COGBLOG

We’re now dominating the market for the phrase Xanadaculous! The one and only top position:

Occasionally we’re asked our opinion of certain marketing companies out there who seem to make fantastic claims for incredibly low prices. Claims like “guaranteed top search positions” for a low low price. Two questions that come to mind are :

Top positions for what phrases?
Generally achieving top positions for obscure terms is pretty straight-forward. Most site owners probably have a number of top positions right now for some combination of words and phrases that appear on their site right now. Of course, what matters is whether anyone else actually uses those phrases in search.

Top positions on what sites?
Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo. Those are the sites that matter. And if you do well there, you’ll do well everywhere else. So that claim (that I fortunately do hear less often these days) that we’ll submit your sites to 50, 100, or 1,000 of the top sites, just doesn’t hold any water. You don’t need to do it.

So, in honor of these shady sites I’m coining a new term : Xanadaculous. Xanadaculous means a spectacular claim that is both mythical (like Xanadu in the movie by the same name) and awful (also like the movie). Amazingly enough, google currently finds no results for the term Xanadaculous.

#1 position, coming right up.

This afternoon I decided to take a trip down memory lane. For me, that means cleaning my desk.

Tucked into the nooks and crannies I found all kinds of little reminders of past projects and people we’ve worked with. I also found that the little mouse we found in our office last year apparently had a vacation home in the back of drawer #2 (we eventually caught the little fellow with this trick).

So, should I clean my desk more often? Is that what I’ve learned in 10 years. No. It isn’t.

What prompted this post is a 3.5″ diskette I found at the very very back that contained the very top industry knowledge on the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)…from 1997.

Back then there was a group called Planet Ocean Communications that produced a guide to “winning the search engine wars”. I found an august 1997 copy (their 2nd I believe) sitting there on the disk in the back of my desk drawer. It was full of recommendations and methods/tricks that would help you climb to the top of the search engines. And, this stuff really worked. I still remember the day we reached #2 for web design on InfoSeek. INFOSEEK people!

Now, while a lot of their recommendations from back then would be real bad ideas today, their top recommendation is still one of the best SEO recommendations out there. It is:

Have a unique descriptive title tag on every page!
It is amazing how many sites still don’t do this. For ten years just about anyone who’s even dipped a toe into search optimization realizes that the title of your page is very important. If every page of your site says the same thing in the title (you’ll see the title at the top of your browser window)… then change it! Right away.

So that was their top recommendation 10 years ago–and guess what the top recommendation is amongst SEO experts today? What single thing to they most agree on? Yes! Have a title containing your keywords.

The secret is out. Update your title tags. Now, I have to get back to cleaning my desk before I catch a case of hantavirus.

A month ago I asked Yahoo! for three wishes that would make my life working with them so much easier.

One month later, a wish has been granted. I have to give them props for granting me my wish to opt-out of certain partners.

Guess what Blurit.com? Gravy train is over!

Yahoo must be getting serious, someone from their agency services team actually pro-actively called us the other day. I don’t think that has happened in a while. Said they are going to improve their service. I hope they do. I’d like to see Yahoo! start to actually compete with AdWords.

See you there next week. I’m looking forward to a lot of back-to-back sessions filled with practical real-world details.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday HitWise came out with their monthly rankings of search volume by engine. According to them, Google now has 64% of the U.S. search market. The top 4 looked like this:

Google: 64.0%
Yahoo: 22.9%
MSN: 8.0%
Ask: 3.5%

That leaves just 1.6% for everyone else.

It just so happens that yesterday I came across an email I’d sent to a client with the top 20 search engines in 2001:

Search Engines
Yahoo! 30.9%
Google 26.2%
MSN 14.9%
AOL.com Search 8.7%
GoTo.com/Overture 3.2%
AltaVista 3.0%
Netscape Search 2.1%
Dogpile 1.9%
CNET Search.com 1.9%
MSN – Canada 1.2%
DirectHit 1.0%
LookSmart 1.0%
Lycos 1.0%
Excite 0.7%
Oingo 0.6%
HotBot 0.6%
Metacrawler 0.4%
Ask Jeeves 0.3%
Mamma 0.2%
All The Web 0.2%

Interesting to see how many have either disappeared or faded into obscurity in that time. A much more diverse field, with those engines outside the top 4 accounting for a full 19.3% of the market.

A few months back Yahoo launched Panama, their long awaited update to their sponsored search management tool. And, while I think most would agree that it is an improvement over the old system, they did not address a few critical areas.

So Yahoo!, for your own good, and mine, grant me these three wishes:

1. Get rid of “match driver”.
Six years ago GoTo.com, Yahoo Search Marketing’s ancestor, dominated the Sponsored Search market. At the time, there was no AdWords. Their closest competitor was FindWhat (now Miva). Yahoo, MSN, AOL all distributed GoTo search listings. Feeling their power, GoTo decided it would be a good idea to artificially boost the number of competitors for each particular term by consolidating like terms together into one bidding pool.

Here’s how they described it:

“Our Match Driver tool takes search term misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations, and maps them to a primary term so that consumers get the best and most comprehensive search results we can offer.”

See, they were really looking out for the consumers. They also did this favor to advertisers:

“In order to maintain your competitive advantage in the search results, we take your highest bid on any form of a primary search term. You therefore need not bid on multiple versions of mapped search terms in the future. Any given search term can be listed only once per advertiser, so we removed all duplicates and retained only one of each term.”

This could alternatively be read as “We’ve now forced you to pay a higher amount than what would otherwise be warranted for less desirable terms that we’ve pooled together with other more valuable terms. If you want to be competitive with the valuable terms, you’ll have to pay for our other junk as well”.

There was of course a lot of dis-satisfaction with this decision at the time in the still relatively small Search Marketing world. What GoTo was trying to do was drive up their average revenue per click to attract more potential distribution partners.

Times have changed, but this bad idea hasn’t. It still sucks. Jerry, it’s time to ditch it.

2. Give me an Adwords Editor for Yahoo.
One of the things that we hoped for most in the new Panama system was that the campaign management interface would be improved. And, to give them credit, it has improved over the old system. They did finally do away with the notion that each keyword had to be associated with its own creative and moved to a more AdWords-esque model where you can associate creative (ads) with groups of keywords.

But, in the meantime, Google has come out with something absolutely fantastic–an offline account editing application. This tool allows you to download a snapshot of your account to your local machine, then very quickly execute thousands of changes. Cut, paste, search, replace. I love it. And, I love how Google took the almost counter-intuitive step of building a desktop app as an upgrade for their online platform.

So, Yahoo, take a look at the AdWords editor and try to make managing very large campaigns through your system as easy as it is now with Google.

3. Let me opt-out of specific partners.
This is really a pet peeve. With Yahoo, you can’t opt out of specific publishing partners–even if you absolutely know that they never, ever, result in quality traffic.

We have a nice little ROI tracking tool we first built about 7 years ago. I keep thinking that with all the great analytics platforms out there, we’ll eventually retire this. But, it is hard to beat having direct access to the raw data when you are doing an analysis. So, it lives on. One very handy component is the ability to identify the referring URLs from any particular campaign. So, using this, we can easily see the conversion rates for Yahoo publishing partners.

For instance, the site BlurtIt is a Yahoo search publishing partner. It is similar to Yahoo answers (but not as good). Every month, Yahoo delivers (and charges us for) traffic from BlurtIt, and every month that traffic immediately hits the back button upon arriving at our client’s sites. Eliminating that traffic would instantly improve the ROI of our overall Yahoo campaign. But, it can’t be done. Why is that? I’m sure they are sick of hearing this but… Google lets me do it.

What these three wishes really boil down to is this: Yahoo, change your mindset from one of fear that giving your advertisers total control over their campaigns will cost you revenue, to one where you are helping advertisers find profitable marketing relationships, and avoiding those that are not profitable. Trying to hang on to marketing dollars by giving clients fewer options is just not going to work.

So, c’mon Yahoo, grant me some wishes.

It’s been interesting to see some of the response to last night’s Digg takeover. Quite a few people have said it is an example of mob rule, deplorable, evidence that Digg is not really a “community”, and so on.

The interesting part of all this to me is that:

1. It is a lesson in damage control gone awry. Clearly if your entire rights management scheme relies on keeping one bit of information under lock and key, you’ll have a very difficult time once that bit of information is released in the wild. And, if your plan is to brand anyone who later passes that bit along a criminal, you’ll be again putting yourself in a very bad position, at least from a public relations standpoint. And by doing so, you may just accomplish exactly the opposite of what you intended through your attempts at enforcement.

2. I think it is interesting that Kevin Rose titled his post with the key. Obviously that is a risky choice, but also in fact the only thing that could have short-circuited the massive wave of copy-cat postings that were rising up the digg ladder–short of just taking the site down. Another example of a kind of rule of opposites of online damage control : heavy handedness fed the fire, capitulation snuffed it out.

I’m not saying that I think what happened on digg was right (I’m not exactly sure it falls into the realm of right and wrong).

But, it is an example of something that is particularly despised among programmers, developers, and security types online (a big part of the digg audience), and that is an attempt by a perceived powerful group to protect an inherently flawed system through intimidation, rather than through an improved system. It is analogous to the scenario where a company like Microsoft responds with a threatened lawsuit when a security expert (aka hacker) releases a discovered bug in their code. Most smart businesses (including Microsoft) have figured this out by now, and instead treat it as an opportunity to improve their product and methods.

I think that sentiment is a big part of what fueled the Digg takeover.

Kevin Rose threw his lot in with the diggers themselves last night with this response.

A very interesting lesson was delivered tonight about who actually owns a social media space. Like a few million other people I’ve been known to get sucked into one story after another on Digg.com. Those stories are like crack for the curious.

Earlier today a story popped up on Digg about a post on blogger that had been removed because of a complaint from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC). The AACS is an industry group set up to enforce copyright protection for the AACS digital rights management system. This digital rights management system is intended to prevent the illegal copying of content on protected DVDs.

The problem is that someone cracked this protection, and then subsequently released the key, composed of an alphanumeric string. Since then, this group has been sending letters to web publishers warning them to remove any postings that contain this key. They warn that publishing this string of numbers and letters is in fact a violation of the digital millennium copyright act.

Well, the funny part about one of these letters is that it actually contained the printed key, inside the URL of one of the pages in question. Now, the story about this letter on chillingeffects.org started making it’s way up on Digg.com. But, was then suddenly removed by Digg administrators. What’s even funnier is that it was not pulled down before Google indexed the page, and so you can still see the Digg article lead in here in Google’s cache

The post that really set things off was this page, that displays the number. It received over 15,000 diggs (votes from members of the digg community that will propel a story towards the number one position on the first page of Digg.com) but then was removed by Digg admins.

Now, this was soon noticed by the community, many of whom were outraged that Digg was taking it upon themselves to censor content that the community clearly felt was of great interest..

Digg administrators also began banning accounts of people who had also published stories containing the string, and subsequently had them dugg up to Digg’s top pages.

So, guess what happened next? Every new article that diggers began digging up to the top pages somehow contained the very same encryption key! Posts titled “Can you guess the number I’m thinking of?” would lead to images containing the key. Soon, EVERY STORY on the front page of Digg, was related to this HD-DVD key. As I write this, every story is still related to this.

Now, to realize how big that is, you need to understand that reaching the front page of Digg.com can result in a massive crush of traffic. The phenomenon known as the Digg effect is when a story reaches the front page, only to have the site’s server become completely unreachable–crushed under the massive load of traffic directed by Digg.

But, it raises really interesting questions about social media, the people and organizations who run these sites, and what their role is in managing the content published there. Clearly Digg users feel that the Digg homepage is more their property than the property of Kevin Rose (founder of Digg). And, by trying to prevent the distribution of this one bit of information, they have inadvertently sealed their own fate–causing such a tremendous explosion of interest that it really has no hope of containment.

It is a fascinating story. And, no matter how you feel about DRM, you gotta love the way a community can respond like this to a perceived offense. That was a serious social media smackdown!