I Like it, I Love it, I Want Some More of It

In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn’t tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location. Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article : Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.” But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.” The concept of discrimination value also has value outside of search. If you get feedback from an anonymous person on a third party site it gets so much weight (maybe none). If you get feedback from someone who is not anonymous it gets more weight. If you get feedback from a paying customer it gets much more weight. One of the most powerful levels of discrimination is indeed payment. If a person pays you the (typically) you know who they are & they have expressed significant interest beyond what most people will do. I think online business models which require payment from the typical user are not hyped and are not considered sexy because those sorts of models are often slow growth due to the penny gap and the requirement of greater trust to convert. Whereas a programming marketer can hear of a new network (say Pippers) and create 40,000 bogus accounts in an hour. The owners of Pippers can then talk about their explosive growth rate in the media, which earns them media coverage. In turn this increases their ability to raise capital and continue their “growth.” But many of the social networks end up being a bag of smoke that will fade because they aim to bucket people as beings in a database and are so broad as to have little discrimination value. I have been reading You Are Not a Gadget and he compared the depersonalization on the broad social networks to the beauty of an oud forum he is a member of. Much like charging for admission, obscurity is a filter which improves the level of discourse. Compare the comments on *any* niche topic site to what you find on Youtube. If you can show me a site which is consistently worse than Youtube (outside of site like 4Chan which specialize in creating campaigns to try to make epileptic people have a seizure) I will buy you a beer then next time we meet. My wife deleted her FaceBook account because she was annoyed at some people’s behavior on it. Part of the problem with the social networks is that they are so broad and so frictionless that your activities on them really don’t matter. As a marketer there are a couple ways to play such networks largely ignore them be friends with everyone use bots As a marketer the first of those options means you are saving your time for higher paying areas, and the second of those options means more people seeing more distribution of whatever content you create. But many of the helpful aids are at best dubious short term opportunistic ploys . The third option means you are one of the people who is going out of their way to make the web worse, but many will. Generally any given month I haven’t been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes outside of writing & targeting ads, or approving a few real “friends” and hundreds to thousands of other people who claim to be my friend. But if you message me on FaceBook there is a precisely 0% chance of getting a reply. When FaceBook launched Beacon a few years ago they wanted to sell peer pressure as an ad unit. If brands can show that your friends did something then maybe that can help lead to a cumulative advantage sort of environment which has you follow along. Beacon was such a flagrant violation of user privacy that it was quickly shot down by the market. But with the new FaceBook like button, they are trying to use like button clicks to put your name on ads : “Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” In the short run it may work, but in the longrun I don’t like the concept. The reasons are many. You can agree with one particular thing a person says and like it while being nearly diametrically opposed to their general philosophy on life. For example, when we launched that “How Google Works” infographic last week one of the reporters who wrote about it also mentioned how sleazy and nefarious the SEO industry is, and yet he was willing to promote the efforts of an SEO because it was published on a blog with a sister acronym in the domain name. … Of the 3,000+ people who voted for us likely less than half of them know anything about me, or even my association with the site. You can like one product from a company, but not like their other products. I have worked with GoDaddy as a registrar for years. And I have had no complaints on that front. But they also sell some search engine submission service that I would cringe to see my name promoting. You click the like button once on one page. Years later the business you liked is trading in another area…they moved from remnant inventory to spyware, and you recommend them. An individual can have multiple lines of work. You might like Thom Yorke’s role in Radiohead, but you might not like his political views or his solo work. Imagine when someone buys a car that you passively recommended which has a manufacturer defect. One of their loved ones gets killed and you eat the blame. Just like businesses, people change over time. This is especially true in the area of business, where a former partner or friend goes out of their way to betray your trust and screw you. How do likes work with 301 redirects? How do they work when the content of the page shifts from genuinely useful to hawking trash with a hyped up sales letter? A like doesn’t have much discrimination value. And it shouldn’t last very long. Why did you like something? When did you like it? Who knows. Did you like Toyota right up until the brakes didn’t work? After you get out of the hospital, how do you feel when your friend asks you why you are still promoting their products? Did you work for a digital sharecropper overlord like Jason Calacanas who required you to push their junk elsewhere? How did you feel when your friend asks you why you are promoting his trash after he canned you with 1 week notice while boasting how they are nearing break-even and have over 8 years of cash in the bank? Once people experience that will they become jaded and stop recommending things? And if there isn’t a backlash against the like button then given enough time one of your friends will like almost anything. It doesn’t matter the product/service/offer … if your pool of “friends” is wide enough then one of them is receiving an affiliate commission for pushing something, one of them owed a favor to the merchant, and one of them liked the merchant because they picked up a tab in the bar last month. A wave of 100 million blond hair 18 year old girls who are lonely have joined FaceBook friending up with the desperate and then promoting scammy wares to them via automated clicks of the like button. And then of course there will be services like SpikeTheVote. Sure a fad might work in the short run , but given enough time and there will be friend recommendations for almost anything. Once the novelty wears of does any of it matter? In time any database record can be an ad targeting mechanism. Will I be promoting some of the products my thousands of “friends” create or endorse by a click of the mouse which changes purpose after the fact? At first online petitions were powerful because they seemed to have mobilized swaths of people. But then people realized that a vote represented nothing more than an automated form submission and clicking send. 2 clicks of the mouse. Not much discrimination value.

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I Like it, I Love it, I Want Some More of It

Whiteboard Friday – 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google’s Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style)

Posted by Danny Dover

Don’t Fall Into the Trap of A/B Testing Minutiae

Posted by randfish Jason Cohen recently authored a post on A/B testing that deserves both broader awareness and a deeper dive. Most of us in the online marketing world are aware of the power A/B tests can bring through improved click-through, sign-up and conversion rates. Getting a higher percentage of visitors to a page to take a desired action is powerful stuff. The process by which we hypothesize, design, create and run testing, however, is fraught with peril. And, one of the least obvious, but most insiduous potential pitfalls is actually what we choose to test . Visualizing

Excessive Worry About Competition

Excessive Worrying = Missed Opportunities Do you worry too much about who you are competing against? Do you feel competitive research leads to many more “move on please” rather than “let’s go!” types of outcomes? Believe it or not, it may be a good sign. Competition is usually a good thing , it means something is worth fighting for. A lot of hucksters try to push ways to “Uncover hidden markets that nobody else knows about, that you can make millions from with little effort, and that is yours for just $47.” Here is the problem with lots of opportunity and 0 competition: businesses follow the money and shorten the supply chain. If an ad market is ripe it means that some of those advertisers are also going to be publishers in the same darn market, targeting the same darn keywords. So if there is big money there will be competition. It is unavoidable. It isn’t so much that specific niches are glossed over, but more to do with the fact that the bigger a site gets and the more keywords it targets the less time it has to focus on optimization at a granular level. These kinds of sites leave the door open for you to come in and attack some of their profitable keywords by creating niche sites around those topics. Consider that our competitive research tool shows a site like ehow.com coming in with 2,948,950 organic keywords they are ranking for in the top 20 (our tool is powered by SEM Rush). Lots of opportunity there! However, if you are interested in your public-facing status then chasing the long tail of a large site may not be the sexiest thing in the world to you. If you are more interested in profiting from your efforts versus tooting your own horn then what should matter is how you can maximize profits while keeping expenses low. Certainly I’m not advocating that you only focus on niche keywords. If you have the resources then you can go after just about anything you want. In either scenario, long-tail plays or broad keyword plays, there should be less worry about who your competition is and more focus on what their weaknesses are, and how you can beat them. There is an intimidation factor that is at play in just about every situation where competition exists: Business Sports Personal Relationships Much of that intimidation is perceived by the underdog or the new competitor. The following points are worth keeping in mind: The best team is not unbeatable The biggest site is not strongly optimized for all their keywords The girl or guy you are quite fond of is actually approachable Many of the competitors at the top of the heap are there for a reason, they’re good. However, it doesn’t mean they are invincible or beyond reproach. In fact it’s quite the opposite. Some of the upper echelon sites in your market likely have become lazy or so big that can no longer reasonably go all out on all their profitable keywords. There are no shortage of tools out there that can help you find potential keywords for your sites by looking at profitable keywords of a competitor’s site. You can’t win every battle you fight but if you win more than you lose then you are on the right track. Competing, in and of itself, is not going to mortally wound you if you lose . Look at is as a learning lesson. What could you have done better? Where could you have pushed harder? Do you need to rethink how you view potential opportunities? The great thing about SEO is that (providing you don’t torch the site) there is no 4th quarter, final set, TKO, or bottom of the ninth. Your timing for failing is based on when you think it’s a good time to pullout and move on to another site or use a new approach. The effective holding cost for a paused project is ~ $0. And who knows, maybe a future algorithmic update or another search engine will take a liking to your site. As long as you have analytics installed you are passively collecting market data – not a bad deal. Google can be the referee that makes a horrible call which ends the game but more often than not you get to be the decider of when to push and when to pull. So rather than worrying about your competition you are better off tracking your competition and figuring out where they are outperforming you. I like to keep a running log of ideas and processes that my competitors are implementing along with notes on where I think they are weak and how they could do what they are doing more efficiently. Armed with that information, along with your findings with free tools like SEO For Firefox , you can start in on a thorough review of your competition and the feasibility of competing against them. Some core items you’ll want to consider are: Number of backlinks from unique domains (don’t be *wowed* by the total link count) Anchor text distribution of external links Domain age, relative to when the site went live (with a few links) Presence of the site in some of the better directories like Yahoo! and Business.Com .Edu Links .Gov Links Is the exact match ranking? Is it all big brands? Are there lots of interior pages ranking? The on-page optimization of the site/page PageRank and so on… There are a number of tools available which can help you find weak spots in areas where your competition is possibly profitable and where potential opportunities exist for you. We did a review of the following spy tools : SEM Rush Compete Keyword Spy SpyFu iSpionage Alexa We outlined a competitive intelligence strategy recently in addition to having quite a bit of killer tips and posts in the competitive research threads inside the forums. So while you shouldn’t ignore the competition completely you shouldn’t be consumed by it, particularly if it’s just a few metrics that you find daunting. There are enough tools out there where you can try and clone most of their best strategies but at some point you will have to go beyond what they are doing. Studying a competitor’s on and off page strategies, then finding ways to exploit weaknesses and build on strengths, will produce a better ROI for your business rather than searching for “The Fountain of No Competition” promised by that really nice internet marketing fellow you got that email from . And SEO is just one phase of your analysis. Does everyone have the same business model? Are there other options? Do they all have similar site structures? Are they so inspired by one another that they are missing huge market segments?

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Excessive Worry About Competition

7 Types of SEO Evidence

Posted by Dr. Pete We’ve had a lot of discussions recently about SEO as a Science. Unfortunately, these discussions sometimes devolve into arguments over semantics or which approach is the “best” in all situations. I’d like to step back for a few moments today and talk about the wider world of SEO evidence. While not all of these types of evidence are “science” in the technical sense, they are all important to our overall understanding. We need to use the best pieces of all of them if we ever hope to develop a mature science of SEO. The Fundamental Assumption All science rests on a fundamental assumption, long before any hypothesis is proposed or tested. The fundamental assumption is that the universe is orderly and follows rules, and that through observation and experimentation we can determine those rules. Without an orderly universe, science would be impossible (as would existence, most likely). A related assumption is that these rules are relatively static – if they change, they change very slowly. Our view of the universe may change dramatically, resulting in paradigm shifts, but the underlying rules remain roughly the same. The advantage we have as SEOs is that we know, for an absolute fact, that our universe is orderly. Like Neo, we have seen The Matrix. The Algorithm consists of lines of code written by humans and running on servers. The disadvantage for SEO science is that the rules governing our universe are NOT static. The algorithm changes constantly – as often as 400 times per year. This means that any observation, any data, and even any controlled experiment could turn out to be irrelevant. The facts we built our SEO practices on 5 or 10 years ago are not always valid today. (1) Anecdotal Evidence All science begins with observation. In SEO, we make changes to sites every day and measure what happens. When rankings rise and fall, we naturally try to figure out why and to tie those changes to something we did in the past. Although it isn’t “science” in the technical sense, the evidence of our own experience is very important. Without observing the universe and creating stories to explain it, we would never learn anything from those experiences. PROS – Anecdotal evidence is easy to collect and it’s the most abundant form of evidence any of us have. It’s the building block for just about any form of scientific inquiry. CONS – Our own experiences are easily affected by our own biases. Also, no single experience can ever tell the whole story. Anecdotal evidence is just a starting point. (2) Prophetic Evidence SEOs have a unique type of available evidence. Every once in a while, a prophet will descend from the Mountain Top (or Mountain View), shave his head, and speak the words of the Google Gods. Whether or not we choose to believe these prophets, the fact remains that there are people who have seen and written the Algorithm, and those people have access to facts that the rest of us don’t. Their statements (and our ability to critically reconcile those statements) are an important part of the overall puzzle. PROS – The prophets are as close to objective reality as we’re ever going to get. They have direct insight into the algorithm. CONS – The prophets don’t have a vested interest in telling us the whole truth. Their messages can be cryptic and even misleading. (3) Secondhand Evidence When you hear “secondhand” evidence, you may naturally think of the extreme examples, like hearsay and urban legends: My cousin’s neighbor’s stylist said that she once changed all of her META tags to “sex poker sex poker sex” and her site immediately jumped to #1 on Google! To be fair, though, secondhand evidence also includes the legitimate science that came before us and the experiences of our peers. If we were forced to confirm and replicate every single conclusion for ourselves, we would never make any progress. Ultimately, we build on the reliable conclusions of other experts, past and present. PROS – Secondhand evidence is the foundation for scientific progress. CONS – Sometimes, experts are wrong, and you have to learn how to tell the difference, especially in a field as young as SEO. (4) Experimental – “The Wild” Experimentation is the heart of Capital-S Science. The most basic experiments happen something like this: You form a hypothesis (“Adding keywords to my title tag will improve rankings”). You make a change to test that hypothesis. You measure the outcome and find out if you were right. Most SEO experimentation, by its nature, occurs in the “wild”. We have to put our sites out in the world, and we often have to use existing sites that are already complicated and changing. PROS – By directly forming and testing a hypothesis, we can start to determine causality. We can also repeat the process, helping to validate what we’ve learned. CONS – Using existing sites in the wild introduces a lot of extra noise. Often, our sites have to keep changing (even during the experiment), and Google is always changing. There’s also a fair amount of risk – if we change our bread-and-butter sites to test SEO theories, mistakes can be costly. (5) Experimental – Controlled This is the classic SEO experiment, where we register one or more new domain names and build sites from the ground up. We can even introduce a control group, by building both sites up to Step X and then only changing one of the sites after that point. Even then, it might be best to call these experiments “semi-controlled,” since the Google algorithm can still change and we can’t always control outside influences (like someone accidentally linking to one of the sites). PROS – This approach is about the best we can do, in terms of control, and it separates out a lot of confounding factors. CONS – The artificial sites we set up in these experiments (often using nonsense words) aren’t always representative of real, complex sites. In addition, these experiments are usually conducted on a sample of just one or very few sites, to save time and money. Statistical significance can be very difficult to achieve. (6) Correlational Evidence Sometimes, either we can’t separate out the variables involved in a complex situation (like the 200+ factors Google uses in its ranking model) or direct experimentation would be impossible or unethical. For example, let’s say you want to understand how smoking affects mortality. You can’t take 1000 5-year-olds, force them to smoke for 70 years, and compare them to 1000 non-smoking 5-year-olds. In these cases, you take a very large data set and look at the correlations. In other words, if I look at 1000 smokers and 1000 non-smokers, how likely is each group to die at a certain age? Correlation can help you understood how changes in X (smoking, in this case) co-occur with changes in Y (mortality). PROS – Correlation can help us mathematically find relationships when direct experimentation is impossible or impractical. These techniques can also help model complex situations where multiple variables are affecting the same outcome. CONS – Correlation does not imply causation. We don’t know if changes in X cause changes in Y or if they just happen to co-occur (maybe even due to a Factor Z affecting them both). (7) Large-scale Simulation If we can collect enough data, we can build a model of the universe and test hypotheses against that model. Now that large-scale indexes are being built to mimic Google (including our own Linkscape and indexes like Majestic), it only stands to reason that we’ll eventually be able to run experiments directly against these models. Although the conclusions we draw from these simulations are only as good as the models themselves, simulation data can help us both improve models and conduct something closer to a laboratory test than is usually possible in SEO. PROS – Simulations can be controlled. Unlike Google, we know whether we’ve changed the model or not. Experiments can also be run very quickly and on a very large-scale. CONS – The result of any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and our models are still in their infancy. Which One Is The Best? Any type of evidence, including controlled experimentation, has limits. In a field like SEO, where the Google algorithm is constantly changing, relying too much on any one type of evidence can either stall progress or lead us to bad conclusions (or, in some cases, both). Understanding every available source of evidence not only helps us paint a broader, more comprehensive picture, but it also helps us cross-test our hypotheses and prevent mistakes. SEO science is a young and constantly changing field, and, at least for now, SEO scientists will need to adapt quickly. Do you like this post? Yes No

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7 Types of SEO Evidence

Prioritize and Summarize – Final Step of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

Posted by laura This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. My friends, you’ve made it. You’ve sat through over 10,000 words I’ve shoveled into these

Using Google’s Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report To Identify Low Hanging Fruit

Posted by Tom_C Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet. I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools: Step 1 – Gathering The Fruit The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just “web” queries and in this case I’ve selected “United States” since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be: Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel: Step 2 – Identify The Low Hanging Fruit Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:

Free Data

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site’s visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response. Given that we live in “the information age” it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets . And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network. At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way. They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage. Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them . Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market. Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear. Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine . How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature. All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace. You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software – the company which powers many airline search sites. Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market . And it includes the following quote Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” If they have all the sales data they don’t need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data. The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace. Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on : ebook sites get rich quick comparison shopping sites travel aggregators 3 out of 4 ain’t bad. But they even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it.

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Free Data

The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Links From Bloggers (Video)

Posted by Danny Dover

Boy Do I Love Linkbuilding – And You Should Too

Posted by Seoteric This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Link building is always a hot topic because it is really what makes an SEO campaign work.