Tons and tons of interesting news to report from the last couple weeks, and rather than just report, I’m going to go ahead and give my opinions, too.
- Search Engine Popularity Ratings – No one really knows what the search engine market share is, not Comscore, not Neilsen, not Hitwise. If they really managed data of the demographic variety and quality that they claim, the figures wouldn’t be as different as they are. Actually, I take back my initial statement – Yahoo!, News Corp, Hearst and other major media giants that control dozens of unique, high-volume domains, probably have a better sense of which engines control what percentages of searches. I really don’t see why the engines don’t publicize their numbers of unique visitors and unique searches each month – that data would help them sell ads and grow publicity – I don’t know what the downside is.
- Eyetracking and Article Design – Aaron posted about this on Monday and it’s got me thinking – if better content organization yields less time on page but greater recall and branding, the metrics we typically think about for measuring success may be a bit backwards. When I see that the average user spends only 70 seconds reading an SEOmoz post, I think – we need to be more interesting and more targeted with our blogs. I don’t think – wow, our content is really well organized and laid out. Jakob’s study would suggest that if we featured better layout, we’d actually be seeing “worse” metrics, with better results.
- PPC & SEO Work Better Together – This just sucks because now I need to go back and re-learn PPC. I used to be great at it 3 years ago, but the landscape has changed completely, and it looks like the “extra” visibility from having both a top PPC ad and top organic placement is truly worth the effort. Maybe I can just stick Rebecca on it 🙂
- Andy’s SEM Scholarship is Back – It made a huge start out of last year’s winner, Ben Wills, and although he’s given up blogging, you’ll still see him with gaggles of fans at conferences (including yours truly). This year might be a bit tougher – there’s only a single round of article submissions, but, on the plus side, the value of the prizes is ~$10,000 and includes a ton of good stuff. And yes, I’m judging again this year 🙂
- Googlebombing Algo Evidence – Normally, I believe Matt Cutts and team when they say that their anti-Googlebombing algo update is completely automated and doesn’t manually target phrases… But, if that’s the case, shouldn’t it be filtering result #3 for this search (Oswald Cobblepot)? If any anti-anchor-text-bombing algo existed, it should really catch that one (screencap below in case they do change it quickly):
For those wondering why this exists, it’s just a practical joke that Matt played on Rebecca – internal office humor stuff. And yes, we’re total geeks for ranking stuff at Google in our spare time just to mess with our friends.
- Newspapers are Dead – I’m linking to Lisa Barone here, because she does the best job covering the issue. My personal take is similar – newspapers and traditional media may lose some ground, but even if Robert Scoble’s kids won’t be scubscribing to them, there’s too much of an infrastructure that provides true value to the world for the entire media publishing world to collapse. The systems that newspapers have built in relationships, partnerships, access, etc. are unachievable by bloggers (unless they start organizing into news-media like entities).
- Neil Patel Bitch Slaps Calcanis – Many thanks to Todd for writing that; I’ve always wanted to put that in the title of a blog post, and linking to it just makes me feel that much better. The truth about SEO is that the search engines have preferences – they’re machines, running on automated algorithms and when you have a lot of experience working with them, you develop a really good idea of what works and what doesn’t. There’s no black magic, here, it’s just like any other skill – experienced chefs know when a steak is ready from the smell and a finger on top of the meat, great plumbers can tell what’s wrong just by listening to your pipes drain water and SEOs, the good ones, can diagnose and fix/help ranking issues in much the same way (although our profession also requires a massive dose of marketing-savvy, too).
- Google Taking On European Spam – There are really three different posts and a whole slew of actions that indicate this is a major focal point for Google. First, there’s Viktor Nebehaj talking about Eastern Europe, then there’s Stefanie (whom I just met for the first time in Munich – terrific gal) updating us on spam reporting and finally, there’s Matt Cutts talking about all the Google spam folks who are spreading out to Dublin (Brian White in particular). It’s a sign of the times – Google feels like they have some very good solutions for US-based spam, and they’ve dealt with the 20% that provided 80% of the problem. Now, they’re exporting those solutions to Europe. I think there’s more than a few notable black hats that Google’s Dublin team is specifically gunning for, which has to be a scary feeling.
- Digg’s Comments Working Against Them – We all know this, but Digg’s comment systems currently rewards the meanest, nastiest folks who can still be funny. The ascerbicly harsh and destructive comments get the most up votes and visibility. I’m with Neil in agreeing that the Slashdot system makes a lot of sense – have karma points for users and don’t make the comments marked “funny” count towards these. This will build up a much more professional and respectable community of commenters (hopefully, unless it’s already too late). BTW – Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the SEOmoz commenting community – it’s amazing that the quality of discussions in this blog are so consistently positive and valuable.
- Going Viral on Digg Part II – Daniel Tynski is at it again, spilling loads of great ideas and strategies for getting Dugg (and appealing to other linkbait portals, too).
That’s all for today.. except wait! For those who might be interested in learning more about SEOmoz internal decisions and our business model and the premium membership, I did a podcast last week with Eric Enge that’s now up on his site (there’s also a transcript for those who’d prefer to read).
