One of the minor annoyances with the introduction with Bing is that all the tools currently used has to be updated (assuming of course you care about MSN/Live/Bing for your work). The sad reality of all this is that Google Analytics has yet to update its system to include Bing as a standard search engine–even Omniture has done this!

Maybe it’s Google just thinking “eh, with all the mistakes on it currently, they’ll just rename it again anyway?”

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The Internet has been envisioned as many different aspects since the beginning; starting as an information educational network to an almost anything goes libertarian world. As it has become adopted across the world, various governmental organizations have tried, some with success and some without, to dictate domestic rules across the Internet.

Governmental organizations are not alone in this regard as multi-national corporations have been trying to push governmental organizations or the United Nations to impose rules favorable to the respective corporation that goes against the core of what a libertarian-viewed Internet is supposed to be about. Napster’s free music shut-down, Comcast’s P2P filtering, and so forth are examples of these aspects to re-make the Internet into a more structured system that is (in their opinion) more conducive to business.

It is in this same way Google’s concept that brands are an answer to the Internet not being very conducive for business and thus Google’s CEO calling the Internet a cesspool:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem… Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Yes, the answer was to allay fears over Google trying to take over the role of publishers and advertisers, but instead Google’s CEO let out an interesting view into what Google wants to change with the Internet beyond what Google has already done with its massive permeance (some say monopoly) in search and other online aspects.

The thing is, many people do not always want to do business online and are often looking for information, games, data, forums, etc. that come from random sites that are not brands. In fact, if the site is successful enough, it could actually become a brand from the very “cesspool” Google’s CEO believes to be a problem.

Of course, we still are assuming what Google’s CEO considers as a “cesspool.” Malware sites? Spam blogs on blogger? Thin affiliate sites? There are many definitions that people consider, and for me one of things that I strongly believe is that brands are not the solution. Sure, they can help, but so can random sites that provide just what people need when browsing the Internet. There is no one solution to any cesspool (whether the Internet is/has one or not) when you have both small sites and brand sites doing many of the same things that people find harmful.

When news outlets hype things up without enough information or when every far away local disaster is “breaking news” that has to scroll across the screen, that is a cesspool of useless information that these brands are doing. Even inside of the SEO world with brand sites such as SEOmoz or WebmasterWorld hyping fears of the tests that Google does to its algorithm on a daily basis (in this case the use of AJAX for Google’s SERPs). These sites can provide useful information at many other points but when there is a hyping fear of things without enough proof as news to me that is a cesspool within the Internet that should not rank or show up.

Large and small sites, or brands and non-brands, these can all create cesspools within the Internet, and one should always be careful on believing there is only one answer to everything. It is that hubris that could lead to unforseen consequences that will not benefit Google in the future.

Update at 4:41PM:

The idea of whether Google should fix some of cesspool it has indirectly spawned from its own services such as Made For AdSense (MFA) sites is an idea put forth by John Andrews, but then the question becomes, where should Google stop fixing the web? Paid links, paid posts, and affiliate ads are livelihoods of many people (whether rightly or wrongly) that can and has brought up and then knocked down their living standards.

Regardless of the view on this matter, whenever one company has something close to total control, these problems manifest into greater issues that all sides begin to fear to some extent, particularly when there are black boxes into what goes on behind various search algorithms or when more trust is given to some sites than to others that can be placed solely on one company, whether fairly or unjustly.

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As evident by the latest Googlebomb, “cheerful achievement” that went to the White House website, Googlebombs still work. Previously, as Danny Sullivan somewhat inaccurately noted, Google tried to “defuse” Googlebombing through an algorithm. Google did not kill or defuse Googlebombing, but instead minimized the impact over the long-run (one has to really fine-tune what Google says and not over-react to the meaning).

Nonetheless, with sites such as Wikipedia noting that Googlebombing at one point potentially no longer worked, there was a public relations blitz using the public face of Matt Cutts to talk about how Google really detects Googlebombs through its algorithm. Useful information, but more insightful was two points in the official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Hidden gem #1:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.

Sounds like as long as no sites are talking about a new Googlebomb and the referenced phrase, then any Googlebomb that is kept quiet will still rank until it is publically exposed and that is only if a small number of people are pushing the Googlebomb.

Hidden gem #2:

Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Yet, having sitelinks for non-brand keywords either is Google’s opinion about what site should rank high for or not enough people are complaining/publically assuming what site to go to. Would be an interesting question to learn about from Google.

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If you are interested in some top notch search engine optimization scientists, I recommend reading SEO Theory’s post listing who these SEO scientists are. Mainly, these would be people useful for doing in-depth research into areas for academia (or learning) and heavy-duty research papers above all else.

Just keep in mind that being a search engine optimization scientist does not necessarily mean they would be good at marketing and providing the most efficient bang for the buck.

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The debate rages on within the online marketing community over the benefits or lack thereof over a social media campaign. I had not planned to delve deep into social media marketing, but due to the growing interest around the net, I thought I would provide a social media marketing analysis after providing you some of the talk around the town.

Aaron Wall jumped into the frayed displaying his general antipathy towards the benefits of social media (with a few exceptions):

A pity, then, that social media traffic is so often worthless.

Worthless?

Let’s look at the market signals. Why is it that you pay dollars per click on Google Adwords for financial keywords, yet the same keywords on social networks are priced at five cents?

This suggests to me one of two things. Either the social networks are seriously underestimating the value of their own traffic, or most of the people on social networks aren’t interested in commercial messages. If they were, then the bid values would closely match those of Google Adwords.

I think the latter is the most likely scenario. Social media traffic isn’t priced higher, because it isn’t translating into revenue for the advertisers. This isn’t happening because the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.

The pro-social media side believes that social media marketing is still in the infancy of many online marketers and deserves attention for a variety of reasons.

My feelings on the matter are a bit nuanced considering my strong belief in the ability to accurately track, analyze, and optimize any kind of campaign.

Mainly, we have to understand what the goals are going to exactly be for a social media marketing campaign without which any social media marketing campaign will be an instant failure (no game plan = no strategy = no benefits). Let’s look at some examples of the types of strategies that a social media campaign may focus on:

Branding:

Also known as driving ‘awareness’ about your company or client. These are probably the most difficult kinds of campaigns for any analytics and for any marketer to track to determine success. For the most part, there are no easy ways to determine the value generated from the cost inputted by a social media marketing campaign. Many of the desired measures are calculations that are often not looked at deeply enough by online marketers. Honestly, how many of the online marketers are going to look into whether a social media marketing campaign is helping to improve the lifetime value of a customer (much less take the time to track it)? Furthermore, you would have to base an overall base lift in brand conversions as the benefit in the social media branding campaign as an early indicator of success. For major brands, this is likely to be the value they look at in order to keep up the interest and value of ‘fanatic’ customers who are brand loyal and desire to be involved with said brand. Retaining these loyal customers would be a success in my opinion (assuming the cost-benefit ratio is good).

SEO:

As a Search Strategist, I will have a strong bias here that may effect my opinion in this matter, but will comment on this anyway. To me, if there was any reason to do social media marketing, then it would be doing social media SEO marketing. Period. I believe that using social media marketing (in the right way) for SEO will likely get the best bang for the buck. However, one has to be careful as many of the social media sites have a dim view of what SEO does. Nonetheless, a successful social media SEO marketing campaign would include driving high-value backlinks into the clients’ websites all in an effort to drive up visibility for the desire keywords. Admittedly, clients that are more interesting and able to entice customers to link to odd stuff helps make my life as an search strategist far easier.

Revenue:

If you are trying to generate revenue directly from social media, stop. In fact, you have a greater chance selling those products that “protect” you from electromagnetic radiation than generating revenue directly from a social media revenue campaign. People just do not want to be disturbed or marketed directly in their niche social media club. All the analytics data continues to show that anyone coming from these sites have the greatest bounce rate and lowest time on site from any other marketing channel. The time and effort it takes to “infiltrate” a social media networking or build something for social media will rarely, if ever, be made up in revenue directly from these sites. Indirect revenue, is a whole other matter, but will often lack the analytical capacity to track (exception potentially being about my article on Nuconomy and Social Media Analytics).

Traffic:

This section is more for content-based sites that require eyeballs viewing a page to provide revenue generated through advertisements displayed on a page or in a video. These would be the areas where traffic is not a cost, but an asset, particularly if it leads into branding (eg: getting into the top X number of sites by traffic). Nonetheless, the traffic generated will be of poor quality (one page view, short time on site, with a quick bounce) that may not be worth the cost in the end. Unless the niche market targeted for a social media traffic campaign is large enough, then focusing on social media here may turn out to be Pyrrhic gold.

In the end, keep in mind what your strategy will be for a social media marketing campaign, have an analytics package that will be able to back you up (not necessarily something one has to build), and really, best of luck in getting it to work successfully. The belief in not needing to measure will lead to inaccurate assumptions about the success of a campaign or what you can learn from the campaign as well.

As a side note, if you want to understand one of the reasons for the Dot Com Boom and Bust, it truly was the belief in the following concept:

[Traditional] roi is a financial metric but social media is not traditional.

In otherwords, the online world does not follow the same rules as the “traditional” or offline world. It was a flawed concept during the 1990s and it is a flawed concept still today.

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Personalization and localization of Google’s Search Results are prompting some in the SEO community and those I have met to jump to the conclusion that the checking of SEO rankings is dead. That there is no longer a purpose of checking SEO rankings as the results from one person to another will vary.

Either they are misinforming people to generate controversy (Aaron Wall calls it pandering) about not checking rankings or they are doing a disservice for themselves and their clients. Listen closely to the response by Matt Cutts in this video interview when asked about whether rankings are dead.

What Matt Cutts actually notes that is that SEO rankings are not as important as before and not the only factor that matters (not that it ever did or should). They are a “security blanket” as he quotes from another person, which, I do agree with and is often focused heavily on by clients.

That said, I also see it as a baseline to keep in mind what is going on in your SEO campaign. Without an idea or averaging of the SEO rankings, one cannot point to a solid cause to an issue in why the traffic has dropped precipitously. If you are not checking your rankings you do not have the ability to rule out the cause of your problems. You also do not know if your SEO work is actually succeeding or if it is due to seasonal issues, other marketing campaigns, a previous SEO work not of your own that was steadily improving already, etc.

Checking your SEO rankings is only the beginning of determining your SEO success, not the be all end all of SEO work. And even though those rankings are becoming more nebulous through personalization and localization, averaging out those positions can statistically bring you accurate information for proper SEO Analytics.

Oh, and if your SEO does not believe in checking rankings, I strongly recommend replacement for someone with a stronger analytical approach (not necessarily referring to myself of course).

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A few days ago Google announced a new feature called Google SearchWiki, allowing you the ability to move and comment on search results. Though called a wiki, SearchWiki is really a misnomer considering that you cannot actually fully customize the search results and what each page says. A better name would have been SocialSearch considering that you can see comments made about various pages by other users logged into their own Google Account.

The idea of a social search is nothing new considering the plethora of social media sites around the web that have taken off with many fans of Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, HaoHao, etc (feel free to submit this to any of those of course *winks*), but what is new is a major search engine actually testing and using the concept of social media to affect the results you see. Both Yahoo and Google had actually tested this over a year ago, but required searchers to download an add-on to actually see truly wiki-like results, and as such never caught on.

If you want basic information about the ups and downs of using the new Google Search Wiki, please check SearchEngineLand and check Graywolf for a more… entertaining example of the downsides. I will be covering the SEO and online advertising aspect that could develop from Google’s new SocialSearch (as I will henceforth be referring to it as).

What SocialSearch could do to SEO:

Currently, the new feature rolled out by Google does not play a factor into the search results, but expect that if Google finds the use of it to be beneficial, then it will certainly do so. As a Search Strategist myself, this additional feature would likely force the industry to adopt social media with a stronger embrace as the human equation plays a stronger part beyond the standard on/off-site SEO. As if SEO is not nebulous enough with tracking the value of organic search, the inclusion of having to use social media will only make matters more indirect. Brand reputation will become exponentially cumbersome as comments will continually need to be made to knock out negative commenters.

And that is where things go from useful to spam-ish. Ironically as Google tries to move away from links playing a part in SEO, Google may be choosing the same, if not worse, path in deciding how organic results should rank. I can guarantee that if SocialSearch plays a part into how organic results rank across the board that spam in the comments, spam in emails (”please rank this site” instead of “please link to me”), and spam Google Accounts (with broken Captchas) will inevitably become the norm.

Yet, why do I say it could be worse with social media playing a part? Social media is mob rule at its best and worst. The nice side is you can find unique and strange stuff and share it to large groups of people; the downside is the credit goes to sites that have the largest following. Posted a hilarious picture and Gizmodo found it? Guess which site is going to show up at the top of social media. Minor newspaper outlets that use the AP? Guess which site is going to show up (even though the AP should almost never show up since they do not create their own content). Basically, social search is about those with the largest followings; you have a huge fan base, you win, regardless of what is relevant, correct, or fair.

Heck, I even expect to see a “RankUp” social media button to come about if Google implemented SocialSearch into its algorithm. You could simply post an article, and provide an automatic ability for your fan base to “Rank [it] Up” on their results.

What SocialSearch could do to advertising:

I see the most impact really on the advertising end, along the lines of what Facebook has done. As someone who finds the load times of pages unacceptable when half the load time is of ads that do not interest me, the system that Facebook has set up actually is working rather well. As I mentioned before about Facebook’s feedback advertising, the ability to place feedback on the ads have made them a lot more relevant to me and therefore worthwhile for myself and the advertiser. Theoretically, this could work in the same way for SocialSearch if Google uses the information to help further optimize its search for more relevant sites per keyword (what better way to understand the very general phrases or information only keyword searches) or through Google providing the thumb up/down information to the websites organically ranking.

It is an interesting concept, but the problem really is Google’s foundation of basing sites on popularity algorithms that will always favor those who are popular (whether through links or social media fans).

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Baidu has recently come to terms with media criticisms over whether Baidu allows its paid results to influence what happens in the organic results. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal covers this in a little bit of detail noting about Baidu’s paid results response:

Last night, in a conference call with analysts, Baidu unveiled its response: A new system that more clearly separates its paid links from ordinary search results.

“We are doing this because we care. It is important to us. We want to be a responsible corporate citizen,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li.

They asserted again that the search company doesn’t exclude Web sites from search results because the companies behind them failed to pay for links. But Baidu executives also said they are speeding up development of the new system, called Phoenix Nest, in part to quell confusion. Under Phoenix Nest, paid ads will appear in a clearly marked section on the right side of the search results page.

Baidu has long argued that its paid links are marked, but yesterday CEO Robin Li said, “We do hear from the press from time to time that some of our users were confused by paid and non-paid content.”

This is nothing new for what search engines have had to deal with as even Google has been accussed in the past for possible monetizing their own organic results based off of their paid results as well or not adequately separating their paid/organic results.

Oftentimes those of us in the online advertising industry take for granted that what we understand about search the average Internet user does as well. In fact, most Internet users do not know all of the paid areas of the search results. Let us take an example of someone interested in looking for “gaming computers:”

You would likely get most people able to answer that there are at least one are of the above results being paid search, but that will hinge on whether the browser’s monitor coloring can differentiate the off-color yellow.

Fewer would realize the results on the right are paid, even with the sponsored links showing up. It is not the fault of a user being an idiot, just that the user does not look for the phrase “Sponsored” as a way to tell what is organic or what is paid. This is entirely different from when you use another color to separate the results as Internet users have gotten used to seeing ads in boxes that are of a different color.

Lastly, I would be surprised if many would name the shopping results as a paid search function from Google Base. These results are certainly not a part of organic search (you can argue if it is a part of paid) even though they will vary in positioning (top, bottom, middle, etc).

The point of all this is to note for the Chinese media with knowledge of the online marketing world, that even in the US for Google, most people still do not know the difference between paid and organic results. The search engines are naturally going to muddy the waters in order to get more people to click on the paid results, so without specifically noting what should be done for all engines, there is little point to complain about the current layout.

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Just seems I cannot blog about anything else as I keep finding more mistakes around the web today. I go to search for some examples for a post about people being confused between organic results and paid results, and instead I find the following results when I search for the phrase “analytics” in Google:

Let’s first ignore the fact that Google Analytics ranks number one in its SERPs with sitelinks as a potential conflict of interest there (that is a whole other topic), but instead focus on the aspect that www.google.com has three sites ranking!

For the uninitiated in SEO, for every given keyword, you are allowed up to two pages ranking per sub-domain (exception are the sitelinks above). So, just how and why is Google ranking three?

It looks like Google is still having problems with differentiating secured and non-secured HTTP pages around the web and incidentally ranking secured pages as a whole other sub-domain (or site). I have had clients previously deal with these issues usually in a negative situation where the secured homepage would rank instead of the non-secured in a lower position.

Yet, here in the case for Google, with such a high PageRank on both “sites,” it is only an additional benefit for them to get around the two sub-domain pages per keyword limit. Not bad considering it’s a one-phrase keyword.

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Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager of Office Live Small Business wrote a blog post about some of types of link building you can engage in for the purpose of generating additional back links to your site. He starts his post with:

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

Digging the hole deeper by listing a few sites such as LinksMaster.com (an automated link-exchange program) and LinkStrategy.com (paid links site) without actually checking with the Search team on what Microsoft’s guidelines are:

..Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results
The following techniques aren’t appropriate uses of the Live Search index. Use of these techniques might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index….. - Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Now, I titled this post that he was indirectly (and obviously unintentionally) supporting blackhat SEO tactics since he did not specifically endorse the tactics but only talked about the ways you could garner more links. The problem is that his first post did not specifically note the downsides of the tactics, nor read Microsoft’s own guidelines.

His second post is trying to walk back from those statements by noting that it is the abuse of the techniques that are not allowed, noting that it could cause problems with search engines. The hilarity of all this is that Microsoft itself says that even using the techniques he talked about are not appropriate. That and plainly any kind of automated software to acquire back links is quite blackhat SEO tactic and is not within an inch of whitehat SEO.

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