Not you, obviously. The mere fact that you are reading here demonstrates your immense intelligence and sensitivity and immediately elevates you into the vanishingly small percentage of the population with taste, style etc. Whatever.
Now we’ve established that we aren’t talking about YOU, let’s move on. Do people believe what is true, or what they find most comfortable to believe? The latter, of course. Why would anyone wish to expend thought and effort on anything so peripheral and insubstantial as their beliefs? What about an example, I hear you cry (go on, cry it). OK, here goes.
(more…)
It’s something I’ve said to more than one client : “Your log files are your best source of data”. Well, it’s true of the logs here too. I will never want for a list of currently popular spam keywords (just don’t clear down Akismet for about 20 minutes). I will never want for the footprints of the latest spam campaigns (…/BLOG/ guy, and multiple-URLs-in-the-referrer-field-because-you-can’t-delimit-a-database guy, keyword–[prescription drug brandname]–[payday loans]-1.blospot.com guy and even Japanese BBS guy - I’M TALKING TO YOU!). I will never want for the faked email addresses of the truly staggering number of registered users I’ve acquired. I will never want for a huge list of proxy IPs to try out. I will never want for a source of spam again.
Very Zen, that. I like it.
Peter reports there’s a meeting being organised in Manchester, on Sept. 14 / 15, 2007. Check it out.
Recently, I was talking via email to a high-profile SEO type, and it occured to me that although there are lots of people working in and around SEO, I run into the same faces again and again. I’m sure other people see the same effect, although the specific faces can vary from person to person, depending on which groups you belong to.
That sparked a whimsical thought - what does the world look like if you are an SE engineer? You work all day with a well-informed, savvy, highly intelligent group of people. You go to the top conferences, and do the prime sessions, after which you are surrounded by A-list SEOs, and adoring throngs of lesser mortals. Occasionally, you will be contacted by the press to dispense a pearl of wisdom on some burning search issue of the day.
On very few occasions will you have to do a 3-hour presentation for a room full of corporate numpties who will judge you more by your PowerPoint skills than anything you say. Rarely will you have to explain to a client why outbound links don’t “leak PageRank” like holes in a jerry can for the fifth time. How infrequent are the hour-long pleading phone calls asking a client not to submit their site to x0,000 search engines, for just $19.99! / replace all your carefully crafted title tags with the company name / get a redesign done in Flash / sack you in favour of their nephew “who knows all about SEO. He learned it at college”
I would love to take an SE engineer out on a real client pitch occasionally, to let them see some of the pain us front-line types have to put up on occasion. I can guarantee there would be a more meaningful dialogue afterwards. Step out of your talent bubbles, guys, come and see how we live…
Tim Converse (an ex-Yahoo employee, for those of you asleep at the back) has moved to the much-heralded Powerset search start-up. Powersets’ “thing” is that they are working towards “natural language processing”. For those of you who’ve been under a rock for the last decade, the concept is that you try to extract the meaning from a query, rather than just treating it as a concatenation of term vectors.
At the simplest level, it’s recognising that some queries are informational, others are commercial and yet others may not really fit into either category well. When applied to web search, there’s also the requirement to use the sematic data to work out what kinds of answers would be appropriate. Tim has a thought-provoking post about proximity and it’s uses and limitations, “Proximity is a hack“. I’ll let you read it youself, as it is quite long, but it’s well worth it.
(more…)
In an interesting object lesson in SE evolution, I’ve watched the SERP for the term “negative SEO” mutate greatly over the last few days. I was a comfortable #1, but with a few “power domains” picking up on the term, and referencing the Forbes article, I have been pushed back to #6 (as I see it at time of writing). The interlopers are :
Forbes.com (not unexpected, really)
Philipp Lenssen (a search A-lister)
Dannys’ place (another search A-lister)
John Andrews (John’s a curious one for me. Sometimes I agree with him, and we are right in step. Sometimes I think he’s dead wrong, and wonder how the hell he survives online. I suspect that he’s an embittered cynic, and remember “cynic is just a word used by idealists to describe realists”, who TRIES to believe, so hard. Kind of an online lapsed Catholic)
Andy Beal (actually a contributed piece bylined to Jordan McCollum) (I gather Ms McCollum rather disapproves of the whole thing 
)
(more…)
Andy Greenberg of Forbes.com has written a new article, entitled “The Saboteurs of Search“, quoting myself, Jason Duke and Matt Cutts. It’s quite a good piece (and not JUST because I contributed 
) which does a pretty good job of saying what can be said about a seldom-discussed topic : negative SEO.
(more…)
I just can’t freakin’ WAIT to see what results Mahalo (the latest iteration of the “of course humans can adequately describe the WWW” meme) finally returns for “viagra“. You can’t tell me that viagra (or some similar pharm type term) doesn’t appear in the top 10,000 searched terms.
With all the hype that’s sure to surround a Jason Calacanis project, in all it’s magnificent effulgence, it’s gotta be worth sneaking a link or two in there… look what kind of crap they already have in there
I’ve seen a suggestion that’s it’s a build-for-sale play, and barring a revolution in human nature, I think that’s spot on. I bet there’s a queue of private equity groups forming already…
A new SEO event wouldn’t normally rate much of a mention, but seodays.com might just be different… it’s being run by David Naylor, Greg Boser and Jennifer Slegg. That’s quite an internet marketing supergroup.
As well as 2 day conference events, they also offer Website Health Check Seodays - essentially a day long version of an SEO conference Site Clinic Session, and for the webmaster with SERIOUS training requirements, even personalised, just-for you, Exclusive SEO days.
Interesting that they’ve chosen to go the smaller, more personal route. With more large scale conferences popping up in the Internet Marketing sector, this kind of small, personalised attention and high quality advice could make the difference to a business with big ambitions, regardless of their current size.
(more…)
I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t care enough about the whole Did-it / “SEO is bullshit” thing to want to comment. But then I saw that yet another Did-it VP has seen fit to contribute to the debate, with a yet-more-transparent pitch to Marketing Managers everywhere to spend those precious dollars on PPC rather than SEO.
In the process of course, he’s kindly taken the time to point out how “The Search Engines Are Killing SEO” - a few choice examples for your delectation :
They’ve also learned to recognize spamming tactics like cloaking and excessive keyword stuffing.
Yup, when it’s rubbed in their faces. Seen the current #1 for “cheap viagra” (my07boxster.siamforum.com at time of writing, YMMV)? Once you’ve looked beyond the second head element, there’s about 3 pages of auto-gen, keyword stuffed rubbish - old skool stuff (note to self :- do SE’s STILL fall for that “inappropriate element wrapper” stuff? Hmmmm)
The endgame for all of this is a world in which SEO doesn’t matter. The engines won’t need you to tell them how relevant your page actually is, because they’ll understand on their own
Really? Well, when you’ve got HAL working over there, guys, maybe it can tell me what the most “relevant” site for the query “lost ginger cat” is? Or the query “bread and butter side loop”? Or maybe, just maybe, human input and interpretation will pretty much always be necessary for certain things. PowerSet’s lofty goals notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ll live to see a truly intelligent machine, capable of grasping all the nuance present in human language. A fair number of humans, with all that grey computing power between the ears, have severe trouble understanding the WWW - how the hell is a poor dumb machine expected to cope?
(more…)
