Google has launched Google Knol officially today (officially beta of course) and in case you don’t know what Google Knol is about:

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.

Essentially it’s middle ground between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia - with ads for revenue! It’s heavily focused on authors writing the content (the URL strings are author-based first, article title second).

So, how useful could it be for abuse… I mean for SEO? It’s definitely useful, but think twice about the amount of time you will need to spend on it.

The Good

• It is expected that many of these pages will rank quite well for a variety of terms with external backlinks and that Google will be promoting it through very highly ranked Google pages.
• $$$$ - need I say more?
• Brand reputation management for people and corporations
• Long-tail content that can be outsourced

The Bad

• Brand reputation hits on people and corporations
• <meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” /> - So much for getting backlinks to your site with spammy pages (this goes for internal links as well)
• The amount of time to spend writing worthwhile articles may not be worth the investment except in certain markets
• Once you die, Google no longer needs to pay anyone–in the long term that means heavy investment up front, but low maintenance costs over time

And The Ugly

• Wanna knock down prominent Wikipedia pages? Duplicate the content, but change it enough to avoid claims of copying it
• Google corporate-owned SERPs
• Once the site gets large enough, the feasibility of stopping spam may become too great to stop (This is different from Wikipedia due to vigilant non-Wikipedia employee people helping for free)

There’s probably more on each side, but these are the first few ideas that popped into my head. Feel free to comment on any other things that may come up.

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I had wanted to do an in-depth post on noting what you could do with Google Adword’s new ability to show actual search numbers, but All Things SEM did a fabulous job of the ideas that ran through my head when I heard about this news.

Instead I’ll just remark that there are two important types of people humans listen to: The Pessimist (seen here as Smackdown) vs. The Optimist (seen here as All Things SEM).

The Pessimist takes the news of Adwords showing search numbers by beginning in this way:

The problem is, however, that those numbers are meant for people doing research into PPC traffic. The numbers shown have very little to do with what people actually search on using Google.com.

Often times they will claim the mantle of “Realist” insisting that the Optimist is naive in the approach. Yet, the instinctual drive towards thumbing down new information limits the boundaries of what is possible.

The Optimist takes the news in this way:

More Accurate Data

Better Upfront Planning

Click Through Rates for SERPs

Title and Description Testing

Improved PPC and SEO Synergies

The Optimist takes down ideas and creatively comes up with new possibilities to test and use in order to create new opportunities and improve upon existing campaigns. Yes, sometimes that leads to wrong paths and errors, but without trying and testing, then you are left with a stagnant campaign.

I prefer to take the path of creativity and new ideas rather than shooting down new possibilities and thus why All Things SEM goes into my RSS feed. You want someone who sits down and thinks of all the possible ways to work with and use new data rather than throw it to the wind.

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Google is becoming more determined about making the more creative SEO ideas as blackhat and against Google’s guidelines. SEO book notes:

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google’s current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

I would have to say that it is a bit ironic to claim that anything with the term “bait” as in “using bait to catch the dumb fish to eat” (that would be the SEO-ignorant people) is really white hat. The concept of anything called ‘linkbait’ or ‘widgetbait’ automatically implies your working towards the search engines in mind.

At least, that’s how I think Google perceives it.

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I have now been working for one year as a Search Strategist and within that one year have noticed some remarkable differences in how I viewed SEO and everyone else.

When I first started it was all about a healthy competition among all the channels: SEO, PPC, EDM, etc. on who could do better, on which channel was better, and we would have a lot of fun dissing each other’s channel. I would say about less than halfway into my time as a Search Strategist, the view changed from a perspective of competition to a perspective of team-work and integration. Now all I see is how each channel can help each other and use the amazing ideas from each channel into our own. The products that is now offered at the place where I work are a true testament to how every channel is working actively together to not just help each other’s work, but to create new innovative ways to further a whole integrated campaign. The credit hands down goes to the management who recognized the importance of integrated campaigns.

One of the areas I believe helped push hard on (and that still needs further efforts) is in changing the business of SEO. When I first arrived in doing SEO, I was amazed at how anecdotal our reports were with very little in the way of collecting and analyzing SEO data for just about any purpose whatsoever. In fact, SEO essentially was an IT/Marketing aspect where we never want to put our foot down on a goal to reach in terms of anything other than keyword positions. This has definitely been changing and although it still has a very marketer personality (and will always have one), I believe that I have been helping push towards an SEO Analytics aspect that will definitely improve how SEO is in the long-run.

It has definitely been a fascinating year with much more to come.

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Leaving the cost of an analytics program aside, below are some of the things a Search Strategist should look for in order to become adept in SEO Analytics:

• Data separation by organic search: To be able to truly understand how well your SEO campaign is doing, the basics have to be there in order to properly separate out PPC data. This should be on a very detailed level so you can drilldown by keyword or page or any other major variable in order to know whether the whole campaign did well or just certain parts.
• Vertical abilities: As a Search Strategist who works on a multitude of clients, the program has to be able to provide data that is beneificial to those vast differences from an ecommerce client to a content provider. The reason is simply that the goals for each client will vary and thus the key indicators should vary as well.
• Usability: My time is valuable (or so I believe) and therefore I do not want to be sitting for five minutes waiting for the analytics program to pull one set of data; if the program is slow, I do not care how advanced the program is I can do more for my clients on my own. In this way I should not be digging around and clicking 30+ times just to get to what I need to look at.
• Export function: You cannot please everyone with whatever charts the analytics program displays and often times I find them rather ugly myself. Thus, I need to be able to pull some data and recreate the data in a nicer graph or take that data and merge it with external non-analytics data.
• Customization: The more customizable the program is, the more I will keep my attention to that analytics program. As I am interested from an Analytical SEO perspective, I will be coming up with new formulas and metrics that the creators of the analytics program will never think of. Restricting what I can do to a large degree means I will be looking else where to integrate all the data together in the long-term.
• Integrated Campaigns: SEO may be my main focus, yet more and more I need to know just how my work complements someone in PPC and other campaigns.
• Truly Integrated Campaigns: I want to move beyond correlations; that means I do not want to sit down and show the client that his revenue increased because of SEO + PPC, I want to show that it was due to having SEO, PPC, and a factor of SEO * PPC (yeah, econometrics!). Unfortunately, that means I the conversion event tracking through the whole person’s event, not just their last session-based event. Therefore analytics programs that focus solely on click-based sessions are going to be at a stong disadvantage in the long-run.
• Funnel Analysis: SEO has been very focused in the past on purely higher positions and lately more on driving traffic. I forsee conversion events and becoming a factor, but in order for that to matter heavily on my SEO campaigns, I need control over the layout of the pages organic searchers are coming through. Without a funnel analysis, there is no way for me to determine if I have relevant traffic but poor usability or vice versa beyond the bounce/exit rates.

When it comes down to it, I have only heard of Coremetrics having the ability to do all of the above functions quite well; that said until I get to try it out Google Analytics is probably the closest analytics program available to fitting within the above SEO Analytics requirements.

Now, what would be in a dream-world analytics program:

• Backlink analysis by page
• KW position trackings
• ROI analysis by keyword (this is here since paid links are violations of Google’s Guidelines and thus Search Strategists are not supposed to be able to do this then to any accurate degree)

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Sometimes the brightest people can come off as completely clueless and say the strangest things. This week’s winner goes to Aaron Wall at SEOBook about how a company could try to make money by limiting the number of people who can freely see buzz-worthy items, and then later charge people for it.

I predict that if that limited syndication model is available to the masses, a future media pricing system will allow publishers to offer free video for the first X views and then the videos are turned to private / members only / payment required after they get a certain number of views. All the free views build the perceived social value, while being easy to market since the content is originally free.

Now, I have to admit I already have a bias in that the Internet will be free and always open as people can create content for prestige or attention that in turn can lead to a job or money elsewhere.

So, what’s the problem then with the idea of a limited syndication model? Simple: you are already giving out something for free–which means anyone can pick it up and freely distribute it elsewhere. Therefore, the minute you remove it into a private/paid area, every new person then goes to another website that is still displaying it, thereby driving down the price of what you can make with something behind a wall (hence why the New York Times finally opened itself up–the money to be made through traffic was far greater than the subscription revenue it generated behind a wall that was leaked elsewhere around the web).

In the same way, I feel that online subscriptions are a joke unless it offers information that is extremely unique and cannot be distributed elsewhere. Sure, it may take me a couple days to find what I need, but once I have done so, I no longer need to continue to continually pay for information I now have for free. Yes, it cost me some time, but with the right researching abilities, then the initial cost of my time is not nearly as high as a continual payment of cash.

So, how does this then affect the word of mouth strategy? Quite poorly really, people hear about a great product or video, try to see it and get frustrated when they have to sign up they will just quickly go elsewhere in their busy lives. Then, the minute another word of mouth campaign comes up about a site that does not hide their content and takes the content hidden from elsewhere leaving it open, they will just permanently go there instead. Sure the site will only last as long as the other sites keep hiding their content as it is not generating unique content, but this is the same way as paid links work–as long as Google continues to erroneously think that linking popularity is relevance for SERPs, the free market will be there to exploit a niche.

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With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

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How aware are you when you focus on something? Click and view the test first before reading on:

The Awareness Test

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The New York Times has a long article about new technologies coming to computers and the web allowing people to interact with their computers without the need of keyboards, focusing around touch screens and browsing the web without browsers:

This software plug-in for Web browsers tries to make it possible to navigate, find and share information by directly browsing the images, video and other digital media that are increasingly common on the Web.

PicLens currently offers a small icon cue inset in each Web photo that lets users know they are at a site like Facebook, Google or Flickr that can be browsed with the software. Clicking on the icon transports the user away from the conventional page-oriented Web into an immersive browsing environment.

The software does away with the browser frame and gives the user the effect of flying through a three-dimensional space that feels like an unending hallway of images. In the future, the Cooliris designers plan to make it possible to browse text and video as well.

What particularly surprises me about people within my industry (SEO) is how many search strategists or online marketers in general seem to place such a faith in Google’s search engine algorithm in being able to figure out every little thing about human nature essentially.

I consistently read how the Google can determine links and relevance algorithmically, only to spout the latest Google Bombing in the next sentence. Let’s think about this: Google Bombing should never work if the relevance is so far on the opposite ends. So why does it? Google still relies heavily on text and links to help piece together the puzzle of what people want.

Don’t get me wrong here, Google’s ability in this regard has definitely worked, but only to a degree. Relevance is very relative: a site selling pants linking to another site that talks about China may seem to be on separate issues, but could possibly be under the same organization, may be an affiliate, or could be actually be unrelated. Humans can easily take a look at a site and see the design of the two sites looking the exact same and immediate know that they are related, but an engine based solely around text may never know the similarity.

The fact is, search engines still cannot read images, (even closed captioning at this point in time otherwise Captchas would be essentially pointless), flash, and videos without the help of text on the page describing what the subject is about. Google is being left behind as more and more technologies are developing around widgets, flash, and video as many developers either do not know how limited Google really is on needing text to find their products or do not have the desire to provide thousands of pages of text to describe each and every action.

In my opinion, the fact that Google’s homepage and search results are still heavily text and relatively unchanged since its founding over the past decade only goes to show how far behind Google is in terms of being able to find these products. And unless Google can start read image text, it will continue to fall back as new technological developers will not put “search engine readable” on the top of their list–the only concern will be developing a new product that will continue to revolutionize the web in ways that will make our lives that much easier and more interactive.

The question then becomes, in a world that begins to operate around these amazing widgets, flash, and other interactive content (duplicate content!) what mode of thought takes over in place of searching?

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eVisibility had some hilarious tshirts over at the latest SMX and I had to include some additional humor that only other SEOs would understand. But first, the ingenious tshirts from eVisibility:

So, to include some of my humor in addition to the ones above:

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