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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Google got tricked again today first with Google Suggest, then with Google Trends (more or less inter-related) with the phrase, “I am extremely terrified of Chinese people,” first broken here:

At one point the phrase got up to position 24 with 10% of the searches coming from Providence, Rhode Island (#1 by cities).

These phrases show up in the hot trends when a group uses their network of people to search for the phrase, and if it is interesting enough, more people will type out the phrase themselves, snowballing the effect (aka: going viral).

Oh, and the page that comes up is NSFW, so I would advise not going there.

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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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In what is a yearly tradition now, the major search engines have released their top ten lists of searches, with some interesting ones coming from Google China. Now, keep in mind that the list below are from more educated and English-speaking China searchers (not counting the fact that most Chinese people use Baidu), but nonetheless provide some insight into China’s net generation.

From Sina Tech, the top ten fastest growing searches:

1. 陈冠希
2. 奥运会开幕式
3. 四川地震
4. 不合格奶粉名单
5. 艳照门
6. 画皮
7. 赤裸特工f.b.i.
8. 国足欢迎你
9. 刘翔退赛
10. 神七

The one I personally like the most is the humorous spoof on the “Beijing Welcomes You (北京欢迎你)” Youtube video shown below:

The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal also has some of the hottest new vocabulary for those who have a real interest in the current/modern net culture of China:

New vocabulary

1. Shanzhai: Originally referred to the mountain strongholds of bandits. Now, the term refers to all manner of knock-off, substandard or improvised goods, such as these makeshift vehicles.
2. 囧 : This is an ancient Chinese character, pronounced jiong, used to mean “light shining through a window” several thousand years ago (kind of what the character itself looks like), among other things. Recently it has found a new life among Chinese youth as an emoticon to express a bad mood, since it also looks like a face crying out in a pictographic version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
3. Very yellow, very violent: The year’s first Internet catchphrase came from a CCTV interview with a 13-year-old girl, part of a program on the government’s new regulations on Internet censorship. Netizens who believed the girl had been coached by CCTV into making the statement lashed out against her, launching a human flesh search engine and numerous parodies.
4. Psoas Muscle: Another musical spoof regarding the Chinese soccer, this one aimed at the women’s team. It comes from one theory about the poor showing of the Chinese team: that it was due to the players’ relatively weak lower back muscles.
5. Three push-ups: Another Internet catchphrase, this one derived from an unconvincing alibi used in the death of a high school student.
6. 槑: This character, pronounced mei, is actually a variant of the word for plum blossom. But it also happens to look like a double version of the character 呆 (dai), which means silly or stupid. Hence 槑 now means “very silly or very stupid.”
7. Getting some soy sauce: Another catchphrase that originated with a man on the street’s don’t-bother-me response to an intrusive reporter.
8. Pick-up artist subculture: Men who see themselves as modern-day Don Juans, seducing women who are often married, sometimes targeting them for their money.
9. Phoenix man: Refers to a man who grew up poor and in the countryside, but thanks to their efforts and the support of others, is able to move to a big city and become successful. Phoenix men often hope to marry city girls but often encounter problems resulting from their different cultural backgrounds and habits.
10. Don’t Be Too CNN: This phrase emerged as a viral response to foreign media coverage of the protests in Tibet, interpreted by many Chinese as biased and inaccurate. A variant of the existing phrase “don’t be too CCTV,” which meant something more along the lines of “don’t be so serious.”

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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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Believe it or not, you can actually read just about any major news website that has an online subscription fee, for free! No, I am not referring to downloading the User-Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox (which does work sometimes) and pretending to be Googlebot. I mean actually acting as yourself and viewing the page you want to read.

Why is this useful? Let us say a friend sends you a link to a good Washington Post article (those are rare, but known to happen), but you unfortunately did not get to read it until about a month later. When you click on the link, instead of actually seeing the news article that used to be there to everyone, it is now behind a subscription wall that you are being asked to pay for. Very annoying, correct?

How can you read the online news article for free? Well, the beauty of today’s world is that if you know the title of the article, you can search for the exact phrase in Google, click on the link, and actually read the article without the annoying subscription wall. Don’t know the article title? Put the URL in the search box and you will be able to access this for free as well.

Why is this possible? Essentially the news websites want to rank in Google in order to get a lot of visitors and make money off of the advertisements been shown to you. Google, unfortunately for the news websites, “mandates” that if you want organic search traffic, you must let the first click be free. Otherwise, Google will consider the whole website to be spam and not relevant to what searchers want thereby hurting Google’s brand.

What does this mean? If you are running a news website, Google believes that anything content-based should free and viewable to anyone, a very anti-publishing “establishment” view. Put another way, anything and everything that can be shown online is and will be considered “must see for free” (with advertisements of course). It is another way of saying “If I can turn something into 0s and 1s, then it should be free.”

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The recent beta launch of Yahoo’s Web Analytics made me think on my preference of Analytics programs for SEO and I thought I would provide my opinion in this matter on the following Analytics packages below. Keep in mind that I am only focusing on Google Analytics and Omniture since they are diametrically different and provide good examples of what to look for in an Analytics package for SEO. I am also not going to comment at this point on Microsoft’s since it is still too early to tell and as for Yahoo’s… well, let’s just say I want to wait awhile longer when Yahoo’s ability as a company to stay afloat is a little more solid.

Omniture and SEO:

Omniture as a web analytics package is one of the top-notch and most expensive out there providing highly detailed and great data for numerous marketing channels. That said, I am looking specifically for SEO, and sadly I have yet to see anyone with good SEO Analytics in Omniture.

Why is this? Essentially it seems that when it comes to organic search and web analytics, few companies take the time and effort to keep natural search in mind and as such, little data is available.

So what can you get for SEO and Omniture? Keyword level data; that’s about it. You can get some detailed level of data such as products via drilling down, but it is very cumbersome and time-inefficient to get all the data you need on a monthly basis. The nice part though is you can see what page you ranked for on Google or other search engines by that keyword, but it’s not as helpful as say position or very easy to download.

What’s missing? Well, the main problem is that Omniture often puts organic and paid together as “search” so that you cannot tell what area people are coming in from! It has been the greatest frustration of mine when working with Omniture. Additionally, due to the way that Omniture is set up, it is not an easy fix–you have to go back to the Omniture people and request the change which takes time and money. This combination of non-paid and paid search means that I cannot tell what keywords people use to hit specific landing pages, only that they came in through a set of keywords.

(UPDATE 10/13/2008: Additionally, per the comments by Tiffany, you can request Omniture’s SearchCenter and get separated data that way.)

Furthermore, when you’re running a content-rich site, once again, the data that is often provided is limited to searches, revenue, transactions, etc., but not bounce rates or time on site. Therefore if I want to establish which pages are providing solid pageviews (eg: people who actually read something and not just hit a page and bounce), Omniture is a no-go.

I do want to make sure that those who are deciding between the web analytics understand one thing: It’s not that Omniture does not have these abilities, it’s that they are not standard! It means you have to prepare in advance what is going to be useful for all channels (or in this case, SEO) and be sure to note those things to the Omniture folks.

Google Analytics and SEO:

Google Analytics is on the complete opposite end providing a free web analytics that is more geared the search marketing agencies rather than to corporations like Omniture. This means the target audiences are quite different mainly as Google Analytics helps smaller companies with highly useful web analytics on the cheap with somewhat more limited options overall. That said, this web analytics program is a bonanza for SEO in my opinion.

Many things come standard within Google Analytics such as keyword level data for non-paid search and the ability to drill by keyword level and then set it to non-paid search, providing myself as a Search Strategist far more data than is available compared to Omniture’s basic settings. Furthermore, Google Analytics provides the ability to create filtered profiles so I can have a profile that will only include organic searches! This essentially means I can now have data such as time of day of visit, geographic visits, browser size, and safely know that everything in that profile is completely organic.

What Google Analytics makes up for basic level SEO analysis, it loses in terms of really far reaching analysis. Google Analytics unfortunately will not provide for SEO what page or position a keyword visit came in on (oh how I wish for this) nor tell me where the returning organic visit first came in on (eg: did they originally came in through email, then left and came back in through organic search).

My preference is strongly towards Google Analytics, but a very strong note of caution. Keep in mind that you are using a Google product–that means you are handing over a lot of potentially competitive data to Google and even your competitors (think Google Trends) and if you ever run decide to afowl of Google, there’s a lot of data available for Google to go through to prove its case.

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Although I am still in Shanghai for vacation at this point (will not be back until October 5th), I thought to note some reflections of mine (purely business-end) from the SMX conference:

• My SMX Nanjing presentation (you have to fill the form out to see it unfortunately), though I believe went well, should have been entirely in Chinese as the conference had 90%+ Chinese there. Oh well, live and learn.
• Stephen’s Noton’s last minute presentation from Adverted on internal linking was very well done and should be given high consideration to learn more on.
• Jose’s (林思吾) presentation on web design from awoo was a huge breath of fresh air considering how ugly many Chinese websites look (please keep in mind this is from a non-Chinese perspective).

A last thanks to Inway Ni for getting the conference up and running and for having me speak as well. Hopefully the next conference in Xiamen (March 2009) will be even better too.

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