It may take them a while to realize that their conversion rates on your branded keywords are specifically and suspiciously low, even if they manage to do so before their infringing ads get banned. For a temporary exercise in defense, to you, the end justifies the means.

The Moral of the Story

Yeah, I know what you're thinking...

"Two wrongs don't make a right."

The adage still has its place of course, but whomever came up with that idiom lived in simpler and less subjective times. In a competitive online business environment, sometimes one has to be more like Hammurabi.

The point is not that I'm literally advocating click fraud. The point is most of the SEM/SEO world, though it can be easy to label black or white at first, upon inspection and in the real-world trenches it's often more just shades of gray. Moreover, as for the direction of the gradient from dark to light or vice-versa, often that just depends on one's positioning and vantage point on it, in whatever given scenario.

"G'NAPP!!!"

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Wired 16.01: The Data Wars

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

OK, I know this article came out over a month ago so I apologize for commenting on somewhat old news. Anyway, my comment here is brief:

It's a good piece however like before, it's interesting to see Wired put out a well-rounded article on a subject yet while maintaining apparent ignorance of SEO respectively (no mention was made of it whatsoever, even though some parts of SEO very much involve scraping... Sometimes tons of it).

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Gmail's Big-Ass Button

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

The world of how to balance usability with tasteful design and also conversion optimization is a constantly fascinating one. It's an area where one can run a lot of creative tests and have a lot of experience but still end up surprised at which test one, yet one often consistent theme is how often it helps to really create as much intuitiveness and simplicity as possible... i.e. to the degree that what might seem boring, ugly or rude from the producer's perspective is actually needed from the user perspective. One of a Web marketer's hardest jobs is to practice learning to get over themselves - and to learn to trust both indirect and direct intelligence (site/ad-side reporting, industry benchmarks, statistics and other data) - in striving to find "what works." With very, very few exceptions... you are not your audience and you never will be, so you realistically only can have so much instinct for how to put yourself in their shoes.

Case in point: One thing that took me a long time to warm up to was the idea that users often need big-ass buttons, as a very clear way to keep their eyes on the desired action. Personally I find large buttons easily gaudy, yet time and again marketers produce test results showing that they can make a world of difference.

Check out the latest update to Gmail's main page. Even if you're a long-time Gmail user just looking to look up your stuff, you simply can't help but notice that the main thing that's on Google's mind here, in this test that they're running, is the importance of driving acquisitions:

Gmail's Big-Ass Button

Google is a great behemouth in terms of how much data they have at their disposal, to help them make smart design decisions, so count on this being a pretty calculated experiment on their part... (and if you're like I used to be and are still holding dogma against big buttons - welcome to the club of the respectively schooled).

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Playing 21: SEO Domaining

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

21 Tips on domains, domaining and SEO:

  1. Domains and portfolios thereof are like fine wine. A lot of it, purchased originally with foresight and then aged over time, is a very good thing.
  2. Domains are like real estate. There's varying quality and limited inventory, so demand can be high and the competition aggressive... (and yes, to-day I'm shamelessly not posting much beyond my own expansion on Quad's earlier list, and drawing on a couple unoriginal analogies in the process).
  3. .com, .org, .net and country-specific TLDs can have weight for ranking whereas all others are much, much weaker.
  4. Newly registered domains are not trusted by engines for a trial or sandbox period that can last months.
  5. Expect that recently-dropped domains are put on a probationary period by search engines to limit their value to spammers
  6. Some recently-dropped domains are "damaged goods" and/or may have a shady past, so use archives to try to look into that.
  7. Aside from branded domains, keyword-rich domains can help.
  8. Use alert services e.g. ClubDrop if watching for certain keywords and/or key phrases.
  9. Consider the value of snagging visitors with easily-made typos, and what one can do with Typo Generators and/or Wordtracker in hand. Try to nail typos that you've verified are happening in the real world. Don't think this is a big deal? Try any easily-made typo of one of the largest sites on the Web, and see where it leads you... You might not want to try this while at the office. 😉
  10. Use reservation services if hoping a registered domain will be dropped and up for grabbed, i.e. not renewed upon its next expiration date.
  11. Own your brands(s) and variations thereof thoroughly. If planning to go international, learn per-country requirements and register early on.
  12. Don't forget how vanity domains can make for brand impact, and keep watchful for situations where you should get creative. See where you can go applying this concept to TLDs as discussed in the previous item. If you see great chances which don't have hurdles aside from price, you may end up doing something kinda special. Be sure to send me letters of spanks, anyone who runs with this approach and finds it fruitful.
  13. Know registrars and their reputations well, e.g. Godaddy vs. Registerfly etc. - check customer references. Some registrars are huge beasts that have large, robust infrastructure but a habit of treating loyal and paying customers poorly and/or being real fascists with SEOs especially. Others have a reputation of looking other way re. things like spam content remixing but still treat their customers poorly. So ask around.
  14. If hosting externally, never have that ISP double as your registrar (in case of disputes with that ISP). The last thing you need is some situation where there's some dispute tempting a host to hold your domain(s) hostage as leverage, because they happen to be able to.
  15. Buy in bulk, and watch for discount offers (coupon codes) to save money.
  16. Assume that search engines and other people are reviewing your WHOIS information which BTW can never be fake details, legally speaking. Keeping your WHOIS current is your responsibility, but forgetting to sometimes does happen. Also, use private registrations to avoid solicitations if unwanted, and/or general privacy. If people really want to get in touch with you, they probably will still find a way to do so.
  17. Never leave registered domains sitting just pointing to default park pages. In each case apply a simple "Coming Soon" page that has at least some relevant content on it, until your new site and/or targeted landing page is ready.
  18. Mind redirects and URL rewrite rules - issues of duplicate content (manage canonicalization) in cases where you're focused on promoting (1) main property. Engines need to be clearly shown it, whenever a rose by any other name is still a rose. As for (segue) when trading in domains with other registrants...
  19. Get them appraised through a mutually-agreed method and/or service between buyer/seller.
  20. There can be a fine line between a transaction and a dispute. Know who trademarked vs. registered first etc. details, but keep solicitations to buy/sell friendly (carrot before the stick). Negotiating a deal can take a while.
  21. In worst cases when claiming domains from others, squatters or otherwise, use arbitration services and/or your lawyer. Know your rights and those of others in detail.

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Myspace, Meet SEO 101

Monday, August 13th, 2007

To-day one of the profiles I manage there was down for a few hours, for "routine maintenance." Shortly afterward I noticed a couple changes on Myspace worth noting:

Their robots.txt file changed since the last time I mentioned it, moreover this change happened just to-day actually. I know this because to-day I was, pseudo-paranoid that I am, looking up my temporarily-downed profile in archive.org in case for some off-the-wall reason I was about to lose it (I've heard of people losing profiles innocently on occasion). In the morning I was able to get to some older caches of it, yet now at nearing 11pm Pacific time it's no dice: They have now at last issued their first 'bot block, and it's of ia_archiver.

My guess is this is to make it harder for spammers or or other undesirables to scrape content, for generating profiles and/or restoring banned content in fresh ones. The other big reason to do this would be user privacy issues. Pretend for a moment that you're a female Myspace member being harassed by an ex-boyfriend (statistically a cyber-stalker would probably be male). You're pushed to extreme measures and delete your profile(s) altogether. Here raises ye olde SERM quarry: Is it deleted everywhere, truly wiped from the face of the 'Net into a sheltering oblivion? Maybe, maybe not. Depends how it was removed, and whether someone copied it down first even if it was removed thoroughly upon being subsequently cut.

That's the best theory I have for the reasons behind a change of this ilk. Anyway, despite whatever higher purposes this one inhibits me from illustrating something else of interest (though many active Myspace marketers will see this next one plainly upon checking), also a change at least somewhat recent:

They are also making progress with adopting basic tagging standards, by now making profile TITLE tags more descriptive. This is happening now with both regular user and band profiles. Not long ago, if you has one of these its title would just mirror your custom URL, e.g.

<TITLE>www.myspace.com/yourURL</TITLE>.

Now though, if you have a regular user profile it's something more like

<TITLE>Myspace.com - yourName - yourAge - yourGender - yourCity, yourState - www.myspace.com/yourURL</TITLE>.

The same principle applies if you have a band profile. In that case, your new tag template is

<TITLE>Myspace.com - yourBand - yourCity, yourState - yourGenre1 / yourGenre2 / yourGenre3 - www.myspace.com/yourURL</TITLE>.

Obviously this item is also a simple but very significant edit. It helps to reduce duplicate content issues some, to be sure. If you've ever tried to find someone on Myspace you probably already know it used to be pretty difficult sometimes. Various parameter values can be shared limitlessly and logically. But now, Presto. Pinpointing people - or at least who/what they say they are - on Myspace, and also searching for such profiles within Google and other engines, just got a whole lot easier. On sites as huge as this, there is no such thing as a minor SEO change really.

It looks like Myspace may be taking a few SEO 101 lessons from Google since buddying up with them. Or perhaps, certain SEOs now within the FIM ranks (you know who you are 😉 ) are behind these gradual however serious improvements.

Ironically, the TITLE tag changes actually make it easier for targeted social marketing or other structured, granular queries in some ways. To target specific demographics and point-of-interest indicators, scrapers now don't necessarily need to look to the Myspace domain itself anymore. Now, when one wants to do simple filtrations like weeding out a solid sampling of 30 year-old males in San Francisco for example, one can just use Google operators.

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New to Me Bag

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

After playing coy on the subject of Keyword Research in my last post addressing tools, here's a follow-up with some of what I've been into lately - various tools, resources and such.

1) SEOmoz's Juicy Links Finder, of course. If you haven't at least heard of this in recent weeks, you've either been under a rock or (good for you, actually!) taking some time off from the Web for a bit (and Hell, its End of Days is upon us anyway). Their list of suggested directories is a nice complement to that, and also similarly concerned, previously unveiled compilations such as those by Aaron Wall and VileSilencer.

2) GapMinder World. This is a very high-level data tool / toy offering variable metrics through which some interesting correlations and contrasts can be viewed. As I tend to work pretty tactically moreover almost totally in strictly Web contexts routinely, I don't see myself making much use of it professionally... Regardless, it's a must-tinker for those who enjoy information, especially demographical and technical, as a way to stay in touch with and understand one's world. For example, one can see how on the global scale, in consideration of our CO2 footprints and GNP per capita, we Americans could be argued as being literally filthy rich (individually, that is). On the African continent by comparison, people are dying more and younger. If you're reading this you probably take note of data enough to have already known the fact... but there's nothing quite like having ways to view data visually that drives the power of sheer numbers home.

3) A couple of popular and/or industry-topical blogs and other social sites into which (as I recently realized) one can drop comments instantly and very easily that include links without forced NOFOLLOW. Hints: One is all about Social Networking and another is a new site dedicated to Search. 😉

4) XSS Attacks - Cross Site Scripting Exploits and Defense: The most recent addition to my library of tech reads. I'll comment more once into it more deeply, which will be soon: I've been looking forward to this.

5) Saving the best for last: AutoMate. As an Analyst and otherwise I find this a hands-down kick-ass application for anyone needing to mechanize structured, repetitive tasks. I've only been using it a while but its got essentially limitless potential. After only hitting the tip of the iceberg with it, I've done more already than literally cut entire days of work out of my average week, freeing myself up to focus on things that actually involve primarily my brain instead of my hands, all the time. Some of the ways it can be used to dissect how sites' logic roughly seems to work for example, is quite cool. For those to whom "work smarter, not harder" equates to laziness being best practice, and also for those with agendas of boosting productivity, around-the-clock profits, reducing human error potential and staving off RSIs (repetitive stress injuries), this is a killer utility - and, a tool being a tool, as a powerful one it can be used for both innocent and dark things. I also highly recommend it to managers who are having trouble hiring people nowadays (of whom there are many). If you're finding yourself wishing you had more junior people on your team to bear the brunt of the A, B, Cs so you can focus on X, Y and Z, this kind of thing may cause you to re-consider if you really need to use a headcount for such or even at all. Lastly, this tool can also raise the bar on contexts like "I need a (better) developer to build me a (blank)." With just a basic grasp of fundamental programming concepts e.g. looping, also attentiveness to detail, patience, creativity and imagination - A lot of things can be done with this that even some really great programmers would find challenging to pull off coding tools for from scratch. I very rarely come across a software product that radically changes my direct game, enabling me to seriously scale, speed up and tighten my work. As an intuitive custom 'bot and/or workflow builder this most definitely qualifies, so from here on out I will continue logging many hours in with it routinely, across as many machines as I can run my custom routines on. It doth hit a few snags sometimes particularly when working with the Web, but the amount of babysitting it needs is usually acceptable. What it can't fully automate can usually be at least partially covered (so far, it seems), despite how every situation is different which puts it at the mercy of what's machine-readable or not, and how if/as so (e.g. trying to unleash it on AJAX or Flash apps). Anyway, at work and at play, let a new level of focused and orchestrated Web Ninpo begin!

That's some of what's been my bag lately. What's been yours?

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Do as I Say, Not as I Do

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

About a week ago a lot of bloggers were up in arms about Yahoo of all people committing a bit of cloaking.

When things like this happen, sometimes it's just a reminder that nobody's infallible, even those who set the guidelines against which many marketers work.

However, sometimes it's something else. With the complexities of search, advanced work sometimes comes down to consciously committing certain acts that would otherwise normally be flagged as worst practice. N00bs should note that "Do as I Say, Not as I Do" comes up in search marketing from time to time, in association with this.

Take for example this image. It's from this page from the site of SMX, the new event series kicking off next week in Seattle.

Looks like a classic mistake: text as an image needlessly, right?

Wrong. It's not walking out on a weak limb to assume this most likely a very conscious site building decision.

The giveaway is in the site itself, and who it's catering to: Advanced search marketers. So of course, the team building this site wouldn't be caught with their pants down doing something like this. Calling them on it would be like the first-year music theory student who struts into class one morning proclaiming

I found a mistake that Bach made!

only to find the professor's reply is

Bach was one of the people who pioneered and wrote what eventually became the rules. What you found was not a mistake, but part of that process playing out.

Having this bit of text as an image helps preserve a bit of confidentiality and/or juice exclusivity. Unlike how content related to speakers and sponsors is presented, it helps avoid passing casually content love between the SMX brand and those of the attendees.

Simple, subtle, effective.

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