Filed under: Industry Stuff by Stuntdubl SEO at 4:48 pm, 5/31/2007
Starting the ridiculous round of investment in such a terrible idea. Continue doing this, and the end will definitely be near. This is so bad I will even give them a link (though I’ve decided it should contain the anchor text “squidoo crackbaby”). Seriously - if you guys are GIVING away money to shit like this, I’ve got an awesome bridge in Brooklyn that we can put google ads on. Scraped content commented on by people who are too lazy to get a real job? I’m sure the quality control level should stay very high, and there will be no incentive for payoffs on terms like “mortgage” (because that never happend on dmoz). Why not listen to some folks that know about search, and social media for investment advice and ideas in the space, instead of a guy with a giant ego that knows how to job jump? This cute little hawaiian phrase is gonna be the pets.com sock puppet of this era. Maybe high risk is good, but putting the money into this project is just the first sign that NO ONE with the money has much of a clue what is really going on, and that they’re only going to learn the economics of search the really hard way. Please stop the madness. I generally try to only write positively - but this was just too much to take without ranting, after all the BS we’ve seen spewed from this man just to get a reaction.
12 Reasons this is the worst idea ever and will never make money
1. No real business model - Adsense is not a long term solution for a search engine.
2. Shitty relevance - just because they’re people - doesn’t mean they’re smart.
3. There is no google killer - there will be one google - at this point, we can only hope to contain them - the barrier to entry is far to high. How hard is it for them to snag and change the best ideas, or worst case, buy them out? Pick a narrow niche, and hope for a buyout, or an area where they’re weak, and get entrenched before they smell ya comin’.
4. Aggregating content is not a $100 million dollar value add - A good programmer will make you a mashup MUCH cheaper, and there is plenty of ways to DIY.
5. This was actually a pretty good idea the first time around - it was called Squidoo - and philanthropic motives helped it to get much closer to a tipping point than this ever will.
6. Just because something is promoted with a negative energy, and becomes remarkable, doesn’t mean it will STAY remarkable and succeed. I might tell people ABOUT it - but not to use it.
7. Paying people peanuts is not going to generate expert content. True motivation MIGHT, but I don’t really see the founder as a positive leader of men.
8. Zero Trustrank (though this can probably be overcome though)
9. G will stop indexing at some point (I hope they have a good PPC person for driving traffic)
10. It’s a squidoo crackbaby - skinny (with content), diseased (with terrible ideas and aweful relevance), and needy (asking for money).
11. Who the hell believes this will be a scaleable solution to good information?
12. There is a name for people who write content on the web - they’re called bloggers, and they can make plenty more money writing on their OWN site, and keeping all of the ad money, once they figure out the distribution channels.
Sequoia’s VC’s are either really really smart - knowing that when people give up on a google killer, it will further inflate G’s stock, or really really stupid (believing that an MFA SE will work). To the other investors - social proof is not always a positive thing. Yes - there are plenty of smart folks on board, but just because Mark Cuban is generally a smart guy and has lots of money, does not mean he is always right.
More (why not listen to people who KNOW about search and what works?)
Threadwatch
Valleywag
Scoreboard - Mahalo Sucks
Tropical SEO
Search Engine Land
MFAhalo?
MFA Hollow?
(Just in case the VC’s don’t get it - MFA stands for MADE FOR ADSENSE - known as a pretty terrible long term business model in the SEO community - next time get a couple of SEO types, the folks who focus on REAL money making models, to give their two pennies if something will work making this kind of impulse buy.)
Filed under: Competitive Webmastering by Stuntdubl SEO at 1:23 pm, 5/17/2007
Search engine optimization is misunderstood and despised by those who have had consistently failed at using it, or have been repeatedly beaten by those who were successful with it. These failures often stem from not understanding the dynamics of the behind the scenes battles that go on for search positioning. It is also a shame to see bright new folks not understanding the field in which they work. It is one thing to be ambitious and competitive - it is quite another to be outright delusional about what you can accomplish. Success is often created by knowing where to start, and how to scale, and which battles will be lost before they are ever fought. A smart general (or SEO) never fights a battle unless they KNOW they can win. This post is intended to be a guide to understanding the fight that takes place for every single search result, and how to know which battles have acceptable odds based on the competition.
Organic search results ARE NOT "free traffic". It is paid for in a much different way, with calculated risks and rewards. You WILL NEVER rank for the single term "mortgages". In fact, I give you very poor odds for every ranking for "Ohio mortgages" unless you are quite proficient at understanding competitive analysis and the playbook for SEO, and executing on the important elements of top rankings.
"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." - Marketing Warfare
SEO can easily be substituted for "marketing strategy". There is no one size fits all solution to a good SEO campaign. Understanding the nature and intensity of the competition is as important as being able to compete for the top spots (Didn’t your mother ever tell you, "you have to pick your battles?) The intensity of the battle will be determined by the other players within the vertical space, and governed by the tactics deemed acceptable and overly aggressive within that marketplace (you’re not gonna rank for "mortgages" without buying some links).
Top rankings will always consist of 3 main points - The old stand bys (content, its’ structure, and inbound links), and one that is being somewhat overlooked as it creeps its way into the search algorithms (legitimate users’ clickstream data that verify the quality and integrity of a website through their actions). These are the goals of any SEO campaign. The methodology for obtaining these goals will never be the same, which is why it takes a creative mind to develop the strategy and understand the tools available to do so.
Concepts of Search Engine Optimization Warfare
1. The principle of force -
"SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them… so hard they f*cking bleed" - quote from DaveN
Aggressive tactics will always win. The main question is how long they will be successful (the risk associated with them). Thinking that a site will outrank others because it is better in terms of content, design, and usability is a mistake made by naive webmasters that have not yet figured out the competitive nature of search results, and their true value. These webmasters overpromise on results due to their inexperience, and this naivete then borders on negligence.
Search results prove over and over that the best sites are not always the top ranked sites. The BEST product, service, or website is NOT always in the top spot of Google. (Perhaps the data borg will someday change this) While we’d like to believe that relevance will be perfect, archaic aggressive tactics can constantly be found at the top of search results, and tend to maintain those high positions for extended periods of time until there is some type of human intervention (in the form of spam reports). This is not a knock on the ever increasing improvements of relevance, but only a caveat to those believing that these tactics will never again be effective, and drink the koolaid that these tactics have been remedied by solely algorithmic means.
2. The superiority of defense -
"Domain names may play a big roll not only in anchor text, but also in overall domain credibility, linkability, and defensibility." - Aaron Wall
Defensible traffic is a concept that will not go away in the world of search engine optimization, and why we will see the love affair between domainers and SEO’s continue to grow. When you’re doing lead generation like a profitable company like Quinstreet, you need to be able to have a thick site that will defend your rankings. A quality branded keyword domain will always be a defensible asset. No matter how algorithms shift, a keyword in the domain will always be effective to varying degrees. A site with thousands of quality inbounds links, or a loyal userbase will always be a defensible asset as well.
Buying a competitor has always been the quickest way to oust a competitor, and this is becoming increasingly true in search results. Even if you are number one on every major term, the other five sites that are consistently in the top ten represent a significant threat to that’s site marketshare (especially if they are truly defensible). Being able to defend with "checkbook SEO" will become increasingly prevalent, and make challenging for top money terms with new sites even more of an impossibility.
3. The new era of competition -
"I just hired a billion linkbuilders and I am not paying them a single cent!" - Brian Provost
Social media being highly effective for developing global link popularity is only one shining example of the battleground being shifted. Emerging tools and technology will shift the battlegrounds even further. Those who understand the strengths, weaknesses, and applications of these tools are the new era of competition within the industries that they affect.
4. The nature of the battleground
The battleground for search engine optimization is top search engine rankings. The stakes for successfully claiming the grounds can be substantial.
The strategic square - Four types of warfare:
Offensive, Defensive, Flanking, and Guerrilla
Principles of defensive warfare
1. Those in the top spots should play defense by constantly repeating the things that got them to the top within the acceptable rules.
2. The best defensive strategy is to try to outrank your own sites with other sites.
3. Strong competitive tactics should always be emulated with improvement or bought.
Principles of offensive warfare
1. The main consideration is the strength of the leader’s position with regards to historical data, user base, linkage, and content.
2. The point of attack should be any angle that the leader is not leveraging - their strengths can be emulated and improved upon once they are in your sites
3. Choose a niche in as narrow a topic as possible to build the site in terms of cashflow for future growth.
Principles of flanking warfare
1. A good flanking move must be made into a niche that has not been discovered or exploited by the market leader.
2. Your site should not be discovered until it is a defensible position within the niche.
3. Learning from the process of high ranking is as important as achieving the top position itself.
Principles of guerrilla warfare
1. Find a search result small enough to make it defensible.
2. No matter how defensible the site in your specified niche becomes, don’t act like the leader of the vertical
Example: When you become number one for "engineering jobs" don’t start emulating monster.com
3. Understand when it is time to move to the next niche, and when opportunity cost outweighs the marginal value for growth. Know when to quit.
The search result wars
Within any search results, there are war stories. Most of these battles are never heard about, seen, or understood, but the understanding of them, and experience in them for those that do is invaluable. These stories and experience are the basis for the future direction of search marketing strategy within many companies, and are shared over IM, and at conferences between those who have built rapports of trust much stronger than any NDA. Some of the more generalized stories, or less important stories come to light after the first few beers at a search conference. Many of the most competitive webmasters have become veterans to certain industries that thrive based off of their search results, and share stories of joy and distress based on the strategic direction decisions made long before the algorithm updates that can make or break revenues for months at a time. To hear your first SEO war story just ask anyone who was around for it how their site was affected by the "Florida update". Then ask them about it’s impact both before and after on their entire marketplace. Welcome to the battlegrounds - please don’t enter until you arm yourself with tools and knowledge.
Credits and thanks.
This post was based around the concepts presented in the book Marketing Warfare which is an excellent read for anyone in the field, and among my favorite books. A big thank you to Mikkel as well, for mentioning it was one of his favorites.
Filed under: General, Pay-per-click by Stuntdubl SEO at 11:55 am, 5/14/2007
If you earned your Google Adwords certification close to when the program was launched, it’s about time to re-take your test, and prove you’re still qualified. If you’re like, me, and don’t do a whole lot of PPC, this could be tough. (I mainly do basic audits as a value add to SEO consulting). I retook the test late last week, and thought I’d put together a quick post on some resources for learning adwords more effectively, and help for taking the test. Many folks will likely be retaking the test soon, since it’s 2 years after the program launched, and it is a requirement to retake the test to maintain your status.
Firstly, you should probably study a little bit. The Adwords learning center is really impressive now. Since I’ve done my fair share of google bashing, I must take this opportunity to say that whoever is in charge of the learning center is doing a kickass job. It’s jampacked with information in both text and multimedia form that is really helpful for improving your adwords skills. There has been a TON of updates in the last few years in terms of functionality, terms of service, and add on tools and services to the adwords program. The learning center really helped me to wrap my mind around some of these that I had ignored when they were launched (hey, they launch something new weekly if not daily - there’s only so much time in a day to check out the new stuff).
Some of the things I learned while studying in the Adwords learning center and taking practice quizes:
- You can use ONE exclamation point in ad text
- You can use superlatives like "best" if they are backed up by a third party
- When you opt-out of the Google search network, your ads still show on Google search results pages, but do not show on Google’s search partners.
- Embedded match allows the ad to appear on all variations of the keyword except for the exact match of the keyword.
- Embedded match utilizes phrase match, exact match, and negative match.
- In order for a site-targeted image ad to appear on a page, its CPM must outrank the eCPM of the top four keyword-targeted text ads
- In Google analytics - Use the Product Merchandising reports to see which keywords resulted in sales of a certain product.
- In Google analytics - Pages with the highest $Index are those pages which were commonly visited prior to high-value conversions during the same visit.
- Tagging your links helps to get information in your reports about your various marketing efforts. Analytics offers 5 campaign tracking variables. The 5 predefined variables which Analytics offers are Campaign, Source, Medium, Term, and Content.
- When editing keywords using the Find and Edit Keywords Tool, the AdWords system considers the edited words as new keywords.
- Site Exclusion is applied at the Campaign level.
- The Keyword Grouper in the Adwords Editor regroups keywords from one ad group into more granular ad groups
Secondly, take all the practice quizzes. The are very useful in gauging the areas you might be weak (I realized there is a lot of cool functionality in G analytics that I hadn’t used at all). Many of the questions are almost identical to these.
Thirdly, when you’re ready to take the test - open a few browser windows. Open your adwords account, the learning center, and a tab or two to do searches. You can find a lot of answers that you may be up in the air on this way. Being able to look stuff up is one of the real benefits of taking a test online. My retention skills aren’t always that great, but my search and find skills rock. There’s also questions about where stuff is in an account that you can double check by opening your account. You can also search for parts of the questions and find them on various google FAQ’s, or look up the respective topic in the learning center which is very well organized.
Fourthly, after studying for a day or two, you should be able to cruise through about 70% of the exam without thinking twice about the questions. However, you need a 75% to pass, so take your time on the rest. In the prometric test, you can mark items for review later. Cruise through the 60 - 70% of the test, and don’t waste time on those you don’t know. Take your best guess, and mark it for later. With this approach, you should be able to get through the entire 111 questions in about 30 - 45 minutes tops. You’ll then have anywhere from 20 - 40 questions to revisit, research, and answer with another 45 minutes or so to finish. Use your time effectively.
You’ll find out your results at the end of the test. I ended up with a 90%, and was pretty happy with that from a couple days of review, and fairly minimal hands on experience.
More resources for learning about effective PPC marketing with Google Adwords:
Do you have any special tidbits you picked up recently on Adwords or PPC in general?
Lawrence Coburn, of 
