There are also a couple of pictures depicting Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Location and Local Services. Obviously, there is an emphasis on Walmart:

In case you don’t get the Walmart reference, Mayer was nominated as a candidate for the company’s board last month.

“I am very excited to be nominated for the Walmart board,” Mayer said at the time. “I have long been a customer and admirer of the company. Walmart is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and, as one of the world’s most powerful brands, touches millions of lives every day. I look forward to contributing to Walmart’s continued growth, success, and innovation in the years to come.”

“We are on the cusp of a massive transformation in the way people shop in our increasingly connected world,” said Walmart Chairman Rob Walton. “Marissa’s insights and expertise in the technology and consumer areas are valuable assets to Walmart as we move forward.”

Walmart will hold its board election at its annual shareholders’ meeting on June 1.

Here are the artist’s renditions of Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, the two most recognizable faces behind the Penguin and Panda updates:

Cutts and Singhal have both called the Penguin update a success.

Here are the Penguin and Panda pics:

Even the old school Florida update made an appearance in the project:

Then there’s the “Google Got Caught Pushing Illegal Drugs Update”:

I don’t think that was Google’s official name, but it refers to when Google had to forfeit $500 million as the result of a settlement with the Justice Department in relation to ads for Canadian pharmacies. The investigation behind this had authorities tracking a fugitive to Mexico, and he had advertised the unlawful sale of drugs using AdWords.

He cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments about branding being the cure to cleaning up the "Internet Cesspool" and a quote of his from the company’s most recent earnings call in which he said, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

Here is the text of my discussion with Aaron Wall:

Chris Crum: With Google giving big brands so much attention, how does the little guy stand a chance?

Aaron Wall: They will always have some balance to the search results, but part of the longterm search game is going to come down to building a brand. Keep in mind the current brand changes are mostly happening for core industry keywords, and smaller websites will still be able to get decent exposure by working longtail keywords.

CC: You say the January 18th Google Update was bigger than Google+Search”>Florida, but few people noticed it. Why do you think that is?

AW: Well the Florida update was a big update with a more violent change in the overall rankings, but it just required a few more technical hoops to jump through. Building a brand is time consuming and difficult…it is much more difficult than jumping through a few more algorithmic hoops. If Google expands on this front many people who have a mechanical approach to SEO and online marketing will be looking for a new job in the not too distant future.

I think few people noticed this update because there was a smaller change in rankings, and many of the search results are relevant sites that are logical to rank…whereas with the Florida update some of the sites that were ranking were quite off topic, or only near matches.

CC: I’m intrigued by the other point you pulled from Schmidt’s earnings call about Google understanding the meaning of your phrases rather than just the words. Clearly this would greatly increase relevancy on a lot of searches if they are able to get it right. How close do you think they are to being able to pull this off?

AW: They still have a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format. Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how do different things in Ubuntu. I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like.

Another big issue is information accuracy…which is yet another reason they might want to put a lot of weight on brand.

Sidenote (CC): With regards to relevancy and branding, there are some interesting possibilties on the way as ICANN begins accepting more new generic Top-Level Domains. This is discussed in the following exclusive WPN interview between SEOMoz’s Sarah Bird and Clarke Walton of Walton Law Firm:

CC: Do you think this (Google recognizing meaning over words) is something the majority of searchers want to see happen or do you think they would prefer to have to specify their own searches further?

AW: We like to feel like we are in control, but we under-estimate our own laziness. People prefer Google to be sophisticated under the hood rather than having to re-query again.

Thanks to Aaron for talking with me. Read his article "Google’s New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding". It’s full of illustrated examples, and I think you’ll find it quite interesting.

Update: Matt Cutts has shared the following video regarding the subject of Google placing weight on brand. He says it’s not really about brand….

The 800-Pound Gorilla and the New Kid on the Block: Google and SEOBook

In our last article covering the similarities, differences, and uses of the most commonly used keyword suggestion tools we focused on comparing the usage, operation models, and results of Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and NicheBot. For Part Two we will be covering the tools Google brings to the table and SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Google rising

With the way the company has exploded in the last decade, especially over the last five years or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Google was taking over the world, not just the Internet. The fact is, they are growing, changing, expanding and refining all of their diverse operations with such velocity that some bloggers and “industry analysts” make a full-time out of tracking Google.

They track Google while Google tracks everything net-related, so you can avail yourself of some of Google’s powerful tools. Some are free, some used to be free – like its Adwords API (Application Programming Interface) – and others cost you in various ways, from money to time to learning curves. But there is no way to do your work, if you work in web marketing, without the Google tools.

The basic Google tools

Google Suggest is good place to start accumulating your list of words and phrases to be researched. It is a fast (some would say “quick and dirty”) way of identifying common word combinations and how many pages are relevant to them. When you start typing your search into Google’s search box, a dropdown box opens listing terms that start with those letters and the number of pages that would come up in a search for each term. What this basically gives you is a very quick way to get a snapshot of related terms and their relative competitive landscape.

If you were to type in "fly," Google Suggest would potentially give you such extrapolations as "fly fishing" or "fly larvae," taking you off on your chosen tangent. Typing in parts of words, like "prob," might show extrapolations such as "probation," "probability," "problem child," or "probono." This tool is particularly helpful in building out your first keyword lists, letting you then focus on terms you deem most worthy of further research.

Google Trends lets you assess the popularity of particular terms and phrases against one other, and even supplies a history of the “most searched” terms from 2004 through the present. The particular search terms’ popularity is expressed as a proportion of the total search volume, which is calculated for different regions of the world, even in a variety of languages.

You can also compare the volume of searches among multiple terms, and can display news associated with search terms on charts displaying the effect of the news on term popularity and presence. This can help you make snap decisions about whether to concentrate on one set of keywords or some other. If you want to get a handle on how searches are affected by regional anomalies and external factors, this is a good tool for that.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Until late 2006 the features in the AdWords tool kit were free. Then Google began to charge for the API portion of the tool, with a 25-per-thousand fee that sounded low until big users started adding it up. The controversy has abated greatly, but it did leave a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

Google responded with a free External Tool outside of AdWords for those that desired keyword help but did not have an AdWords account. It was truly a tool that suggested keywords only, returning a great number of keywords related to the term you entered but offering no search quantity numbers to show how often people actually searched for each term daily or monthly.

More recently Google added the search metrics that a lot of marketers and business owners have been craving. Their External Tool now shows how many times the keywords you are researching were searched last month on Google related properties, as well as a twelve-month average for the terms. It also features a measurement that shows you the advertiser competition for each.

For AdWords accounts holders the AdWords Keyword Tool is tightly “Google integrated” of course, and not only helps you estimate your AdWords campaign cost but provides information on the competition levels among your chosen, targeted keywords and terms.

The AdWords Traffic Estimator is another tool that can provide data on total potential clicks for each ad, each day, for each keyword, but they are merely approximates. It also estimates potential cost so you have an idea what your daily spend would be for those terms. For natural search research it is helpful in compiling an initial list for further, detailed research, which is the point at which you would bring other keyword analytics tools into the process.

As with all of the free and fee-based tools, they are best seen as an “information buffet,” a range of tools and tests from which you can assemble the best toolkit for your particular project. Your needs may change from one task to the next, from one product to the next, so you need the greatest amount of flexibility you can get. Some people are now saying that SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is the best “anchor program” on which to hang other specialized tools.

The up-and-comer

SEO industry stalwart Aaron Wall developed the Keyword Suggestion Tool for SEOBook, and it is popular for not reinventing the wheel, essentially. That is, it aggregates the most successful and effective suggestion tools on the Internet –Google tools, the “visual tool” Quintura (with its “word clouds”), Wordtracker and even Yahoo metrics, back when there were some.

Its proponents say that SEOBook’s tool is the right one for anyone, any time, because of its components. By combining results, it does save time, but some professional traffic mongers prefer to set the tools against each other for comparison, rather than aggregation, purposes.

Still, features of the tool are legion. It can estimate certain keyword traffic in Google, Yahoo and MSN independently, or add it together for average total daily traffic. It links up to the Google Trends data for the targeted keyword(s) and employs the Google Traffic Estimator to determine the daily cost for advertising the subject terms.

The SEOBook tool also allows you to get an idea of your competitors’ numbers by interfacing with Google, Wordtracker and the UK’s Overture. It also makes use of the GoRank SEO Tools and Ontology Finder, and checks the top 1000 Google results for your terms by running queries on related words. It would be a good idea to look at GoRank’s new link popularity analyzer, which is just now being made ready for beta testing (as of September 20). It’s completely free and supports up to 30 backlinks. Once beta testing is complete, it will have the capability to analyze up to 1000 backlinks.

At the bottom of the SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool page is a list of potential searches you can perform on a “vertical database” – for news, blogs, directories, tags, thesauruses, dictionaries, encyclopedias, classified ad listings, audio, video, competitive, groups and other tangents.

Who, what, how and why

There are still differences among keyword analysis tools and keyword suggestion tool, but as they continue to aggregate each others’ functions and link to various other third-party programs, there is bound to be some “convergence.” There is a great deal of “shakeout” still to come in this sector, and following Yahoo’s almost-ignominious retreat from this arena the winnowing process would appear to be gaining some momentum.

Using any or all of the available suggestion tools can be a very nerve-wracking experience. There is always the chance that you will start taking the results and suggestions as gospel, and making sweeping changes based on data that changes by the nanosecond. It takes patience to make these tools perform their best, and there is no substitute for the human brain. It is the ultimate analytical tool.

Whatever tools you use, in whatever manner, it is wise to maintain a healthy skepticism about the results. Various industry analysts have run tests that show a wide discrepancy between what some of the tools report, and what they actually do. This is not to say there is misrepresentation (sometimes called “lying”) going on. It is more a function of the transient nature of knowledge and the rapid turnover of data sets in Internet-related enterprises. Use the tools, certainly, but use your head, primarily.

1. Google providing Webmaster Central, a blog for webmasters, & many of the best free SEO tools
2. Yahoo! offering a paid inclusion service & a webmaster focused tool by the name of Site Explorer
3. Microsoft offering SEO services

This article aims to highlight the best search engine marketing tools.

Keyword Research

Keywords are at the core of search, so any effective SEO campaign starts with keyword research. My 4 favorite keyword research tools are

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
2. SEO Book Keyword Tool
3. Google Traffic Estimator
4. Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Given Google’s enormous search marketshare they have the most keyword data, though typically they have been less open than others with sharing data. Recently the Google AdWords Keyword Tool has started to show estimated search volumes using numbers (rather than graphs).

Cool features:

• Match Types: Shows search estimates for exact match keywords (the exact keyword), phrase match (searches containing that keyword as part of the search), and broad match (additionally related searches that may have words in a different order).
• URL Related Keywords: Allows you to enter in a specific page and/or site and find relevant keywords based on that page/site.

SEO Book Keyword Tool

I partnered with the fine folks at Wordtracker to create a free keyword tool powered by their API. The SEO Book keyword tool acts like a meta search keyword tool, where the results are powered by Wordtracker and link to other related keyword tools.

Cool features:

• Cross referencing: Like search engines, all keyword tools have some biases to them, so the quick ability to compare results from different sources makes this the first keyword tool I typically use.
• CSV Export: This tool offers a quick CSV export option, which makes it easy to create a keyword list that can be inserted into other tools for further analysis (which I will mention in the Google Traffic Estimator & Microsoft Ad Intelligence sections).

Google Traffic Estimator

Google Traffic Estimator is a tool which estimates the number of ad clicks that a particular keyword would get at a particular bid price. Given how ad clickthrough rate can vary greatly based on ad copy the estimates can be a bit rough, but this tool does give relative volumes AND values for keywords.

The addition of click cost estimates makes this a nice tool to submit a keyword list to in order to find out which keywords are the most valuable.

Cool features:

• Bid Price Estimation: If you do not enter in a bid price, they return a bid price that should return your ads in the top position 85% of the time.
• Match Types: Shows search estimates for [exact match] , "phrase match", and broad match. In this context it is easy to see how long the tail is for a keyword.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Microsoft Ad Intelligence is an Excel Plug In for Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.

It is similar to a combination of the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator, with a couple additional features included.

Cool features:

• Real data: One of the ways Microsoft is playing catch up in search is providing their actual search data via this tool (these search counts are the same data set that they use internally). Most search services offer somewhat doctored up estimates.
• Near realtime: This tool offers many advanced filters, which allow you to sort data as recently as yesterday.
• Category based keywords: You can find the all time top category based keywords, or category based keywords that have recently become popular… a service that is great for niche publishers.

Search Analytics Tools

If you are not using web analytics you are flying blind. Analytics data gives you the power to refine your strategy based on what is working and what is not. 3 of my favorite analytics tools are:

1. Google Analytics
2. Clicky
3. Mint

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust free analytics tool. The only concern I have with using it is that if you are profiting from a market inefficiency you might be revealing that inefficiency to the largest online ad network… which may then reveal it to other people. With their large search marketshare, their free keyword tools, industry benchmarking data, and the launch of Google Ad Planner (still in beta), Google Trends for Websites, and Google Insights for Search, Google is the leading source of keyword and market data for many online businesses.

Clicky

Clicky is an inexpensive web based analytics tool. In addition to being fairly feature rich, they also offer a white label service that allows webmasters to resell their analytics product.

Mint

Mint is an analytics program you can install on your server for a one time $30 licensing fee. It offers realtime data and has a wide array of extensions that display information in convenient panes, but is not as feature rich as the above options.

More Analytics Tools

There are a wide array of analytics tools on the market. There are niche tools specifically for PPC campaigns like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202, as well as higher end offerings from companies like Omniture… finding the right tool for your needs is largely a function of defining your needs and budget, and if your budget is quite extensive it might make sense to program something in house.

Search Engine Rank Checkers

While most successful SEO professionals pay more attention to traffic trends, conversions, and profits – it is still helpful to track where some sites rank for certain keywords. Tracking how sites move in the rankings for specific keywords gives you clues as to when search engineers change the weightings on things like domain authority, anchor text, and related words.

While Google Webmaster Central shows you some keywords you rank for, they do not show you the keywords you rank on page 5 or 6 for… just the keywords where you show up near the top of the search results often. Years ago Google had a useful search API, but more recently they have been using an Ajax API which does not work well with rank checkers.

My 2 favorite rank checkers are

1. SEO Book Rank Checker
2. Advanced Web Ranking

SEO Book Rank Checker

This free rank checking tool is a Firefox extension which allows you to track how you rank in the search engines for a variety of keywords.

Cool features

• International: It works with international versions of Google.
• Automated: Allows you to create preset lists which automatically run at a set periodicity .
• Exportable: Allows you to export the results and see how rankings for a keyword have changed over time.

Advanced Web Ranking

Starting at $99, Advanced Web Ranking is one of the more popular desktop search engine rank checking tools.

Cool features

• Graphs: Allows you to view graphs of how your rankings change over time.
• Wide Selection of Search Engines: If you live in China, Russia, or another market where Google is not the clear market leader, then this tool will still work for you, as they allow you to track rankings in hundreds of search engines.

Link Analysis Tools

Link analysis is a field which has lost a bit of its importance over the past couple years. Google has clamped down on paid links, web directories, and article directories. At the same time more people are blogging online, and more webmasters have become aware to the field of public relations and the value of links. These combine to make it is much harder to catch up with a competitor if you are trying to duplicate their link building strategy.

To some degree link analysis has moved away from PageRank and anchor text toward analyzing news in the marketplace and understanding why stories are spreading (link analysis is evolving into media analysis and public relations). Here are 6 of my favorite link analysis tools

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
2. Google Blog Search
3. Google Webmaster Central
4. SEO Link Analysis
5. Xenu Link Sleuth
6. Advanced Link Manager

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google and Microsoft generally show rather limited link data to the public. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows a much deeper and more representative sampling of inbound link data.

SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a free Firefox extension that adds link anchor text, PageRank score, and if a link is nofollowed to Yahoo! Site Explorer results.

Google Blogsearch

While Google tends to show a small sample of backlinks their Blogsearch is much better at detecting new links from blogs.

Google Webmaster Central

If you verify you own a website inside Google Webmaster Central, they will allow you to download a list of links pointing at your site. If you notice your rankings for a keyword are decent (but could be better) you could look through some of the people linking at your page and ask them to link at your page using more specific anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu Link Sleuth crawls websites looking for broken links. This helps you keep your website maximally clean and functional by finding any broken internal links and any references to documents that are no longer online.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is a paid software package starting at $199 which allows you to automatically track new backlinks obtained by competitors. It also crawls pages to find anchor text, if the link is using nofollow, and the PageRank score of the linking page.

We also created a free tool somewhat similar to Advanced Link Manager, named Backlink Analyzer. We have not updated our tool in a while though, and it is sorely in need of an update.

PPC Tools

As search ad networks have become less transparent many PPC tools that did things like bid gap management have been rendered useless, while Google has built out a powerful AdWords API, an ad platform that allows you to bid per click or per conversion, and the Google AdWords Editor.

1. Google AdWords Editor
2. Google Website Optimizer
3. Speed PPC
4. PPC Tools suite
5. PPC Analytics Tools

Google AdWords Editor

Google AdWords Editor is a free desktop tool advertisers can use to quickly edit their AdWords campaigns in bulk.

Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that makes it easy to test and improve your landing page and conversion process. Conversion Rate Experts offers a great overview article about how to take advantage of Website Optimizer and other conversion boosting tools.

Speed PPC

Speed PPC is a paid desktop software program which makes it easy to generate many cross referenced ad campaigns and landing pages for geo-targeted keyword combinations. At $497 Speed PPC is not cheap, but if it is beyond your means and you are a good programmer then Zipcode Guy offers a free database of U.S. cities and zip codes.

PPC Tool suite

My wife has build a free collection of useful web based PPC tools including a keyword list generator, a keyword list cleaner, a typo generator, a keyword wrapper, an ad group generator, and a ROI calculator.

• The keyword list generator can be good for creating a quick list of keywords to plug into a PPC account to see what variations get the most search volume, then trim back the fat after you collect some account feedback data.
• The keyword list cleaner is good for taking a dirty keyword list and making it useful. For example, lets say you have a list of MP3 player related keywords. This tool allows you to quickly filter out any keywords related to car and automotive MP3 players.
• The ad group generator makes it easy to create ad groups for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter at the same time.

PPC Analytics Tools

• Many big affiliate marketers create their own bid management software, but newer affiliates may find tracking tools like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202 useful.
• Many enterprise level websites create custom bid management software for their company, but for enterprise level merchants who do not manage paid search in house, firms like Efficient Frontier can help with management.

Competitive Research

Services like comScore and Hitwise have been around for many years for the people who could afford to buy their data, but their price points are north of what most people are willing to pay. Competitive research is one of the areas which has improved the most in the past few years, largely by a number of companies making products and tools at a more accessible price point. Here are 5 of my favorite competitive analysis tools.

1. Compete.com Search Analytics
2. Google Website Trends & Google Insights for Search
3. Microsoft Ad Intelligence
4. KeyCompete
5. SEO Digger

Compete.com Search Analytics

Much of the consumer facing innovation in the competitive analysis industry stemmed from Compete.com launching with free basic analytics data, and using a credit based system that allowed anyone to buy competitive data for as little as $20. Since then they have changed their pricing model to one based on a flat monthly fee starting at $299 a month. Here are some of their top keywords for blogoscoped.com… and they offer the option to download hundreds more

Cool features

• Category based top keywords: they were one of the first services to offer top keywords by category (this feature has since been cloned by Microsoft Ad Intelligence and Google Insights for Search).
• Weighting based analytics: they not only show popular keywords sending traffic to competing sites, but they show the approximate percent of traffic driven by each keyword.
• Organic vs paid breakout: they break out which traffic came from organic search vs paid search ads.

Google Website Trends & Google Insights for Search

Google Trends for Websites displays related sites, related search queries, and what countries a website is popular in. Google Insights for Search shows category related keywords, top search terms related to the keyword you entered, and top rising related keywords.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

Microsoft Ad Intelligence, also covered in the above keyword tools section, offers top category based keywords and allows you to research keywords based on campaign association with competing advertisers (along with confidence estimates).

KeyCompete

KeyCompete is a paid tool that lets you find what keywords competing advertisers are buying. This tool is especially powerful for affiliate marketers, where many of them resell the same product or service and need to get a baseline idea of what competitors are doing. SpyFu offers a similar service.

SEO Digger

SEO Digger is similar to KeyCompete, but is free and works on showing what organic keywords a website is ranking for. URLTrends, which is currently undergoing redesign, is similar to SEO Digger.

[Source of first image Creative Commons-licensed by Brian Caldwell.]

Comments

SEOBook author Aaron Wall’s wife, Giovanna, posted a screenshot at the SEObook blog of some contextual advertising appearing above her Gmail account. After sending out emails regarding her recent wedding, Wall was shown ad promoting a website for finding lonely, cheating married women.

She writes, "Why would Google, with their ‘Do No Evil’ policy promote cheating and infidelity?"

She faced some criticism in the comments for her "moral platitudes" and others contended that Google shouldn’t be making moral judgments on ads. Rather, they said, Google should "err on the side of free speech."

And that may be a fine argument if Google hasn’t made a practice since inception of deciding who can and can’t advertise based on certain moral codes. The company certainly hasn’t had any qualms about freedom of speech in advertising.

Google disallows:

Liquor ads
Gun ads
Gambling ads
Political ads against individuals, groups, or organizations

But adultery? Eh, they’ll leave that moral judgment up to the individual. 

MSN announced they are upgrading relevancy and coverage. The increased coverage likely means that more inbound link sources are getting indexed. From looking at rankings of a few of my sites it looks like:

• anchor text got A LOT more weighting
• many lower authority links that were not passing weight (due to not being in their index) are passing weight. For some competitive core industry related phrases (not SEO, another industry) I see a site that went from #150 to top 5 based on the anchor text of lots of low authority links.
• fresh links are still heavily trusted, but sites with older links but few fresh links now rank a bit better than they used to in the older MSN, likely due to the more comprehensive index coverage. for as much as Google has beat down some directory links, MSN just gave them a lot of love.
• MSN is still screwing up some navigational queries. For example, my homepage does not rank for seobook. Though I have already seen them fix some of these issues.
• Internal anchor text still counts, but it might seem slightly demoted, as a side effect of more competing pages and more links getting indexed.
• MSN mentioned that they were also looking to get more into universal search.

Yahoo! Search Update

Yahoo! recently updated their infrastructure, then rolled out universal search and are getting more aggressive with search suggestions. You can see they are serious about universal search because they are not only promoting their internal content, but they are also promoting YouTube videos. I believe this also indicates that YouTube will remain the #1 video destination in years to come.

Rand also noticed that Yahoo! is using their homepage to drive search queries for recent news. As Yahoo integrates their own content in their SERPs even more aggressively look for them to get more aggressive on this front to help further their search brand.

Google Tests

You can read about the Google test on WMW, which is seen on some Google IP addresses, but has yet to spread to Google.com.

Comments

You may not know that Aaron Wall at SEObook has made available a couple of free tools for doing keyword and link research for competitive analysis.

Did I mention they were free?

The keyword research makes use of Google Traffic Estimator, Google Trends, Google Suggest, Google Synonym, and Google Sets.

The Link Analysis Gadget helps with researching backlinks from the major search engines, and fresh citations from blog search engines.

Like other widgets (widgets, by the way, are a fantastic way to generate traffic and links, so long as they are useful), both gadgets come with code that can be slapped onto a webpage.    

I’m sad to see ThreadWatch go. As long as I’ve been blogging, it’s been there, and while it was never a place I hung out, it was always worth checking out, usually with some good commentary you didn’t get anywhere else, and more edgy and adult than other sites dared be.

As you can see in the Alexa graph, after Aaron took over ThreadWatch in late 2005, traffic seemed to have increased, but this year has been a particularly bad one for the site. I wonder if that had a lot to do with Aaron’s decision, and if he’d be interested in sharing some site stats now that it’s over.

Hopefully, there’s some exit strategy for ThreadWatch. Certainly, a website with a lot of backlinks and community is worth something, even if just sold off to someone who wants to use it as a link farm. I’d love to see a new owner keep the site as a community, but give it the support to help it grow again. As one farewell comment said:

Another site that dared to be unique gets unplugged.

Comments

Tag:

Are Big Brands Stealing (Buying) the SERPS?

Coke still hasn’t quite figured it out yet, as Google+Search”>KillerCoke.com is still staring at them menacingly from the number four spot. Pontiac and Mazda, after a short scuffle over competitive keyword bidding, seem to have forgotten each other for now, too.

But notice the domains listed in the organic results for "Pontiac":

1.    Pontiac.com
2.    Pontiac.com/solstice/index.jsp
7.    Pontiacunderground.autos.yahoo.com
9.    GmcCanada.com/English/vehicles/Pontiac/index.jsp

You’re saying "so what?" right? It’s reasonable that Pontiac or General Motors-owned sites show up in the top ten. That’s relevance.

But what makes the Yahoo forum greater than ClassicalPontiac.com, or GMC Canada, or any of the other 35 million results?

SEObook’s Aaron Wall would argue that Google is "over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms." This isn’t to say that Yahoo’s Pontiac forum isn’t a great authority, only to note that some links are worth more than others in Google’s eyes.

Wall says big brands with big budgets "have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains." They have a tremendous amount of authority, and can set subdomains to leverage that authority, linking to the sites they want to rank higher.

What may be more ethically questionable than that is that these big brands are buying up the other sites they want to rank higher. The end result of that is they are manipulating the search results so that only sites they own with positive messages about their brands show up.

Add that budget leverage to an innate ability to outbid smaller competitors on highly competitive keywords, and you have SERPs literally owned by big business.

"While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links," writes Wall, "some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains en mass."

He uses eBay (which just pulled its ads from Google), Monster.com, Bankrate, and Yahoo as examples. Yahoo has at least nine verticals with Nintendo Wii coverage, Bankrate nails the rankings for "mortgage calculator" and Monster.com has a bag full of educational subdomains.

This type of manipulation isn’t much different than Black SEO Google frowns on, nor is it all that different from buying links, which Google also isn’t crazy about. This will be Google’s next relevancy challenge, then, to find a way to prevent the dollar from overriding the relevance.