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Monday, January 31, 2005

Searching for Product Placement Spots

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 1:29 PM

Why is it that when one search engine does something, every other search engine jumps on the bandwagon? From the introduction of similar new products and features to the coincidental timing of product introductions, the major search engines frequently tend to trip over each other's feet. This tendancy is getting mention in the mainstream media with an article from tech-writer Seth Hansell in today's New York Times noting "Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up".

Over the past seven days we've seen an array of product placements on television shows. For two years, the brand-name Google was used as a noun, a verb and an adverb. It is little wonder the other search engines want to produce a little word-of-mouth of their own. This is the kind of advertising money can't buy and in all cases, the search firms claim they did not purchase the placements. Yahoo has signed a content distribution deal with the producers of the Apprentice however.

If the search engines are not purchasing these placements, they are certainly calling favors from contacts in the entertainment industry.

Recently a character on teen drama The OC was "A9.Com'd" by another character. The episode was released the day before A9 announced their local-search product A9Yellow Pages. According to Google-Video, here are the lines from the script:

"Uh, you were right. Caleb Nichol is not a good Guy. Why, why happened? Did he call you? No, but I a9.Com'd him last night, and according to the O.C. Weekly, he's pretty much everything that's wrong with Western civilization, all wrapped up in one Guy." (Fox - Fox Network - Thu Jan 27 2005 at 8:00 PM PST )

Next came the Yahoo surveys used in the last episode of the Apprentice in which the destination travel businesses (established overnight by two teams) were voted on via a Yahoo poll. The product placement promoted the "Review this" rating option featured by Yahoo-local. Here is some of the text from that episode:

"Each team will be given $20,000 to renovate and refurbish a motel on the Jersey Shore. Then you will welcome paying customers. After the guests check out, they will rate your motel on Yahoo" (NBC - NBC Network - Thu Jan 27 2005 at 8:30 PM PST )

Previously, the quiet butler Jeeves got in on the action with a placement mentioned on the dysfunctional family comedy, Arrested Development.

"Now, unfortunately, it's a private Stock, so you cannot just buy up the shares unless someone is willing to Sell. Are you sure? That's what they said on "Ask Jeeves." All right, who's the majority shareholder now? A company called "standpoor." "Standpoor"?" (Fox - Fox Network - Sun Jan 23 2005 at 8:30 PM PST )

Google gets its share of mentions on television as well. Thousands of hits are found at Google-Video for the word "google" but most come from reference in the mainsteam media. Often reporters say they have "googled" a word or prompt viewers to "google" something to add credibility to their story.

Aside from the ubiquitous mentions of Google in pop-culture, search engines are rarely mentioned on TV. This could mark a change in popular attitudes towards information. In the 1950's young characters were always exiting the scene on their way to the library. While I never heard Wally or the Beaver mention the local branch of the Carnegie Mellon library, today's TV characters are not only using search engines, they mention them by brand name.

Chances are however, these product mentions actually mark a new front in the battle to win users.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 1:29 PM.

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Friday, January 28, 2005

Local Search Growth Awakens the Amazon

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 5:27 PM

The concept of local Internet advertising is rapidly gaining acceptance with users and advertisers with a predicted 46% increase in ad-spending in 2005 according to a study conducted by Borrell Associates in 210 U.S. media markets.

The Borrell study includes advertising in online newspapers but notes that local-search spending accounted for nearly 8.4% of the market. 2004 was the first year Borrell included search in its local online ad-spending studies.

Local search ad spending is projected to grow a whopping 70% in the Washington DC area in 2005, much of it focused on the highly competitive real estate market in the counties surrounding DC. Other American cities with high local search growth projections include; Salisbury MD - 62.3%, Bend OR - 51.7%, and Missoula MT - 47.9%. The sector is growing so quickly cities such as San Francisco and Miami are considered slow-growth areas with projected spending increases in the 22% - 26% range.

Local search is becoming a hot section of the search sector for a number of reasons. Nearly 75% of US homes now have Internet access with over 50% of them using high-speed connections. Add the portability of hand-held computers, cell-phones and whatever I-Pod evolves into and it is easy to understand why local-search is being accepted and used as an online version of the traditional print Yellow-Pages.

Consumers are starting to exercise their ability to research local-shopping excursions, find the best prices and plot the best travel routes using mapping tools provided alongside search results. Ten years ago the publishers of the traditional print Yellow Pages directories knew this would happen. They spent the last decade desperately trying to find substantial value-added features they could offer a formerly captive market.

It took a full ten years for three major factors to form the "perfect-norm" for local-search to thrive in. The first was the US broadband barrier which was breached in 2004. The second was the awakening of interest in search by the business world over the past two years. The last is the continued increases in processing power, bandwidth and Internet enabled appliances and home entertainment. The waves created by this confluence of factors are beginning to crest and the search sector and traditional print publishers are partnering up to stake out the best surf. Google and Yahoo have already claimed their sections of the beach. The latest entry to the local search market is Amazon's A9.com Yellow Pages.

A9 appeared on the search scene about nine months ago with a huge promotional push that generated a great deal of attention but won few long-term users. Drawing organic results from Google's database, the search engine filters results through Alexa's popularity ranker and its own database of registered users' preferences. To the right, a series of images drawn from Google-Images appear alongside corresponding search results. By design, A9 is still a work in progress as rankings are dependent on unique user preferences.

A second A9 marketing push appears to be underway with yesterday's introduction of A9's Local search feature, A9 Yellow Pages. Amazon's vision of local-search has one feature that blows the doors off the competition's products. In order to produce their version of local search, A9 placed cameras on a number of Amazon owned SUVs and basically took images of every commercial doorway in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Manhattan, Denver, LA, Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area. They are hiring new staff, and plan to expand this list to every commercial doorway in America.

According to CEO Udi Manber A9's goal is to show local search users "...images of the businesses in the Yellow Pages." They actually go one step further by displaying images of every doorway on the same block as the business the searcher is looking for. This is the demonstration search offered by A9.Com (http://a9.com/optical?a=oyp).

Like Google-Local, A9.com is working with a database Yellow Pages listings, practically every business that has a telephone should be included.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 5:27 PM.

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Local Search Growth Awakens the Amazon

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 5:27 PM

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 5:27 PM.

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Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Google and FireFox - We're only allies, really we swear

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 3:15 PM

Adding fuel to the rumors that Google is going to introduce a proprietary browser, Google Inc. has hired the lead developer of the Firefox web browser, Ben Goodger away from the Mozilla Foundation. Despite a volume of circumstantial evidence such as the registration of the domain Gbrowser.com or its organization of open source programming events, Google has repeatedly denied speculation they are developing a web browser or an operating system. According to Google spokesperson Steven Langdon, Goodger will be working on products that enhance the browser experience such as the Google Toolbar and desktop search.

Goodger will also continue working on upgrades to the wildly popular browser he has fostered over the past 18-months. Google will be donating half his time back to the Mozilla Foundation. In a Monday morning post to the Mozillazine Blog, Goodger wrote about his new employment and continued role at Firefox stating,

"As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general."

Firefox is quickly becoming the browser of choice for Internet professionals who appreciate the expandability of open source software. Over the past six months, millions of web users have migrated to the Firefox browser, suddenly taking a large market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Mozilla and Google have a lot in common with each other. Both rose to mass popularity because of word-of-mouth testimonials from very satisfied users. The only comparable mass-migration in Internet history was the meteoric rise of Google itself over the past four years. Both identify Microsoft as their main competitor and both have drawn an enormous amount of attention from Microsoft.

Mozilla and Google also have similar cultures of young, smart engineers who feel they are different from the common business mold. Both groups are committed to the creation of "disruptive technologies", or technologies that make products which change the ways people use the Internet. Lastly, both Google and Mozilla employees believe their work will make the web a better place. While it is only safe to say a partnership between the two is a likely development, the alliance between the two firms is obvious.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 3:15 PM.

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SE changes blur lines between myth and reality

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 3:05 PM

Much has changed since last year in the world of search engine marketing. These changes have widened the knowledge gaps between the SEM sector, our clients and the general public. A knowledge gap separating professional experience and general interest is natural in any industry as a quick peak under any newer model car hood will demonstrate.

In a field as user-dependent and re-evolutionary as the search industry, knowledge gaps can lead to expensive chaos for consumers, advertisers and webmasters. Many common assumptions about search engine marketing have been made obsolete or require a different way of thinking. Many erroneous assumptions continue to be proliferated in hundreds of forum posts, emails and marketing articles.

Search is the most important facet of the Web and the fastest growing part of the tech world. In an almost fully globalized world, search provides the unifying medium. In other words, search is the starting point of everything in accessible mass-communication. There are a number of myths surrounding the search marketing industry. On one hand, recent changes at the major search engines have made a number of long-held truths into newly minted myths. On the other hand, some long-held but mistaken beliefs simply refuse to go away.

Due to the rapidity of change and the proliferation of information, the knowledge gaps inherent to the search sector are exceptionally fluid. For example, last week the Big3 agreed on a new link-attribute called the NOFOLLOW tag. Answers I would give to questions about this tag if asked today are very different than the ones I would have volunteered last week. Over the past five days, a number of unique exploits have been devised, shared and posted to SEO themed forums and for good or for ill, some SEOs have a new tool at their fingertips.

Most online business owners think about search engines frequently. Similarly, many web site designers and hosting firms have studied SEO techniques in order to incorporate them into site design and hosting packages. Judging by the emails I receive, many tech-firms offering SEM as a side-service simply don't have the time to absorb the volumes of information necessary to fully understand the environment as it evolves.

These gaps exist within the full-time SEM industry as well. Aside from the fly-by-night operations that have refined every type of spam describable, there are some shops that are practicing SEO like it was still 1999. It's not that they all intend to be malicious. Few humans have the ability to run a business, read everything ever written, experiment with different techniques and service client concerns, all at the same time. The necessity to share a growing number of tasks is the biggest reason most older SEO firms are hiring more staff each year.

Here are some of the recent myths I'd like to see slain:

Myth #1
Some SEOs and SEMs can make special agreements with Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

This is a marketing myth that simply is not true.
One can gain accreditation from Google. One can manage massive accounts and receive a personal support agent who can answer questions. One can even take full advantage of every offer a search firm makes but one can not make a sweetheart deal with the paid-advertising arms of the search engines. The SEM sector brings advertisers to the table but there are no special deals offered to individual SEMs aside from the occasional round of free drinks at conventions.

As for SEO firms who claim a special relationship, no one who manipulates search engine rankings for a living is going to be offered a welcome mat by the search engines. The SEO sector is tolerated as long as it doesn't egregiously make a mess. The closest it gets to "special" is personal relationships that develop between people who work together.

The only folks who can make special agreements with a reputable search engine are those offering the search engine something they don't already have, like new technologies or expertise. If an SEO or SEM firm tells you they have a special arrangement with search engines, ask for proof and follow up on it before spending.

Myth #2
Organic Optimization is always cheap.

I guess this myth is subject to what any individual feels is expensive. Organic placements must rank among the least costly ways to advertise however costs in the sector are rising fairly rapidly, especially among established SEO firms. The amount of work necessary to optimize a site has increased as has the time commitment in fostering and monitoring placements. Search engines are one of the primary information sources for consumers both at work and at home. As search becomes more important to society, search engine optimization services become more important for advertisers thus driving up demand and in turn, costs. The growth in demand continues to outstrip the number of SEO practitioners thus driving costs even further. Even with increased costs, for the size of the audience available, SEO is still cheaper than a printed directory listing and much cheaper than any other form of electronic media.

Myth #3
Submission services are a necessary part of search engine marketing.

I hate to blow anyone's business bubble but, submission services gasped their last useful breaths last year when every major search engine moved away from paid-submission indexing and moved to automated spidering. The one sure way to get into the databases of the major search engines is to get a link from an established site or a search directory like DMOZ, Joe Ant or Web Atlas. Once these links are established, the spiders will come. There are still a lot of businesses drawing supplemental income from search engine submissions and unfortunately, those businesses are not doing their clients a great service. A wise solution for businesses who can't give up the income from submission services is to market SEO services to their clients by learning the techniques or by reselling the services of an established firm.

Myth #4
My rankings dropped. Google must be penalizing me.

Search engine rankings will fluctuate. It is very rare an unmonitored placement will remain in the Top10 forever. Even sites with Top10 placements that are monitored and maintained by SEO firms will lose ranking from time to time. More often than not, the problem can be quickly traced back to one of three areas; on-site issues, hosting issues or link-issues. The search engines are in the promotion business, not in the penalization business. You really have to work hard at being bad (or pay someone to be bad for you) to get an actual penalty applied against your site. Historically, when Google decides enough is enough, the punishment is harsh, wide-spread and very apparent. 800 lb gorillas are not known for subtly.

Myth #5

Doorway pages are necessary to get placements on all search engines under multiple keyword phrases.

Speaking of stuff that will get Google to penalize placements, doorway pages appear to be making a comeback. A doorway page is a replica of an existing page designed to rank under a unique phrase at a specific search engine. By creating doorway pages, what started as a 10-page site turns into a 100 page site bulked up by 90 pages of relatively duplicate content. Titles, meta tags, word densities and keyword targets may vary from doorway page to doorway page but the content is basically the same.

Back in the 90's, doorway pages were very common as there was a much wider variety of search options using wildly different ranking algorithms. When Google became the only major dominant search engine in early 2001, the days of doorway pages were numbered. When Google stated that duplicate content would get penalized, the technique should have died. Google however, neglected to dole out effective sanctions and the practice persisted.

Today, two factors are driving the return of the doorway page. The first is that ecommerce sites have grown much larger and with the development of shared product databases, much more competitive. The second factor is the return of a multi-engine search universe with both Yahoo and MSN maintaining their own databases. This is a long-term favorite trick of the affiliate marketing sector and is making a comeback under the new marketing tool name, Landing Pages.

In reality, the Big 3 search engines all work pretty much the same way. It is possible to optimize for all three at the same time without risking placements. You can also optimize a full site for multiple keyword phrases however, expectations of 2500+ unique product placements are somewhat unrealistic. A wise guideline is, if you think you need to make a series of doorway pages, chances are your website is trying to represent too many different topics and should be redesigned into several different websites each focused on a unique topic or similar topics.

If these five myths die this year, the sector will be a cleaner place to work in. Advertisers will be less likely to be scammed into believing their SEO has a special relationship with the search firms. They will also have a more realistic view of the long-term commitment it takes to run a successful organic placement campaign and will be able to better budget for services. People would stop obsessing over submissions, penalizations, and other irrelevancies and get on with the business of producing great websites. Lastly, if the final myth about the value of doorway pages is undone, consumers would see stronger SERPs and some advertisers would save a lot money and the eventual heartache of displaced rankings.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 3:05 PM.

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Friday, January 21, 2005

Adding Value to AdWords

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:04 PM

This is a breaking story about Google AdWords based on several rumours, readings and conversations. There is a fair likelihood that some information here is erroneous. In an email, Google Advertising PR Michael Mayzel stated, "We are not providing comment." If correct the implications are huge and might provide Google advertisers critical protections they've been asking for.

Google is about to announce significant changes in the way it does business with its advertisers.

As owner of the most successful pay-per-click search business, AdWords, Google wants to continue its dominant role in the sector's accelerating growth phase. Revenues from contextual advertising account for over 90% of Google's annual income and are the bedrock their stock values are staked on.

Having read a growing number of articles and blog-posts describing poor experiences with AdWords over the past six months, Google has grown concerned about the publics' confidence in the AdWords/AdSense model. Reports of increasing click-fraud and decreasing ROIs have advertisers looking for other options and competitors are emerging from all directions.

Starting this week, Google appears to be taking steps to radically improve their relationship with their clients by offering advertisers more control over their AdWords campaigns.

While most of the world thought it was away skiing in Lake Tahoe, Google rented a large conference hall in San Francisco and treated 1800 of its sales staff to a day long seminar detailing changes to the AdWords advertising environment.

According to the Silicone Valley Watcher blog Google is about to give advertisers and SEMs who have achieved Google Advertising Professional certification a lot more control over their AdWords accounts. Sometime soon, Google is going to announce the release of an application-programming interface (API) that will allow advertisers or their third-party representatives control over the delivery, timing, geographic distribution and costs of AdWords advertising.

This move comes at a time when Google is facing increasingly stiff competition from well-known rivals Overture and Kanoodle and new arrivals, AOL and MSN. AskJeeves and Lycos also present growing challenges to Google's dominance of the PPC sector in North America while eSpotting continues to offer European alternatives.

Google is hoping that by offering advertisers a greater sense of control over the costs of campaigns and contextual delivery options, they will retain current advertisers and win back the loyalty of advertisers experimenting with competing systems. Allowing advertisers the ability to effect where and when an ad appears, gives them the ability (and responsibility) to limit the damage from click-fraud. If the number of click-throughs from a geographic area suddenly increases without a sudden increase in sales, the advertiser can simply remove that geographic location from their campaign targets. One of the sub-rumours making the rounds says Google will allow advertisers to automate their interactions with the API.

Giving this level of control to advertisers will require a new set of reporting tools that should make it much easier to determine the micro-effectiveness of AdWords campaigns. After fears of click-fraud, advertisers noted a lack of account management and reporting as their biggest problem with the AdWords program. Better reporting tools that offer a strict accounting of monies spent and strong estimates of monies needed should alleviate many of those concerns.

Allowing advertisers to determine the size, scope and distribution of their campaigns could provide the tonic Google needs to successfully revamp its most successful offering. Not being known to do smart things in halves, there is an expectation Google will now set to work out kinks in its relationships with AdSense distribution partners.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:04 PM.

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Thursday, January 20, 2005

Nofollow to limit blog and comment spam

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 10:44 AM

Over the past year, Blogs have been used to manipulate search engine rankings in a very big way. Couple the immense power of link-distribution inherent in the Blogosphere with Google's way of ranking websites based on the number and relevancy of incoming links and add a number of SEOs with overactive imaginations. The result is a spamming machine of mythic proportions.

Remember the SEO competitions of last year when the nonsense phrase: "Nigritude Ultramarine"? Well, if you don't, suffice it to say it was a contest to see who could get and keep #1 placement under a phrase that was at the time, totally fresh as it wasn't a real phrase to begin with. The results proved the power of Blogs and link-densities. Now Google, Yahoo, MSN and others have joined together to support a new link-attribute that stops spiders from following specified links

The new attribute is called "nofollow" and is designed to be placed within an anchor tag.

For instance, the link: [a href=http://www.isedb.com/]Search Industry News[/a] will allow a spider to follow the link to the ISEDB homepage.

A similar link, [a href="http://www.isedb.com/" rel="nofollow"]Search Industry News[/a] will NOT allow the spider to follow. The attribute can also be placed in front of the URL in the href string.

Google says it will not count links with the nofollow attribute in PageRank scores and will not count the anchor text in terms of relevancy to the page linked to. This should effectively remove the benefits of link-spamming in forums and blogs. Even so, the overactive imaginations found under dark-hats in the sector are already working on work-arounds. It will be interesting to see how this new tag works out.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 10:44 AM.

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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

MSN(beta) Is Now Live

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 9:11 PM

MSN has removed the beta-wrap from its proprietary search engine and is now showing self-generated results at MSN.Com. Beta results had started bleeding into MSN listings over the past three weeks but since Sunday (Jan 16), the .COM (US / Global) version of MSN has consistently mirrored those found at MSN(beta). Regional versions of MSN continue to display Inktomi (Yahoo owned) / Regional partner generated results (Jan19, 05).

At this time two years ago, Google was the only major search database, feeding search results to Yahoo and eventually by extension to MSN. Around this time last year, Yahoo began to break away from Google by amalgamating data from its acquisitions of Overture, AlltheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi into a monster database built on the dbase they bought from FAST. This was a huge project that resulted in a database almost as large as Google's. When Yahoo stopped using Google generated results, MSN stopped showing them as well. At the same time, a new spider named MSNbot was making its presence known, appearing in our clients' server-logs with amazing frequency.

The introduction of an MSN search engine makes the business world of search a lot more interesting and might help open the door for other smaller firms such as Lycos and Ask Jeeves to gain a toehold against Google. However MSN changes the business of search, it will help improve on the science of it by innovation rather than invention.

The engineers at MSN have had the luxury of watching everyone else invent dozens of wheels. They have had the time to see what works well and what makes money. They have watched great ideas that should have succeeded fall to failure and not so great ideas flourish until the market determined their death. Having created much of the environment themselves, they also know the histories of the web and appear to have learned when to act and when to lay-low.
The search engine that they have produced takes factors that worked well for others and combined them to make what could become a very popular search tool.

Like Google, MSN's spider finds new sites by following links directed to those sites. MSNbot is active all the time. So active in fact that about five weeks ago a few webmasters reported so many visits their servers crashed. MSN revisits sites very frequently as well. Over the past year, MSN has compiled a 5-Billion site database.

Once a site is in the database, MSN looks at the number of links directed to that site. There is no hard data on the role topical relevancy plays in how MSN determines links however it is assumed by most that anchor text plays a major role. (Anchor text did factor in our initial tests however with the beta version of the engine)

Next, MSN looks at the content of the site. This is where much of the ranking determination is made. Sites with great text and clear internal link-paths are ranking very well with MSN. Of our entire client base, only one site with excellent text and internal linking lost a top placement at MSN when the new version was introduced. Strong, keyword enriched titles and body text continue to provide strong placements. We are fairly certain that the anchor text of internal links can influence placements as well.

Size matters with MSN as larger sites with long-term content appear to be doing very well under more generic keyword searches. Content rich news and information sites and large corporate sites should be able to leverage their size and content-scope into high placements. The size and content-scope factor should also work well with large e-commerce sites, provided a very clear mapping technique makes the site as easy to access as possible for MSNbot.

There is a simple experiment that folks should run every time a new search engine is introduced or a new algorithm is applied. Open three browser windows (or click on the following links) and cue up MSN.Com, Google.Com, and Yahoo.Com. Enter a keyword phrase important to your business or interests. For this example, I will use one I am familiar with, "Artificial Turf".

Look for similarities between what you know works at Google and Yahoo and you can learn what works well at MSN. The Field Turf website ranks #1 at each of the Big3 under the phrase "artificial turf". The index page itself is dynamically generated and does not always present the same text information limiting the effectiveness of seo-copyrighting and keyword densities.

There are several remaining areas on the site SEO work could be applied and a number of off-site factors that collectively contribute to the site's top placements. Based on this simple test, we can determine the following.

A website that has a large number of incoming links will get noticed and spidered a number of times. Google recognizes 131 unique domains linking to the Field Turf website. Yahoo notes over 1000. MSN sees far more, weighing in above 1500. Next, note the "quality" of incoming links. Google is taking a very refined approach to contextual-quality while Yahoo and MSN seem more interested in the number of links.

Titles make a big difference at all three and are an important area to work on when doing basic SEO for MSN. MSN also seems to be able to read text found in drop-down menus such as the ones on the right hand side of the Field Turf index page.

Another important factor in improving and retaining rankings is updating the site. MSN states on its "How MSN Search Works" page that pages that are active will be spidered more frequently and achieve stronger rankings.

The business of search has changed radically over the past four months, working through a scenario that has been building for about two years. MSN going live with their own search engine is huge news with as many unknown implications as known ones. Its presence will challenge many basic assumptions about SEO and will play a large hand in determining the future of the search industry itself. The greatest general change is the burst of corporate diversity and identity in the search marketplace. A range of new products and services has been introduced by every search tool from the Big3 to the dozen or so smaller but notable search firms. Google is buying ad-space and fiber optics. Yahoo is reporting massive earnings as it pushes into the Chinese market, and MSN is suddenly in the house, so to speak. The precursors of change are written on the wall and MSN is betting much of that change will be found between the walls of your home.

More on MSN very soon.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 9:11 PM.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Google Eating Fiber for Optimal Growth

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:50 PM

Cyberspace is almost always bigger than we think but big does have its limits. Logic tells us that the environment known as cyberspace is finite. It can grow but there are always definite numbers or statistics that can be used to measure its boundaries. To be practical, the boundaries of cyberspace are defined by bandwidth-capacity. Google, which lives in a world of infinite possibilities doesn't accept the concept of finite gracefully. Faced with the obvious limitations of growth to the Internet as we know it, Google is doing the most logical thing possible. It is grabbing more bandwidth-space in order to allow it to expand the current finite boundaries of cyberspace.

In the realm of cyberspace there exists a virtual land that time forgot. It was buried years ago, before the crash. Cyberspace exists wherever its energy flows. Back in the wild days of the pre-millennial tech-boom, lots and lots of fiber was laid, likely under a city near you. After the dot-com crash, this network of fiber optic cable was rendered virtually useless by the sudden absence of anyone with enough cash to access it. The boom built the backbone but the crash made much of it surplus. Real estate is almost always a good investment, especially when land gets scarce. Google is said to be buying surplus, pre-laid fiber optic cable wherever it can. It is also looking for folks who know exactly what to do with it.

In a recent blog post at searchenginelowdown, Andy Beal suggests Google might be developing a new cyber-network. Yesterday, my colleagues and I were thinking along the same lines. Andy is known to be a very smart guy and serendipity says this is a good theory to start on.

A New Net?

Google could be creating an alternative Internet. We understand the current Internet environment simply because for most of us, it is all we know. Aside from the evolving laws of electro-physics, is there anything preventing a group of young geniuses from dreaming up an alternative Internet after a short game of street-hockey?

There are some interesting factors that support this theory. First and most importantly, the United States constitutes the world's largest user-market. Now that the majority of that market is accessing the Internet using a high-speed (broadband) connection larger file types, like movies, can be downloaded by home-users very easily. The commercial infrastructure to support legal entertainment distribution is being built at breakneck speeds, but it comes five years too late. Now the legal distributors are in the unfortunate position of having to call for a virtual clampdown on illegal file-trading while trying to rebuild their businesses to meet the REAL new-economy. This, of course, has threatening implications for Google and the way Google does business.

Another factor is the mounting complaints around AdWords and AdSense. Click-fraud has been noted as a major concern for businesses. Much of that stems from unscrupulous webmasters finding ways to fool Google into paying them much more than they deserve. A critical flaw in the AdSense business plan makes Google dependent on a high AdSense click-through rate. Some analysts have estimated click-fraud to represent 5% or more of Google's billable income. That is a huge problem which threatens to undermine advertiser confidence in AdWords. As a business model, AdWords may not be sustainable without a massive overhaul that might generate as much bad PR as it would stabilize confidence.

The third factor adding credence to the concept of a Google-built alternative universe is the mix of cool/good-works kind of company Google wishes to be. I actually believe them when they say "Don't be Evil". I just don't believe the real-world will let them be good all the time. Commercial and legal pressure is quickly making the Web a much more regulated space. Consumers are starting to realize the extent of behavioural monitoring that currently happens on the Internet. Now that personal data-mining has become the finest of the rotten sciences, monitoring of user-behaviour happens to virtually everyone. Knowing about consumers is one thing. Using that knowledge to deliver a universe particular to their desires is quite another. Would it be "evil" of Google to attempt to do this? Not if you asked them to create a universe for you.

That universe might be a better space than the current version of the Internet. The net has some significant problems, the greatest of which is also one of the biggest attractors for young net users. The lack of commercial broadband access for US consumers led to the development of massive off-shore piracy networks. Most people know someone who has downloaded pirated music or movies. The real root cause for the growth of online piracy was a lack of commercial infrastructure to allow consumers to get the goods legally. That critical infrastructure is only now being built and the web is liable to become the massive shopping mall that marketers dream of. I grew up around shopping malls and in my rebellious adulthood, I simply can't stand them anymore. I think most Net users feel the same way and vision the Internet as a better place to do commerce than the mall.

What if Internet users wanted something different? William Gibson, the author who popularized the term cyberspace, wrote of a virtual representations of the physical universe that users would enter and virtually exist within. There are actually models that exist on the Internet aside from gaming communities but consumer home-bandwidth limitations stifled growth. Now that bandwidth is not the factor it once was, Googlites can really start to think differently.

Just as "Thinking Different" was easier for Apple to say than do, creating different in the current Internet environment is easier said than done. You need to control the infrastructure. Even if that control means making sure that nobody really gains control, the creators of something new need to control the basic environment in which that something evolves in. That's what the unused sections of the backbone might really represent to Google. If you can't join them comfortably, create another universe. Infinity is possible, but only for the creator.

While user acceptance might slow implementation of an alternative online-network; why not dream of one now, acquire the infrastructure to facilitate its growth and crank out the code that makes it work. The alpha-test phases can be run out of the equivalent of several large filing cabinets without disturbing the current Internet in any way. When conditions are ready for mass market acceptance, give the people what they tell you they want. That's not really evil. It is effective long-term planning.

But what if Google is not considering building another universe? There is still a lot that can be done with that much bandwidth. There are at least two other credible theories that are based on Google stocking up for a more robust version of the current Internet.

Google's future is based on the continued growth of the commercial Internet and the exploitation of new consumer applications. Within the next two years, the Internet will become one of the primary conduits of home-entertainment options. It will also play a larger role in helping time-harried consumers plan their basic-life tasks such as shopping, bill paying and home maintenance.

Microsoft is extremely interested in home-networking which is one of the reasons I think Longhorn's release has been so delayed. There is going to be a lot more information to examine in the near future than there is today. Television can be created on the fly and posted rapidly. World events like music festivals or football matches can be broadcast to billions. Desperate Housewives can come into our hard-drives anytime we want them too. Miss the Godfather trilogy? Soon you won't have to hope it is in at the video store. It will always be in stock and crisper than ever before. The home-entertainment/life-management phase of the information revolution is about to begin.

Buying surplus fiber optic networks will allow Google to do at least two essential things. First, it lets Google create full copies of file-types that would make most e-commerce sites look tiny. Secondly, it allows Google to support tools and applications that require a lot of user-server interaction. Google has access to technologies that have not been commercially introduced as yet. Some of the stuff they have been treated to as recently as last week is virtually unknown to all but the programmers and those who read between the lines of press releases religiously.

Google is full of sensible geniuses who understand that fiber is an essential part of any diet designed to create the conditions for market domination. Remember the "size-wars" of previous years? Google needs the added bandwidth muscle to move files that are simply too big for anyone else. In many ways, this theory makes a bit more sense than the original theory that Google may be creating an alternative Internet. The Internet is changing and Google is gearing up to meet new challenges.

A last theory says Google is preparing to become one of the world's largest ISPs. Google is buying fiber in a number of places and could create an international ISP if it wanted to. This would make sense and would allow Google nearly unlimited freedom to do whatever it wanted to do with the network it establishes. Distributed networking, in which Google makes use of users' CPUs when they are not using them may be part of the end-user agreement for a free Google ISP account. Becoming an ISP might actually save Google a lot of money in the long run and allow it to emulate the successes of AOL. By harnessing the immense power of unused processors that are almost always connected to the net, Google might be able to cut the costs associated with running the massive server-farms that power their search engine. It would also provide the ultimate branding tool and could provide a stable base for financial growth. In some cases, it would also allow Google to exercise a bit more control over AdWords/AdSense by providing webmasters with free space to post pages AdSense ads appear.

Becoming an ISP would also make Google a global telecommunications provider. With the expected rise in VOIP applications, owning bandwidth is going to be tremendously important, much like ownership of telephone or cable lines is today.

What do you get when you take the world's largest information resource and add the biggest amount of unused but very real bandwidth-space in existence? I don't really know myself but I can't wait to find out. Whatever emerges, it will be built on a uniquely powerful foundation.

There is one final finite factor that rules all others and is the one that made the surplus of fiber in the first place. That factor is money. Right now, Google has lots of money, peaking above $206/share earlier today. I remember when lots of firms had lots of money. So does Google. They used to be neighbours.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 2:50 PM.

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Monday, January 17, 2005

Overture Keyword Selection Tool Down?

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 7:40 PM

The extremely useful Overture keyword suggestion page has been crashing over the past few days. Used by thousands of SEOs as a way to judge the user-popularity of specific words and phrases, the Overture Keyword Selection tool was an integral part of the SEO toolkit.

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MSN Beta is now MSN-Live

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:44 PM

It's official folks, MSN (beta) is powering MSN.Com! At least it is today.

We have been conducting random tests over the past three hours and have not seen old-MSN results. Unless otherwise noted, assume MSN(Beta) is now MSN-Live

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Friday, January 14, 2005

Is There a Future for LookSmart?

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:24 PM

Former search giant LookSmart has reissued investor guidance numbers for the last quarter of 2004. Posting lower revenues than expected, the beleaguered firm admitted it overestimated potential revenues by about $2million and underestimated quarterly losses by about $700,000.

The erroneous projections, originally issued in late October stem from poor management of sales assets and LookSmart's failure to find a way to combat the continued growth of Google and Overture in the PPC market. Shares in LookSmart fell 22% in after-hours trading opening this morning at $1.42, a 36 cent per share decline.

The greatest recent contribution LookSmart has made to the search sector is to let other companies know how not to do things.

Formed back at the dawn of the commercial Internet in October 1996, LookSmart was one of the originals. It established its first foothold in the sector by providing listings to AltaVista and HotBot starting in 1998. Within a year, it was distributing listings to MSN.com, a highly lucrative deal that ended in late 2003. For SEOs, getting a site into LookSmart was critical to seeing good placements at MSN and, as LookSmart was a human-edited entity at the time, helped a great deal with strong Google listings.

LookSmart was flying high going into the new millennium. As one of the most influential places to be listed, LookSmart had become extremely important, a fact that was not lost on their sales, marketing and accounting departments.

Towards the beginning of 2000, LookSmart started charging $199 for its new Express Submission Service. A few months later it phased out free listings, replacing them with a $49 submission fee that increased to $79 and then to $99 over the span of a few months. Shortly thereafter, the fees for their Express Submission service jumped to $299/year. While the fees were not charged retroactively, the sudden, frequent increases made if very difficult for SEOs to guarantee their submission fees for clients, thus lowering LookSmart's credibility in the sector. Even with a $99 basic submission fee or a $299 Express Submission fee, LookSmart was still important enough to recommend clients pay for the listing. With distribution of listings to AltaVista, HotBot (which were still very popular at the time) and to MSN, it looked like LookSmart was on the road to long-term success with a business model that provided enough revenues for stability and smart expansion of their services. Like their corporate name, the search tool looked smart at the time. This is about the point things started to go horribly wrong...

Without any warning to the SEO/SEM community, LookSmart made one of the dumbest moves in search engine history. Months after the sector adjusted to their habit of raising their rates, LookSmart announced they were moving towards a pay-per-click model and would thereafter charge sites $0.15/click. Sites that had already paid to be listed were granted $15 worth of free-clicks per month, promised over 18-months; hardly a bargain considering $15 represented only 100 clicks. SEOs who had recommended their clients spend $299 now had to explain to those clients that more money would be expected in order to keep their LookSmart listings alive. Keeping a listing at LookSmart alive meant retaining strong MSN listings, therefore placing the client over a barrel. This wasn't the end to the sudden and unannounced price increases but it did mark the beginning of the end for LookSmart as an important search tool in the eyes of the SEO community.

The only positive outcome from these moves was a sudden solidarity amongst SEO practitioners in the massive rebellion that followed the announcement. Servers hosting SEO related forums lit up like Christmas Trees as angry SEOs tried to figure out what to do about LookSmart. It took about five minutes for most of us working the web at the time to make the ultimate decision; LookSmart had to go.

Since then, LookSmart has stumbled from one mistake to another misquote. They were entirely unprepared to lose MSN as their biggest client in December 2003 and now only supply directory and paid results for two smaller search tools, Lycos and Excite. Share prices, which peaked at $69.62 on March 10, 2000, have fallen to the $1.50 range they are at today.
Earlier today, CEO David Hills announced a corporate restructuring in the hopes of stopping the slide. A leaner LookSmart will be focusing on sales and improving their search products. Deborah Richman has been named the Sr. Vice-President of Consumer Products and Bryan Everett has been named Sr. Vice-President of Sales.

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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Search Marketing Association Forming in North America

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 1:59 PM

Almost every professional industry has an association that sets best-practice standards and represents the best interests of their profession. Organizations such as the American Medical Association, the Associated Locksmiths of America, and various Law Societies work to establish legitimacy in both professional practice and public perception. About two years ago, a number of search engine marketers decided to establish an industrial association representing search engine marketers, leading to the creation of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, or SEMPO.

When it was first formed, SEMPO was welcomed with great interest from a search engine marketing community desperate to establish credibility as the mainstream world began to understand the unparalleled power of search marketing. Since then, SEMPO has seen a great deal of controversy and is seen by most in the SEM industry as a somewhat dead duck. After the defections of some of the most respected names in the SEM industry such as Christine Churchill and Mike Greham, new SEM associations have formed in the UK and EU, and another is starting to take shape here in North America.

With the apparent failure of SEMPO, a new initiative has been formed by Calgary-based SEO Ian McAnerin who recently wrote, "One of the problems that I saw with SEMPO is that although they state that they have the goal of representing the industry as a whole, in reality it turned out to be only representing the big names".

McAnerin is a graduate from the University of Alberta law school and continues to be a member of SEMPO though he has resigned all official positions he held in order to avoid conflicts of interest. During a recent trip to the UK, McAnerin decided to establish the Search Marketing Association of North America or SMA-NA. Currently formed as a "working group", SMA-NA hopes to officially launch itself at the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference in early March.

SEMPO has made at least one strong contribution to the SEM sector with the December release of its detailed survey (PDF format) outlining trends in search marketing. The results of this survey are a must-read for anyone interested in SEM. In every other sense however, SEMPO has not captured the allegiance of the majority of SEM firms or individual practitioners. Much of the blame for their failure focuses on two important issues: communication and money.

In its early days, SEMPO failed to communicate well with its members and others in the SEM industry. There are varying levels of membership in SEMPO but promotional services seem to be reserved for SEM firms that pay the most for membership. As the vast majority of SEM practitioners are either self-employed or are small 2 - 20 person businesses, the cost of membership is too high for most of the industry. Some notable names in the SEM sector have quit the organization while many other current members are simply allowing their memberships to lapse. Compounding these problems is the continuing controversy over the extremely high fees originally charged to the organization by its first (and now outgoing) president, Barbara Coll.

McAnerin's initiative seems to have put the fear of competition into SEMPO with chairperson Coll allegedly demanding to know the names of members of the SMA-NA working group. (To make it easier for her and to disclose what might be perceived as a bias on my part, McAnerin has invited me to sit on the working group.) Coll defends SEMPO stating that they are looking at the "big picture" and cites the December release of the SEMPO marketing survey as evidence.

In her defense of SEMPO, Coll couldn't resist taking a pot-shot at the newly formed SMAs stating in a ClickZ article, "The vision of SEMPO is to be involved in the industry, not in the members necessarily. The research we put out in December showed that we're thinking long-term. I don't think the regional SMA groups are going to focus on the industry, they seem to be about making sure the members are getting benefits".

McAnerin envisions two unique arms of the SMA-NA, a combination of one non-profit arm to act as a lobbying and event promoting organization with another for-profit arm offering benefits to members such as discounts, special offers, and members-only RFPs. A similar model is used by one of the world's largest industry associations, the American Marketing Association.

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Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Paranoid or Prescient? Daniel Brandt is concerned about Google Print

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:36 PM

Daniel Brandt knows a lot about what Google knows about you. Having spent the past three years studying Google and the ways Google collects personal information, Brandt is the self-appointed "voice of reason" behind the Google-Watch website. In an email yesterday, Brandt expressed his continuing concerns about Google's data collection and personal privacy. Brandt's concerns have been exasperated by Google's recent mission to digitalize the collections of as many libraries as possible.

Eighteen months ago, Brandt wrote an article published in the newsletter of the American Library Association pointing out nine unique ways Google can be cast in the role of "Big Brother". Since then, his concerns have deepened with the Gmail and Google Print (libraries) initiatives.

Brandt's concern stems from Google's use of a single, unifying cookie which tracks a user's experience across all Google services and products. Google saves the IP and search terms used for every query, as it does with any Google service or tool. This information is saved using a single, unique identifying cookie which Google plants on every computer that uses its system. As the firm has acquired millions of email addresses through its popular and rapidly growing Gmail service, linking identifying information caught by the unifying cookie and your computer's IP address to your personal identity is radically simplified.

While offended, Brandt is not terribly concerned about Google using the information itself, at least not on a personal level. With the advent of personalized search, it is expected that marketers will tap into an individual's unique information consumption habits to determine the most cost effective ways of advertising to that individual. Data mining for marketing purposes is hardly new in our society though personalization of search makes that process infinitely more efficient. Marketers may annoy you but their intrusion into your personal life rarely causes problems aside from junk mail and spam email. Brandt is more concerned about the State making assumptions about individuals based on the information they are interested in.

Those of us living outside the United States can be forgiven for forgetting about the powerful Patriot Act quickly enacted (before many legislators had even read it) after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. One of the key provisions of the Patriot Act gives US security forces such as the FBI, local law enforcement, the CIA, and the NSA access to the records kept by public libraries and private corporations. The American Libraries Association (ALA) has taken the US Government to court over the Patriot Act and continues to lobby in Washington to undo some of the more intrusive provisions in the Act. As Brandt wrote yesterday, "...keep in mind that the scale of anything Google does is a million times larger than the scale of anything that involves discrete libraries, access to paper hard copy, and occasional subpoenas for specific information. Perhaps the scale of what Google does is even ten million times larger."

Brandt would like libraries that contract with Google for access to their collections to force Google to protect the personal privacy of the reading public. This would require Google to cease recording IP information and other identifying information gathered by the single unifying cookie in relation to library searchers. The other alternative Brandt offers is for librarians to deny Google access to any material that has political content or relevance. He feels this is the only way to guarantee the FBI doesn't assume you are a closet communist if you do research on Marxist theory or a state-threatening revolutionary if you research anarchist materials.

Ironically, Google requires the libraries who's collections are scanned to sign non-disclosure agreements limiting public access to both technical and privacy information about the Google Print initiative. In the eyes of those who don't know you personally, you are what you think. Under the US Patriot Act, there are more people thinking about what you think than you might think there are. Those of us living outside the US should realize that much of our personal information is kept by corporations registered in the United States, thus giving the US government access to these records. The Patriot Act effects all of us, regardless of our nationalities. The vast majority of us will probably never need to care. On the other hand, even Cat Stevens has been banned from entering the United States due to his known religious beliefs. Have you or has anyone you've ever known ordered a copy of the Koran from your local library? For those of us with a memory for 20th century history, Brandt's apparent paranoia suddenly seems prescient.

Brandt believes it is not too late for the American Librarians Association to move to protect the privacy of individuals accessing their collections through Google Print. In an open letter to the ALA, Brandt outlines his concerns and asks for help from the general public.

For more information, please visit www.google-watch.org/appeal.html

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Friday, January 07, 2005

The Distribution of SERPs: Who's Feeding Whom in 2005

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 2:54 PM

The search engine marketplace underwent a number of changes in 2004 with the number of independent sources nearly tripling by year's end. Twelve months ago, Google was the dominant search tool feeding information to almost every other popular search engine in one way or another, including its biggest rivals Yahoo and MSN. Going into 2005, Google still dominates the search engine market but the world's most popular search tool has lost a great deal of ground to its former bedfellows. Yahoo introduced its own algorithmic search engine early last spring followed by MSN's beta release of their own search tool in the autumn. Over the span of one year, Google's control of organic results dropped from approximately 76% to the 45% share it owns today.

Google's absolute dominance started about three years ago, a year before Yahoo purchased AltaVista, All the Web, Inktomi and Overture. At that time, Yahoo changed formats moving away from its original model of human edited directory listings in an attempt to emulate the success of Google. As it was unable to generate organic results on its own, Yahoo began to display results originating from the Google database. Yahoo, in turn, fed results to MSN. Realizing that getting great placements at Google virtually guaranteed strong placements at Yahoo and MSN, a Google-centric style of SEO emerged relying strongly on perceived PageRank values and heavy link-densities. To this day, search engine optimization forums are full of obsessive comments on back-link fluctuations and PageRank updates, even after Google openly admitted that PageRank, as measured by the Google toolbar should be viewed for entertainment purposes only.

It has been about three months since MSN released the beta version of their new search tool and nine months since Yahoo introduced theirs. Entering 2005, two of the Big3 control over 80% of the organic SERPs by displaying search results directly or by selling results to other search engines.

Google continues to be the number one distributor of search listings. Far and away the most popular of the Big3 with direct users, Google also distributes organic results to Netscape, AOL, HotBot, iWon, Go and Excite. Google is also the largest direct distributor of PPC results by providing paid-ads to Teoma, Ask Jeeves, About, Excite, Netscape, AOL, iWon, and Go. Indirectly, its AdSence program displays ads across more independent websites than all contextual advertising rivals combined.

Yahoo enjoys the second largest reach though the ownership of AltaVista, All the Web, Overture and the Inktomi database. Currently, Yahoo's stable of search engines fees data to Excite, Hotbot, and the non-beta version of MSN, mostly through distribution of data from the Inktomi database. Yahoo also owns Google's largest PPC rival, Overture which distributes paid contextual advertising to Excite, MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista and All the Web. Overture also distributes paid-ads across private websites, much like Google does through AdSence. Overture's contextual distribution reach is however, eclipsed by Google's. Oddly enough, Yahoo's least known property, All the Web continues to receive organic results from its original parent company, FAST Search and Transfer, based in Oslo Norway.

Rounding out the list of well known search engines distributing data to other search engines is Ask Jeeves/Teoma and Lycos. Ask Jeeves is fed directly by Teoma and in turn feeds Excite and HotBot, which also purchases access to Lycos’ database of spidered sites. Lycos, incidentally, receives data from FAST Search and Transfer.

One can't be blamed for needing a scorecard to keep up. Here is a link to an excellent animated search engine chart outlining which search tools feed which what.

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Wednesday, January 05, 2005

AOL contracts Norway's FAST for search platform technology

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:21 PM

Fast Search and Transfer of Norway has won a very large contract from AOL to develop a search platform based on its FAST enterprise search technology across various applications in the AOL network.

Owned by media giant Time Warner, AOL has spent the last year trying to re-enter the search engine market as a relevant player. Coupled with this announcement, AOL also entered into an agreement with Pure Networks to develop home networking tools for AOL subscribers with broadband access.

In an interview with WebProNews, AOL Executive Director of Digital Services, David Park said, "Making the AOL service go to work for our members no matter how they access it is pivotal and we chose to work with Pure Networks because we share a common vision of making the AOL 'digital home' easy-to-use and manage. Even with home networking on the rise, the technology can be complex and difficult to manage. With AOL Network Magic, we will deliver a product that is simple, intuitive and helps maximize the value of a home network."

As more information and entertainment options move to the digital world, home networking is going to be one of the major trends in the coming years.

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2005 Predictions - Watershed Ground

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 4:16 PM

Three weeks ago we promised our predictions for the coming year. Here they are. Please remember, we are techno-geeks, not psychics. Some of these predictions may come true and some may be way off base. We do know the search industry is evolving faster than ever before. What seems fantasy today may well be reality next month. 2004 was an interesting year in the business of search, setting the stage for what should be a watershed year in 2005.

2004 was an amazing year for the search engine marketing sector. Over the past year, search has become the most important aspect of the World Wide Web, eclipsed only by Email as the most widely used online application. Benefiting from a highly profitable year, the Big3 of Google, Yahoo and MSN enter 2005 with what appears to be a lock-hold on the future of the sector.

The next twelve months will change the way we relate to information, not only over the Internet but in the offline world as well. There will be a lot more of it available at the click of a button. Aside from thirsty searchers, the first to be affected will be traditional information outlets such as libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers and telephone directories. Traditional media will start to feel a significant financial pinch as information provision moves from print to digital mediums. How the traditional information outlets will cope with these changes remains to be seen but for the time being, expect many to follow the old adage, "if you can't beat them, join them".

The move towards personalization by the major search engines will result in a change in the way sites are designed and the way SEO is practiced. PHP design enthusiasts will rejoice as regionally unique information-inserts become a major tool in the advanced SEO sector. Another strain of doorway page dependent SEO techniques will also evolve but given the changing requirements of an increasing number of search tools, the techniques might not be considered "black-hat" entirely. It will likely become a case of "it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it."

Search engine spiders have become far more powerful than ever before reading and recording information from file types they were previously unable to access. As more information is accessible through search engines, a series of major algorithm shifts is inevitable. We know that both MSN(beta) and IBM are working to introduce what are being referred to as "Third Generation" search tools designed to find context in specific phrases and paragraphs found on pages in their indexes. Expect the others to follow suit.

Broadband access will peak above 75% for most US home users in 2005. Now that legal challenges between the cable firms and telephone companies in the US seems to have been settled, US consumers will continue their mass-migration towards high-speed connectivity at home. Like most waves of migration, this will have an enormous impact on the business of entertainment. The availability of high-speed home access will spell the end of the big-business of entertainment distribution firms such as the mainstream music industry. As the RIAA did not take advantage of the two year time lag between the United States adopting broadband and the rest of the wired world enjoying high-speed connectivity, many of their members will find themselves unprepared to cope with increasing digital demand from consumers. Expect to see a round of mergers and conglomeration in the music industry as smaller players team up to stave off the inevitable.

SEOs will start to see and use phrases like "Web-Document(s)" as often as they see or use the word-phrase "web site(s)". Search engine listings now reference material from sources that can no longer be consistently described as "websites". For instance, a unique video file referenced by Google might or might not be housed on the same server as the web page that links to it. Similarly, that web page might or might not reside on the same server as the rest of the website it is a part of. Therefore links found on Search Engine Results Pages do not necessarily refer to websites as is the current norm, but will increasingly point to specific web-documents. This trend will lead to the development of page-specific SEO techniques and may result in a regression of SEO techniques back towards doorway or leader pages.

A better term than "web-documents" will be coined by someone far wiser than me.

Jim Hedger will be beaten to a pulp in certain SEO forums for the first fifteen days of the new year for even suggesting Doorway pages might make a come back.

Several new types of vertical search engine will be introduced. Most will be based on a user-pay model in which the user pays to find and download entertainment materials such as music files, streaming live events and television shows. We live in a universe in which practically any digital file can be spidered, indexed and referenced by search tools. Most pioneering firms will not succeed as searchers discover they can find the same material through one of the major search tools.

Watch for Yahoo to try to enter this arena before the others do.

Somehow, this year will be the beginning of the end for one of the Big3. Google, Yahoo and MSN each have to make some defining decisions based on what the others are doing. In 2004, each of the Big3 worked to introduce several similar features and tools such as desktop search and support for Bloggers. By trying to overextend themselves against their competition, one of the Big3 will make a fatal error in judgment leading to a slow but obvious decline.

Google will absorb the Library of Congress but due to Federal funding cutbacks, no one is around to raise an alarm.

Smaller businesses will work to keep the Big3 honest by demanding stronger organic results. An article earlier today likened the current search engine world to a penny-farthing bicycle with the larger front wheel representing PPC and the smaller back wheel representing organic SEO. As costs for PPC increase, expect to see a quiet revolt amongst smaller PPC advertisers as they begin to become more sophisticated, switching back and forth between PPC and organic campaigns as their sales cycle suits them.

Google needs to figure out the limits of what it seems to think is infinity. That's enough to drive any corporate culture to distraction. Fortunately, Google continues to live in what might as well be an infinite universe as the scope of GoogleBots reach keeps growing exponentially. At the same time, the scope of AdWords real estate is also growing exponentially, thus providing plenty of fuel for future exploration. Google's big problem this year will be preventing the inevitable backlash as web users learn that increasingly Google is to the Web what Microsoft was to PCs a decade ago.

MSN will enter the PPC market by the end of the first quarter. This prediction is relatively easy to make as MSN has been headhunting some of the most well known names in Search Engine Marketing the past few weeks.

Smaller search tools such as Ask Jeeves and Vivisimo (Clusty) will be recognized for their innovations in the field of search. Ask Jeeves will market their backend search engine, Teoma as a stand alone alterative to Google, MSN and Yahoo with some degree of success. Vivisimo will finally find marketing firms that can help them brand their clustering technology with names search engine users can actually relate to.

Video advertisements will start to appear alongside organic search results. This is almost a reality as a Texan start-up, SiSTeR.TV is in negotiations with several of the largest search engines.

The law of Karma will sneak up on Microsoft from two totally different directions. First, Microsoft will begin to feel a great deal of heat from the super-hot Firefox browser. With market penetration of almost 15% in the last quarter of 2004 and continued hype, the Explorer browser may find itself in deep trouble. Secondly, Google is rumoured to be assisting in the development of a new operating system that could challenge Microsoft's greatest asset, the Windows operating system.

Search Engine Optimizers and Marketers will be treated like the super-stars they really are. StepForth's Head SEO Scott Van Achte will be asked to head British Columbia's government in early May but will turn down the position as the job is simply not intense enough for his liking.

Ok, that's it for the beginning of this year. One thing I do know is that by the end of this new year, search engines will be remarkably different than they are today. The Internet as we understand it today will seem like a Model T car in twelve months time. The Net is about to get faster, bigger and much more interesting.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 4:16 PM.

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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Videos to Enhance your Search Engine Listings

Written by Jim Hedger and published at 10:43 AM

In the coming months a small start-up in Texas called SiSTeR Technologies hopes to introduce short video clips to search engine listings.

Folks used to say a picture was worth a thousand words. That of course was in the days before video was an instantly accessible medium. Video advertising can so be sophisticated; a two minute ad can be a more powerful sales tool than a million lines of print. Search engine listings tend to express a fair amount of information about the site behind each link. SEOs and site designers try to write strong descriptions and body text in order to generate a good paragraph under their links to attract visitors to the site but in the end, reference links often look very much alike. When competing for clicks with several other web-documents, conventional wisdom says it is smart to somehow stand out from the rest.

An interesting new tool from SiSTeR Technologies will allow advertisers to create short video clips that would appear alongside regular organic listings. They are currently speaking with a number of large players in the search engine world and if talks go well we may see the products of their labours very soon. Last week, SiSTeR Technologies CEO Israel Alpert and Marketing Director, Tomer Alpert gave me a behind the scenes tour of their products.

SiSTeR's plan is to allow search engine advertisers to produce short video clips of up to 5-minutes that will appear to the left of your search listing. The clips are very easy to produce using SiSTeR's "Pic-2-Vid" and "M-Plat" online editing platforms which combine digital images or videos with voice-overs recorded by telephone.

Tomer guided me through the seven or eight simple steps involved in creating a video and within 90-seconds I had created a fifteen second clip. In less than an hour I could easily create a credible 60-second commercial that would appear beside my organic search listing, or perhaps as part of a paid-listing.

At the cost of one-cent per minute of broadcast, SiSTeR's pricing structure is also simple. A one-minute clip that receives one thousand views would cost the advertiser $10US. Stretched across thousands of advertisers, 365-days and tens of millions of daily searchers, the lowest possible fees should still provide a fair return for SiSTeR's efforts.

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This SEO News was posted by Jim Hedger @ 10:43 AM.