No Joke: SEO and Panda
April 1, 2012
Another lesson for the SEO mavens. Search Engine Journal presents “The One Question Google Panda has Taught Us to Ask Ourselves.” The question suggested by the article: “am I adding value?” Hmm, that’s actually a very good query, and one that could render the whole SEO field moot. Perhaps the Panda is working as designed; could it be?
Writer Eric Siu seems to think so, and that this is a good thing. He emphasizes:
The time wasted trying to figure out how to manipulate the system would probably be better spent on creating something remarkable for users. Besides, who doesn’t like the added benefit of engagement and new relationships from great content? From becoming a better writer to establishing your brand on other Web sites, the benefits are countless.
What a novel concept.
I wonder, though, how many search engine optimization professionals will take Siu’s advice. They have built their careers on gaming search engines with such tools (ploys) as keywords, anchor text, and link networks.
As Upton Sinclair famously declared, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Cynthia Murrell, April 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Another Poobah Insight: Marketing Is an Opportunity
March 21, 2012
Please, read the entire write up “Marketing Is the Next Big Money Sector in Technology.” When you read it, you will want to forget the following factoids:
- Google has been generating significant revenue from online ad services for about a decade
- Facebook is working to monetize with a range of marketing services every single one of the 800 million plus Facebook users
- Start ups in and around marketing are flourishing as the scrub brush search engine optimizers of yore bite the dust. A good example is the list of exhibitors at this conference.
The hook for the story is a quote from an azure chip consultancy. The idea is that as traditional marketing methods flame out, crash, and burn, digital marketing is the future. So the direct mail of the past will become spam email of the future I predict. Imagine.
Marketing will chew up an organization’s information technology budget. The way this works is that since “everyone” will have a mobile device, the digital pitches will know who, what, where, why, and how a prospect thinks, feels, and expects. The revolution is on its way, and there’s no one happier than a Madison Avenue executive who contemplates the riches from the intersection of technology, hapless prospects, and good old fashioned hucksterism. The future looks like a digital PT Barnum I predict.
BrightEdge: Confusing Search and SEO
March 17, 2012
Little wonder that there is massive confusion about search and retrieval. I noted “BrightEdge Raises $12.6 Million to Fund Market and Company Extension.” The cash alone deserves attention. What threw me for a loop was this passage:
BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises…
I checked my Overflight file which monitors search and content processing companies and there was no information about BrightEdge as a vendor of search and retrieval. I looked at the company’s Web site and learned that the firm is a search engine optimization outfit. I don’t have reservations about the upside potential of helping outfits get traffic from Bing, Google, or Yandex. I do think that the use of the word search is darned confusing.
As an side note, Google’s public announcements that the company will alter its search system is likely to give some of the search engine optimization experts either a new lease on life or a reason to look for a job as a WalMart greeter.
SEO, in my opinion, erodes relevance. Precision and recall to an SEO expert who has a degree in home economics means traffic to a Web site. But does a searcher today know or care? Nah, it’s the Goldman Sachs-type excitement that matters.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Existential Crisis in the SEO Field
March 11, 2012
SEO is trying to preserve its credibility and relevance in a shifting world. Search Engine Journal asks, “Is SEO Really SEO Anymore? Index Search Down 50%, Apps and Social Search Exploding.”
Search engine optimization, a young profession (compared to, say, farming or tax collecting) is going through an existential crisis. Why so soon? Writer Gabriel Gervelis explains:
“An earlier post of mine for SEJ stated that index search is down fifty percent. Search has moved to sites like Wikipedia and other popular content sites. Search in the app store is up. People have made a the statement that they prefer branded content from apps they trust, rather than sorting through links on a SERP [Search Engine Results Page]. “When the term ‘search engine’ is actually in your job title (or at least in your job description), that’s a change that demands your attention.”
Indeed. Gervelis wonders how SEO professionals will refocus their efforts on social platforms and mobile apps. For the first, he suggests, they will have to invest more in the end user’s experience. As for the apps market, Apple’s recent acquisition of app organizing tool Chomp highlighted the importance of the apps revolution in Gervelis’ mind.
In the end, the article ponders: is even the title itself, “search engine optimization expert”, obsolete? Marginalized, for sure.
Cynthia Murrell, March 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Ontoprise GmbH: Multiple Issues Says Wikipedia
March 3, 2012
Now Wikipedia is a go-to resource for Google. I heard from one of my colleagues that Wikipedia turns up as the top hit on a surprising number of queries. I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I don’t trust any encyclopedia produced by volunteers including volunteers. Volunteers often participate in a spoofing fiesta.
Note: I will be using this symbol when I write about subjects which trigger associations in my mind about use of words, bound phrases, and links to affect how results may be returned from Exalead.com, Jike.com, and Yandex.ru, among other modern Web indexing services either supported by government entities or commercial organizations.
I was updating my list of Overflight companies. We have added five companies to a new Overflight service called, quite imaginatively, Taxonomy Overflight. We have added five firms and are going through the process of figuring out if the outfits are in business or putting on a vaudeville act for paying customers.
The first five companies are:
We will be adding to the Taxonomy Overflight another group of companies on March 4, 2012. I have not yet decided how to “score” each vendor. For enterprise search Overflight, I use a goose method. Click here for an example: Overflight about Autonomy. Three ducks. Darned good.
I wanted to mention one quite interesting finding. We came across a company doing business as Ontoprise. The firm’s Web site is www.ontoprise.de. We are checking to see which companies have legitimate Web sites, no matter how sparse.
We noted that the Wikipedia entry for Ontoprise carried this somewhat interesting “warning”:
The gist of this warning is to give me a sense of caution, if not wariness, with regard to this company which offers products which delivered “ontologies.” The company’s research is called “Ontorule”, which has a faintly ominous sound to me. If I look at the naming of products from such firms as Convera before it experienced financial stress, Convera’s product naming was like science fiction but less dogmatic than Ontoprise’s language choice. So I cannot correlate Convera and Ontoprise on other than my personal “semantic”baloney detector. But Convera went south in a rather unexpected business action.
Exogenous Complexity 4: SEO and Big Data
February 29, 2012
Introduction
In the interview with Dr. Linda McIsaac, founder of Xyte, Inc., I learned that new analytic methods reveal high-value insights about human behavior. You can read the full interview in my Search Wizards Speak series at this link. The method involves an approach called Xyting and sophisticated analytic methods.
One example of the type of data which emerge from the Xyte method are these insights about Facebook users:
- Consumers who are most in tune with the written word are more likely to use Facebook. These consumers are the most frequent Internet users and use Facebook primarily to communicate with friends and connect with family.
- They like to keep their information up-to-date, meet new people, share photos, follow celebrities, share concerns, and solve people problems.
- They like to learn about and share experiences about new products. Advertisers should key in on this important segment because they are early adopters. They lead trends and influence others.
- The population segment that most frequents Facebook has a number of characteristics; for example, showing great compassion for others, wanting to be emotionally connected with others, having a natural intuition about people and how to relate to them, adapting well to change, embracing technology such as the Internet, and enjoying gossip and messages delivered in story form and liking to read and write.
- Facebook constituents are emotional, idealistic and romantic, yet can rationalize through situations. Many do not need concrete examples in order to comprehend new ideas.
I am not into social networks. Sure, some of our for-free content is available via social media channels, but where I live in rural Kentucky yelling down the hollow works quite well.
I read “How The Era Of ‘Big-Data’ Is Changing The Practice Of Online Marketing” and came away confused. You should work through the text, graphs, charts, and lingo yourself. I got a headache because most of the data struck me as slightly off center from what an outfit like Xyte has developed. More about this difference in a moment.
The thrust of the argument is that “big data” is now available to those who would generate traffic to client Web sites. Big data is described as “a torrent of digital data.” The author continues:
large sets of data that, when mined, could reveal insight about online marketing efforts. This includes data such as search rankings, site visits, SERPs and click-data. In the SEO realm alone at Conductor, for example, we collect tens of terabytes of search data for enterprise search marketers every month.
Like most SEO baloney, there are touchstones and jargon aplenty. For example, SERP, click data, enterprise search, and others. The intent is to suggest that one can pay a company to analyze big data and generate insights. The insights can be used to produce traffic to a Web page, make sales, or produce leads which can become sales. In a lousy business environment, such promises appeal to some people. Like most search engine optimization pitches, the desperate marketer may embrace the latest and greatest pitch. Little wonder there are growing numbers of unemployed professionals who failed to deliver the sales their employer wanted. The notion of desperation marketing fosters a services business who can assert to deliver sales and presumably job security for those who hire the SEO “experts.” I am okay with this type of business, and I am indifferent to the hollowness of the claims.
What interests me is this statement:
From our vantage point at Conductor, the move to the era of big data has been catalyzed by several distinct occurrences:
- Move to Thousands of Keywords: The old days of SEO involved tracking your top fifty keywords. Today, enterprise marketers are tracking up to thousands of keywords as the online landscape becomes increasingly competitive, marketers advance down the maturity spectrum and they work to continuously expand their zone of coverage in search.
- Growing Digital Assets: A recent Conductor study showed universal search results are now present in 8 out of 10 high-volume searches. The prevalence of digital media assets (e.g. images, video, maps, shopping, PPC) in the SERPs require marketers to get innovative about their search strategy.
- Multiple Search Engines: Early days of SEO involved periodically tracking your rank on Google. Today, marketers want to expand not just to Yahoo and Bing, but also to the dozens of search engines around the world as enterprise marketers expand their view to a global search presence.
All the above factors combined mean there are significant opportunities for an increase in both the breadth and volume of data available to search professionals.
Effective communication, in my experience, is not measured in “thousands of key words”. The notion of expanding the “zone of coverage” means that meaning is diffused. Of course, the intent of the key words is not getting a point across. The goal is to get traffic, make sales. This is the 2112 equivalent of the old America Online carpet bombing of CD ROMs decades ago. Good business for CD ROM manufacturers, I might add. Erosion of meaning opens the door to some exogenous complexity excitement I assert.
Faking Out the Panda: Crazy Notions
February 19, 2012
More baloney from the desperate world of tricking Google. Search Engine Journal offers an “Easy Way to Understand Google’s Panda.” Writer Melissa Fach reproduces here an infographic with this introduction:
There are so many myths out there about Panda and what it means. This infographic from Single Grain makes it very easy for you to understand what Panda is, what can hurt your site, link building tips and offers suggestions on what to do if your website was affected.
This graphic actually seems to do what it claims, and the pandas in it are quite cute. However, we maintain that trying to outsmart the Panda is a waste of time and energy, and adds no value to the Web community. Better to focus on providing original, quality content that actually brings value to your site’s visitors.
Nothing tricky about that. Why not just write interesting and useful articles? We just do our thing at Beyond Search. Geese, not pandas too.
Cynthia Murrell, February 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Engine Optimization Billing
January 7, 2012
I saw a graphic which purports to answer the question, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” The guts of the write up is more along the lines of how a client pays for the allegedly high-value, must-have ministrations of SEO experts. Here’s an example:
cost-per-project is the most common pricing model and is offered by 70% of the agencies and consultancies surveyed. A monthly retainer was the second most common cost model offered (60%), followed by hourly rates at 55%.
The big summary of data explains what services the alleged experts offer the clients who pay. The bulk of the work appears to be involved in making recommendations and suggesting key words. Okay, librarians, are you on alert. SEO experts are recommending key words. I wonder if home economics majors, those skilled in political science, and various unemployed high school teachers are trained in indexing? MBAs? Hey, MBAs are born able to manage anything. Key words are a piece of cake. Just look at the indexing of Lehman Brothers’ and BearStearns’ content.
But the big factoid in the write up is the Monthly retainer section. One learns that the fees are in what is “buy a Toyota Camry” range; that is, hundreds a month to $2,501 to $5,000 a month range. The use of blue bars without “real” numbers makes this observation suspect, but I concluded that with advisory services and some key word fiddling, a good salesperson could snag six or seven clients a month. Even at $2,000 per month, the enterprising SEO expert can move up to a baby Lexus.
Project pricing is, it appears, mostly in the $1,500 to $7,000 range. My hunch is that projects drag out over several time chunks. The hourly rate section pegs the experts in the $75 to $150 per hour range. Compared to blue chip consulting work or expert witness work, SEO experts are billing at a rate which probably keeps the lights on and maybe makes it possible to enjoy a holiday each year.
The infographic suggests that making a living as an SEO expert is possible, probably not particularly easy. Worth checking out the chart if you are in the SEO game. No information about the productization of the alleged SEO services. That would be interesting to me.
By the way, the “real cost” of SEO is the friction added to the spending of Bing and Google to deal with the craziness, spoofing, and coding horrors the SEO clan visits on the hapless residents of rural Kentucky. Google’s Matt Cutts has a job because of SEO. SEO costs a great deal of money, and when I consider how relevance has become a thing of the past, SEO has consumed more dough than it has generated for those looking for on point information.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Quote to Note: Perfect Search Engine
December 28, 2011
I find the search engine optimization blogs entertaining and humorous. The writers go through amazing gyrations, often suggesting that “real” SEO pros should tie clicks to money. Yep, great idea. But the theme that causes me to chortle is the message, “Content is king.” Yep, great idea.
Navigate to “Search & Mobile Marketing Trends: SEO Apocalypse 2012”. You will get a shovel full of SEO goodness. But the point of the write up is secondary to this quote to note. The speaker is top Googler Larry Page. He allegedly said:
“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want,” according to Google CEO Larry Page. Generalized search tactics become even murkier as results become so individualized to time, place, preference, and personal social trends.
Yep, perfection. But what does “perfect” mean? Ad revenue? When SEO fails, there is the life saver of Adwords I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, December 28, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Good Content Should be Paired with SEO
December 24, 2011
Today, almost everything is accessible through the Web. Therefore, many companies utilize Web advertising in the form of SEO to increase Web traffic to their sites. Read Write Enterprise recently posted a video that addresses the importance of pairing good content with SEO strategies in the post “Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO.”
In the video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, answers a question about SEO practices and whether “poor” sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google. Cutts states:
Just because somebody dots every i and crosses every “t” and gets all their HTML structure right, doesn’t mean that it’s good content. Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it. In fact, Google tries to make it so that sites don’t have to do SEO. First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.
While Cutts emphasizes that Google wants to reward companies for providing good content, he also makes it clear that to receive the best results, you should work to make that compelling content accessible through SEO. If Google didn’t recognize the importance of SEO, why would they have AdWords?
Jasmine Ashton, December 24, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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