Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Brett’s is one of the first to test this theory pushing “all-in” Te-has hold ‘em style by banning all bots.

I think this is another evolution that Google doesn’t realize that they have created yet. Google and Yahoo both realized relatively recently that Bigger is not necessarily better and G has removed their McDonald’s-esque penis index size measurement numbers.

I think I’ll give up SEO and become a VMO (viral marketing optimizer). Give me two heavily distributed pages among a target audience versus several dozen dispersed among an untargeted audience any day. It’s about acheiving relevance and conversion by better undersanding your goals or prospects not unquantified volume for the sake of it. The methodology and intuition of acheiving this is the mark of the SEO.

I think I may have to start jumping on more timely topics in the future, and just archiving the REALLY good stuff in a special spot for future reference. This is pretty much an unfinished thought, but decided to post a handful of things today.

Thanks to Rand for pointing me in the direction of the staff of Fortune Interactive (including Andy Beal, and Mike Marshall). SEM Logic is a brilliant piece of programming done by a guy nice enough to talk to me for 25 minutes even though he knew I was just “kicking his tires” (and I really dislike when people to me).

How sweet is it to be able to conduct semantic analysis on and off pages. Really nice graphic and statistical implementation of SEO principles. What could be better than this? It’s a brilliant piece of technology from someone who has been trained to reverse engineer scientifically and take a lot of the guesswork (gutfeel) out of the optimization process. Very nice work that I’m sure would be very useful data to near any site.

Among other things, the software is able to give information on:

• Document relevancy and
• Supporting terms relevancy
• Competitive analysis

This in and of itself doesn’t really do the tool justice, and information can be gathered for both on page AND off page optimization. If you could benefit from this software (and aren’t just a filthy tire kicker like me) be sure to give these guys a jingle.

Disclaimer: This is not an advertisement, just being non-biasedly impressed with both someone’s SEO knowledge and application and business acumen.

There were no secrets online today. There was only the decentralized arguements of expertise from a community of folks who has been entirely educated in our field online. All the secrets have been “vaulted” for use from a different perspective for another day, or I am not qualified or willing to speculate on them. My apologies to those who were hoping to get rich today on SEO tricks, I cannot help you in this capacity. This is a difficult and rewarding sport and occupation. It is marketing. It is business. It is technology. It is principles of art and science applied to a new medium. SEO is the optimization of all things internet for increasing online visibility. It is OVO. Online visibility optimization.

Tomorrow there may be some new revelations in the internet marketing community, but today there were no secrets. I swear it…or at least I agreed not to blog them. I wish you luck finding the secrets to your internet millions online tommorrow.

There have recently been interesting examples of how there are still holes but they are fairly technical and closing windows of opportunity, though there are certainly still opportunities for SEO soldiers of fortune.

Maybe some day I will stop being a blogger and actually employ a trick or two so I can tell people a REAL secret, until them I am left studying how to create better .htaccess and dreaming up ways to develop user generated content and chasing the dreams of web 2.0. I hope there are some secrets tomorrow.

Roger “Martinibuster” Montti was kind enough to give me a bit of his time to run through some of the recent issues on marketing on the web and it’s evolution. Hope you’ll enjoy the read.

Todd:It was nice to get a chance to hang out with you a bit and talk links and search at WMW X in Vegas. What were your major takeaways or confirmations from the conference?

I was way sick during Vegas so I missed most of the sessions except my own. But one thing I noted from speaking with others attending the session was the need for one way inbound links has grown a hundred fold since Jagger. Reciprocal link exchanges have started smelling like last weeks fish to a lot of people for many different reasons.

Strange because at the beginning of the year everyone from all shades of hats were loving reciprocal links, and when I posted on WMW that reciprocal links were not strictly white hat, nor were they approved by Google, I had to pull a NEO from The Matrix to dodge the pitchforks and kitchen sinks whizzing past my head.

So I would say the major takeaway is that a great many people, compared to the beginning of this year, are reconsidering reciprocal linking. Not necessarily giving it up, but being more thoughtful about it and being open to alternative strategies.

Todd:I get pretty tired of the “type X links are dead” discussions myself. Do you think there is still the opportunity to “game” the system with different types of links, and how much longer do you think that will last?
There is definitely wiggle room for self-promotion. Some of it is hard to trace, while the other part comes simply from designing a site around a niche chosen around its ability to gain links. Then there are proxy sites built expressly for collecting links and good old website buyouts or takeovers.

Todd:How do you think SEO/ SEM will be different one year from now?
Every year we have fads that burn out. Article directory submissions are marching toward a peak right now and should reach critical mass sometime next year when everyone including your grandmother is doing it. Directories in general seem to be out of fashion and should continue to be out of fashion until those creating directories wise up to the value in lead generation. There are a handful of quality directories out there right now, but I would say that the days of visiting your friendly neighborhood list of directories and bottom feeding the cheapest directories are over.

I see the price of obtaining good links going up as it finally hits home that the usual way of doing business isn’t working anymore. And while the days of the low paid link monkey are maybe drawing to an end, hopefully it’ll give rise to a smarter monkey, even if it costs more, although at that point why not hire someone locally off the college campus?

I tend to see link development now as an alternate form of advertising with less direct correlation to results (when purchased mainly to increase rankings). Do you still buy links for their value to search engines, or just for the clickthrough?

I think many people buy it for their search engine value, though there are always those who like to measure the value of their investment. The metrics can be how high your site gets bumped up to traffic to conversions.

Todd:What is your favorite approach for buying links?
Attaining them outside of usual channels.

Todd:What effects do you think personalized search will have on SEO?
No effect in the near term. People just want to find stuff and Google’s search box on the home page of their Earthlink start page or the Yahoo’s main page will do fine. I just don’t see people finding value in Google’s homepage thing or Yahoo’s 360 where someone is going to go out of their way to register for that stuff and then take a half hour to figure it all out. Yahoo’s approach is closer to the Web 2.0 ideal with the collaborative aspect of it, but I think that kind of community has to be built from the bottom up, like MySpace.com. That is where tomorrow’s wallet is spending their time.

My brother’s teenage daughter was IMing me the other day asking how to hack her high school’s firewall to get to MySpace.com. Now that’s a community member! I don’t think anyone’s hurting to get to Google or MSN’s start page, lol. So I’m not convinced, despite Yahoo’s head start with my.yahoo.com, that personalized search is going to go anywhere in the near term. It’s too top-down, you know what I mean? Nevertheless, there’s still some innovation to be done in terms of Vista and OpenOffice, etc. so the book isn’t closed on personalized search.

Yahoo just snagged delicious which is something you’re probably going to see more of in the future, instead of building to compete with them. As those communities are brought together then maybe we’ll start to see more of the personalization. But you have to remember that depending on user generated content and signups can be subject to manipulation…

Todd:What would be your 5 minute advice to a prospect with a new site?
This will sound boring, but it’s about offering community, deep information, user reviews, user interaction… that kind of thing. CitySearch, Amazon, and TripAdvisor are all over that. It’s a good model.

Todd:I’ve been saying a lot of the same lately. I still feel like I sound as though I’ve been drinking the web 2.0 kool-aid. Do you think Google has set the barrier of entry for new business on the web too high, or is it the right decision for low value add ecommerce and affiliate sites?

If a local auto repair shop throws a site out there hoping to get some business, he may be out of luck because Google has no way to gauge, at that moment, that the site is legit. He’s just out of pocket for site design fees until his site meets Google’s criteria for a legit site. That’s sad and too bad for Joe Repair guy.

Of course, there is another way and that’s to proactively market the site, which they should have planned on from the beginning anyway. So part of the problem is a sense of entitlement regarding free traffic that is getting in the way of making viable, and realistic, marketing decisions.

Even if you’re bumvertising, do whatever it takes to get the job done. Look at that Golden Palace and the streakers they sent to sports events. That’s an extreme example, but there are other things people should be looking at apart from search to get the job done, including online classifieds, news releases, cultivating deals with other site owners.

Todd:What are the 5 most important considerations for an average site for improving their SEO?
No SEO.
Make your site a destination. This is more important than many people realize.
Think viral.
Add community
Get some press, get the ball rolling on notoriety

Todd:Do you think the Whitehats have won?
Building a site for users with quality content and all that is a great thing. Anything that can pass a hand check and represents a step forward in giving something of value to site visitors is cool. I am 100% into that.

But where some Whitehats fall down is in the idea that certain methods for promoting a site can be considered Whitehat. A lot of these people, most of what they ever stood for was along the lines of what they didn’t stand for, what they didn’t do. They would say things like reciprocal linking is good, as long you exchanged links with quality sites and never used software and did it mostly for the traffic- without ever considering that Google’s guidelines never explicitly (nor implicitly) recommends reciprocal linking.

Some of the Whitehat arguments remind me of statements like: you’re not a slut if the guy you’re humping is your steady boyfriend, that kind of silliness. But here’s the line in the sand: Almost anything you do beyond making your site spiderable and making sure your keywords are on the page is going to be spam.

Todd:That’s a very good point. I’ve always considered myself a “lighter shade of grayhat” because I couldn’t really identify with either side. I agree with a lot of what whitehats have to say, but it seems to be taken to an extreme for sometimes.

Todd:Will Google consume us all?
Didn’t they say that about the Roman Empire?

Todd:What new technology are you most excited about?
Ajax! It’s the Dynamic HTML of the new century! …Actually, I don’t care about technology. I’m more focused on trends.

Todd:What trends are you currently most concerned with or excited about?
User generated content, building communities around an old idea presented in a fresh way. Local search. Viral blogs. Things that bring people together. If there’s a way to tweak your site to bring people together, that’s interesting, if it can be done profitably.

Todd:What are your favorite blogs?
Webguerrilla’s blog is exciting. You never know what he’s going to maim or praise. His logo is blood red for a reason, lol.

Graywolf’s blog is the product of a mind on the prowl, good stuff.

Your blog has some cool tool stuff. Why bookmark them when I can just go to your blog?

Added post interview by Todd - Thanks for the plug dude!

Pizzadeliverydrivers.org is great for a reality check.

Adverblog.com is cool.

Tech Confidential over at http://blogs.thedeal.com/ is interesting, too.

Todd:How’d you get the name Martinibuster and where can folks find you?
My blog can be found at martinibuster.net. If you need a site review/hand check, consulting or whatever, you can email me at RogerATMartinibusterDOTCOM.

As for my nick, I wanted to ask a question over at WMW and had to pick a name quickly because it was getting close to happy hour and I was anxious to run out the door for a martini at my favorite dive. So martinis were weighing heavily on my mind at that moment.

Thanks for a great interview, and the chance to swap some memes in Vegas. Cheers to your continued success.

Mr. Ploppy returns…briefly anyhow.

SEO toolbox is probably a bit more fitting, since I would guess most everyone on the panel did very little PPC work. Perhaps some PPC tools would be nice next time.

Thanks to all the other great panelists. If you were at the session, and have feedback, I’d be happy to hear it.

Bill of MarketNet
http://www.optilink.com
http://www.optilinksoftware.com
http://www.ranks.nl
http://www.combinewords.com
http://www.urltrends.com  
Lists:
http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/
http://www.seotoolset.com
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools
http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/
     

Paul works with Bruce
http://www.ratemyhost.com/
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
http://www.blocklayer.com/googlesitemap/
http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm http://www.mytrashmail.com/Keyword_Generator.aspx
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://www.backlinkanalyzer.com/
http://www.prase.us/
Lists:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/tools.htm  
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ 
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/directory/
http://www.webseodesign.com/seo-tool-chest/
http://www.seotoolset.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/  

Ken
of Epair
http://www.roboform.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox
SEO Extensions: SEOpen, Web Developer, Search Status, SEO Links, Aggregate Yahoo!
& Google, Customize Google 
Others: PDF Download, Googlebar, AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox, Search Keys,
IE View
http://www.webceo.com/
http://www.clicktracks.com/
http://www.marketleap.com/  

Todd of We Build Pages
http://www.whois.sc
http://www.dnsreport.org
http://www.ip-report.com
http://www.googspy.com
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchproxy
http://www.openproxies.com
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
http://labs.google.com/sets
http://www.gorank.com/seotools/
http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp#sitemap-generator-updates

Lists:
http://www.stuntdubl.com/tools
http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/

Jim of WeBuildPages
http://www.waybackmachine.org
http://www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp
http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/
http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/hubfinder.php
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go
http://www.dead-links.com/check_links.php
http://www.copyscape.com
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

What is a scraper site

Question from client:
What do you make of this site?

Whats the purpose?

My response:
It’s what we call a “scraper site”

Designed specifically to game adsense and make money
from clicks. It’s an evolution of the escalating information arms race between spammers and search engineers.

They “scrape” the title and descriptions for the search top 10,20, 50 search results and spit it out to a webpage. There are LOTS of variations of this technique, and one of the reasons I worry so much about duplicate content, as it’s one of the biggest problems SE’s currently face.

The real question is why google allows them as much as they do, and don’t shut down or penalize accounts that use them. Tin foil hat theory says to pollute yahoo and msn and make extra money from advertisers using content targeting. That and it’s a very new gray area.

This is the darker side of SEO that includes heavy automation of webpage creation for gaming the engines.I’ve heard it joked before that about a couple dozen SEO’s are responsible for 3/4’s of the SE’s indexes…the funny part is that it is probably nearly true (I’ve met a couple of them).

Sincerely,

Todd

The Clone Wars

“DMOZ clones” were among the first “scaper sites”. They rendered “common backlink tools” much less useful, as any site that is listed in DMOZ would show up on many of these clone sites. They also pollute the search engines. The engines have managed to get rid of most DMOZ clones, and are doing better on ridding themselves of scraper sites, but it is still a hotly debated issue that probably isn’t going to go away completely anytime soon.

I think G has realized that some things that seem detrimental may have certain benefits associated with them as well. I’m sure the web spam team doesn’t like scrapers (and I agree with them), but if they investors (or board for that matter) knew about them would they really care, or would it be seen as a nice added short term revenue stream? I won’t add fuel to the tin hat fire, but I don’t think scrapers are all that different than click fraud, when left to the eyes of someone outside the search space (especially if they see THEIR ad on a sh*t site). It’s going to take a long time for the ROI of advertisers to dip low enough for them to realize all the trash that they don’t need to be paying for shouldn’t be considered a cost of doing business.

The Rules of SE Ambiguity

Duplicate content and scrapers are going to be ongoing concerns with the search engines for quite some time. As aggregation becomes more and more simple, so does abusing the uses of aggregation. Button pushers are testing the limits all the time to establish thresh-holds. This is also why you won’t get black and white answers from webmaster guidelines. They are not going to tell you anything even remotely close to variable threshholds. Google and Yahoo are not going to tell you that you can copy up to 20% of content and not get kicked. Then nearly every page on the net (or at least in SEO-land) would have 19.9999% dupe content. Most likely, this is not how the content is filtered anyhow. It’s more likely that “overlays” and pattern matching are used.

Don’t be collateral damage

Understanding how duplicate content filtering works is important to those that are legitimately aggregating portions of content on their site. You don’t want to create a problem in the engines, just so your users can read CNN headlines on your website. Try to keep the content as unique as possible, and you won’t end up as collateral damage.

Unique content also poses an interesting question. What is “quality content”? Do you need to be Harvard educated to write a piece on the sociological implications of search on the political structure of our country? If I mention Harvard and big three and four syllable words, will the assumption be that my content is fit for college graduate readership, and thus deemed higher “quality”?

What’s Your Site’s Reading Level?

My guess is that as the benefits to being more relevant improve for the search engines (there are certainly arguments against why efficiency is not currently in the SE’s best interest), they will get increasingly better at determining “reading levels” of sites. Someone searching for information on investing in a stock portfolio or 401k plan will not want to read an article written by a high school dropout, or click through a strange looking page with ads at the top to get to what they are really looking for. Whenever you are pondering a subject like duplicate content, you have to assume that at the very least G is three moves ahead of what you are thinking. What are their next three moves AFTER duplicate content detection? Think ahead, and you won’t be worrying about increasing your site’s reading grade level in a year, or talking about the “11th grade penalty vs. filter”.

Scraper Site Discussions and articles:

• Duplicate content detection articles courtesy of Marcia
• What is a scraper site? - WMW
• Content thieves - by Lee Odden
• How to prevent scraper sites - WMW
• Can your content pass a hand check? - martinibuster
• Scraper sites are good - WMW
• Scraper sites are good for you - martinibuster
• Is submitting to DMOZ worth getting scraped? - WMW
• Scraper sites and google adsense - WMW
• Scraper clearout collateral damage - WMW
• Google funds information pollution - SEOBook
• Google duplicate content filters - SEOBook
• Spam justice - scraper sites generate $$$ - TW
• Should search engines return to hand checking? - TW
• Scraper site link building strategy - SERountable
• Anti-scraper rally cry -TW
• 10k scraper sites -seomoz

Book: Marketing Warfare by Al Reis and Jack Trout

Subtitle:
A Guide to Marketing with the Assistance of Karl von Clausewitz

Topics:
-Marketing
-War

Interpreted Thesis:
The principles of marketing are like the principles of warfare, only the battleground is in the mind.

Marketing battles are fought inside the mind. Inside your own mind and inside the mind of your prospects every day of the week. The mind is the battleground. A terrain that is tricky and difficult to understand. The entire battleground is just 6 inches wide. This is where the marketing war takes place. You try to outmaneuver and out fight your competitors on a mental mountain about the size of a canteloupe.

A marketing war is a totally intellectual war with a battleground that no one has ever seen. It can only be imagined in the mind, which makes marketing warfare one of the most difficult disciplines to learn.

Extended:
Marketing Warfare is broken into about 3 sections in my mind: the history of war, principles and strategy, and applied theory. Strangely, it was only upon completion of the book that I realized just how good it was. I am quite glad that I stuck with it. I was tempted to write it off as another old marketing book that really meant nothing to current marketing strategy. In the end, I found it was a book with timeless design that is even MORE important in the era of a global economy.

The book starts with a history of war, that bored me nearly to tears, and I ended up skimming through. I may re-read this someday, but just isn’t really my thing. The book continues with the principles of marketing warfare, which I will probably read repeatedly for years to come. This is the gold. As I was initially reading it, it was tough to grasp, but the applied theory really drives it home. The principles applied to big brand warfare show how the strategies effect the outcome on a macro-marketing scale.

I really have to make note of some of the principles here for my own future reference, though by themselves they are not really done justice. If you are in business, SEO, or marketing you should definitely read this book.

There is no such thing as a good marketing strategy in the abstract. Good strategy is bad. And bad strategy is good. It all depends on who is going to use it.

Concepts of Warfare
1. The principle of force
Don’t be tempted by the fallacies of a better product, staff, or service. The numbers most generally win. Math tells us this time and time again.
2. The superiority of defense
A good general never starts a war with lower numbers.
3. The new era of competition
Synonomy of the language of war and marketing.
4. The nature of the battleground
The battleground for marketing warfare is in the mind.

The strategic square
Four types of warfare: Offensive, Defensive, Flanking, and Guerrilla

Principles of defensive warfare
1.Only the market leader should consider playing defense.
2.The best defensive strategy is the courage to attack yourself.
3.Strong competitive moves should always be blocked.

Principles of offensive warfare
1. The main consideration is the strength of the leader’s position.
2. Find a weakness in the leader’s strength and attack at that point.
3. Launch the attack on as narrow a front as possible.

Principles of flanking warfare
1. A good flanking move must be made into an uncontested area.
2. Tactical surprise ought to be an important element of the plan.
3. The pursuit is just as critical as the attack itself.

Principles of guerrilla warfare
1. Find a segment of the market small enough to defend.
2. No matter how successful you become, never act like the leader.
3. Be prepared to bug out at a moment’s notice

Favorite part:

In hindsight, most all of it. This book is like reading about how to shoot a better jumpshot, play better poker, or tie better fishing knots. The excitement is not in reading the book. The excitement comes from knowing that the application of the newfound knowledge will enhance your skill level. When these principles become second nature, I know that I will be a better marketer. My favorite part was finishing and knowing that I would re-read the concepts and ideas many times.

Favorite portions:

Lots of good stories on the cola wars, beer wars, computer wars, and burger wars. These are the applied theory. It would be very interesting to see these concepts applied to the search war.

Application to SEO:

On a macro level - the search war is being fought. Yahoo, Google, and MSN are fighting this war as we speak. In my estimation - Google is search. They have become a verb in the mind of many consumers. The question becomes, is the war really for search, is it for media (which Yahoo has more heavily embraced), or is it really for the living room (which M$ has never stopped wanting).

On a micro level, we are fighting a new type of marketing warfare everyday in SEO. The battle of the SERPS which makes the battle of the mind nearly less important on the micro level. If I want to know about something, I can search for it before making up my mind. SEO is fighting the same battle for the mind one query at a time. Devising methodology to beat competitors and not become collateral damage by search engines are the dilemmas that we face. Developing a niche and sticking to it is what got most people into SEO. It is time to choose and create new sub-niches both within SEO, and within every now globally fragmented industry that is available for business online.

Thanks to Mikkel for pointing this one out over at TW.