Early feedback on the SEO Toolbar has been quite positive.
You know people like a Firefox extension when an official Microsoft blog makes an entry promoting it!
Actually I just wanted an excuse to embed this Beattles video in a blog post 
Have a good weekend everyone!
Continuing on with our community questions, here are a few requests for specific ranking information:
“What are the 100+ variables Google considers in their ranking algorithm?”
Cheeky
Easy to say, hard to do. Take a job at Google, work your way up the ranks and join the inner circle.
Another question we received is along the same lines:
How do you outrank a super established website in your niche, one where Google is giving site links and their domain is older
Again, easy to say, hard to do. Either forget outranking the domain and buy it, or spend time doing exactly what they have done, and hope they also stop their SEO efforts in order to let you catch up.
These types of questions arise often. “If I could just learn a few quick-fix insider secrets, I can outrank everyone!”
If there was a quick n easy secret formula that would guarantee high rank, why would those who know it, reveal it?
The reality is that quick-fix secret formulas don’t exist.
Sure, there are quirks in the algorithms that can be exploited, but they are often trumped by historical factors, like authority metrics, that are difficult to fake. One common blackhat technique is to hack an established domain, and place “money” pages on that domain. That’s an admission, if ever there was, that technical trickery on your own domain is either too time consuming, or doesn’t work so well.
I know some of the worlds top SEOs, and I can’t recall them spending much time talking about secret sauce. What they do talk about is making money and growing empires. They’re more focused on the business strategy of SEO.
The effectiveness of many SEO techniques will be dead soon, anyway.
What you need to think about for the future is user interaction.
Have a read of this document, by my good friend and Merlot drinker, Mike Grehan. Mike outlines his view on the future of search, and he makes a number of important points:
If you want to future proof your SEO strategy, take heed of Mike’s words.
The crawler model is failing because the crawler was designed for structured text, not multimedia. The crawler can’t see behind pay-walls. It has trouble navigating databases in which the data isn’t interlinked or marked-up. The search engines will need to look for other ways of finding and making sense of data.
Social networks, blogs, Twitter etc indicate a move away from the webmaster as signaler of importance i.e. who you choose to link out to. The search engines will need to mine the social signals form those networks. The user will signal where their attention is focused by their interaction and paths.
Universal search, in may cases, has pushed results listings down below the fold. For example, to get a client seen high up on the results page may involve making sure making sure they are featured on Google Maps. Similarly, if they have video content, it should be placed on YouTube. Google have shown they are increasingly looking to the aggregators for results and featuring their content in prominent positions.
That list of search results is becoming more and more personalized, and this will continue. Who knows, we may not have a list before too long. More and more “search” data - meaning “answers to questions” - might be pushed to us, rather than us having to go hunt for it.
The future of SEO, therefore, will be increasingly about engaging people. The search engines will be measuring the signals users send. In the past, it’s all been about the signals webmasters send i.e. links and marked up content.
For now, you still need to cover the obvious bases - create crawlable, on-topic content, backed by quality linking. But you’ll also need to think about the users - and the signals they send - in order to future proof your site. Google has long placed the user at the center of the web. Their algorithms are surely heading towards measuring them, too.
What are these signals? Ah, now there’s a question…..
Source:The 100+ Ranking Variables Google Uses, And Why You Shouldn't Care
I have had a very well known SEO company dust one of best link building strategies (outing it directly to a Google engineer) because I was trusting enough to mention how effective it was inside our training program, thinking that a competitor would not out it, but I was wrong! At least I know what to expect, and can use that knowledge to mitigate future risks.
One of the common concerns about the SEO Toolbar is something along the lines of “does it phone home” or “are you spying on us” or “what data is it sending you”. Some SEO companies offer a huge EULA and do spy on the people who use their toolbars, but we do not do that for a number of reasons
It is pretty obvious that the trend in software (since the day I got on the web) is that open source software is commoditizing the value of most software products and tools. Providing tools that require limited maintenance costs and provide access to a best of breed collection of SEO tools makes it easy for us to evolve with the space and help our customers do so, without building up a huge cost sink that requires raising capital and having to listen to some icky investors.
The reason we can (and do) provide so many free SEO tools is because I feel doing so…
In addition to all the above points, most of the tools we create are tools I want to use. So the cost of building them would still be there even if we did not share them. Sharing them gets us lots of great user feedback to improve them, and does not cost us much relative to the potential upside.
Rather than centralizing things, we like to rely on a distributed software strategy which has a much lower cost structure.
That strategy allows this site (with a popular blog, an array of tools, some videos, training modules, and an active community) to run on 1 server. We find the Plenty of Fish story inspiring, though doubt we will need his distributed computing skills anytime soon given how small our industry is. After 5 years we are still millions of visitors and over a billion monthly pageviews behind Plenty of Fish
Though we are doing ok in our little corner of the web
We have analytics on our website to help us see where we are getting coverage, and to measure and improve conversions (an area ripe for opportunity given our brand exposure and site traffic). We may add relevant affiliate links and offers to some of our SEO tools to help pay for the 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars we spent developing our various tools (for example, see how we integrated a link to our Wordtracker keyword guide and the Wordtracker keyword research service in our keyword tool). But we have no need or desire to spy on users who download our tools. Spying and outing are poor strategies for professional SEOs to employ….they erode trust and value.
Every listing site or review site has to start off from scratch at some point. Over the past 3 or 4 years it has got much harder to rank thin affiliate database sites, and now that is only going to get harder, with Matt Cutts asking for spam reports on empty review sites.
Of course if Amazon.com or TripAdvisor or Craigslist open new sections they can probably get away with using duplicate or thin content based on the strength of their brands. Branded networks can always throw out a new related niche site and have it be seen as being above board:
The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
But new competitors are going to have a hard time building the budget and funding the brand exposure needed to rank because SEO is getting more complex, and if you don’t have enough brand or enough AdWords spend you pretty-much are not going to get the exposure needed to get consumer reviews and rank organically, unless you license/steal/borrow/mix/re-mix content to build an opening “reviews” database. Some software tools, like Web Data Parser, make the process easier, but you still need to wrap everything in some time of value add (good design, mash ups, etc.). Or have great public relations. Or start your site off as an editorial only play, where you review what interests you, and then move the brand into the reviews space after you get some momentum and an organic traffic flow.
Matt Cutts explained how thin listing pages may be against their guidelines
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
….
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
….
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…
and yet Google crawls form boxes to generate new URLs.
Search is growing more subjective, becoming more about competition and expanding the ad channel. Think like a black hat. You have to stay ahead of Google’s internal products & services if you want to avoid the spam label.
The shopping search engines/price comparison sites spend enough on AdWords to be considered a value add user experience (they give AdWords a broad backfill baseline inventory which other merchants have to compete against), but if Google can evolve their Product Search into a revenue stream and encourage reviews then many shopping search engines will soon run out of steam.
A Microsoft engineer notes:
I believe that the locus of advertising will gradually shift towards the creation of valuable and compelling content. There is, however, a relative dearth of professionals or companies that can provide such content creation services. Perhaps advertising agencies might evolve in this direction, or perhaps this may an opportunity for forward-thinking individuals?
Eventually Google will need to become more of a content play if they want to keep growing revenues. This is why…
And if Google co-opts the media that makes it hard to give them serious negative press. Eric Schmidt thinks the press needs to be more tightly integrated into Google
I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.
Google’s growing depth gives it a huge network advantage. More advertisers = more relevant ads = higher monetization with better user experience & more user loyalty. Microsoft is trying to buy marketshare and will likely push search harder in Windows 7, but it might be too little too late.
Yahoo! screwed up their US advertiser terms of service AND gave up on their international contextual ad service, giving Google yet another competitive advantage.
After reading John Andrews write a great review of Affiliate Summit I got thinking about some of Google’s potential moves…
Source:Google: Closing the Loop on Content, Advertising, & Commerce
Some recent Google shifts have caused a lot of .edu websites to rank for competitive keywords like mortgage and credit card. Here is a screenshot of the top 100 search results for “mortgage” with 57 .edu results and 15 .gov results. And here is a similar credit card screenshot.
Note that few of these pages have any relevant on-page content. Is this a case of Google-bombing? Or did Google dial up the .edu bonus too far?
Does Google want to return all the irrelevant pages? Or does it not matter if they are deep enough in the result set? Will having mystery meat results on pages 2 through 100 hurt Google’s brand? Or does everyone just click on the first page?
We discussed this a bit more in the forums: new Google results
Source:Google's .edu Domain Love: Department of Economics ≠ Mortgage, or Does It?
Posted by randfish
Thousands of posts, news articles and analysis pieces have covered the central topic of battling Google’s dominance in web search, but I’ve seen very few that have discussed what is, in my opinion, the most telling example of the search giant’s dominance. The latest (made popular across Techmeme and many individual blogs) was this piece from C|Net’s Don Reisinger:
In an interview last year with a Google representative on my podcast, the CNET Digital Home Podcast, I was told that the key to Google’s success, and more importantly, a key component in its corporate culture, is its willingness and desire to get search users going to the destination site as quickly as possible. He said that Google recognizes itself as a "middleman" and getting users to its intended site quickly is paramount if it wants to be successful…
…Google’s tallest barrier to entry in the search engine market is its advertising platform, which is the world’s largest. By expanding its search, it’s able to create a more enticing advertising platform through AdWords, AdSense, and its embeddable Google Search box.
I disagree. I don’t think Google’s dominance is owed to their willingness to "get users where they’re going," their advertising platform, the quality of their search results, their partnership network or the billions in capital. It’s the results of a simple test…
In this test, subjects were asked which search results they preferred for a wide variety of queries - long tail searches, top-of-mind searches, topics about which their emotions ranged from great passion to total agnosticism. They were shown two sets of search results and asked which they prefer.
Lots of tests like this have been run with all sorts of differentiations. In some, the brands are removed so users only see the links. Testers do this to get an idea of whether they can win from a pure "quality" standpoint. In others, the brands remain to get an unvarnished, more "real-world" view. And in one particular experiment - performed many times by many different organizations - the results are swapped across the brands to test whether brand loyalty and brand preference is stronger than qualitative analysis in consumers.
It’s this last test that has the most intriguing results (at least, in my opinion). Because in virtually every instance where qualitative differences weren’t glaringly obvious, Google was picked as the best "search engine" without regard for the results themselves:
Fundamentally, testers find (again and again) that the brand preference for Google outweighs the logical consideration of the search results quality. The problem is, we run up against a situation like this:
If Microsoft or Yahoo! or a start up search engine wants to take market share, they’re going to have to think less like a technology company trying to build a better mousetrap and more like a brand trying to win mind share from a beloved competitor. How was it that Pepsi took share away from Coke? Or Toyota from Ford? I seem to recall that it took a lot longer than 10 years.
What do you think? Given this advantage, how can another search engine effectively compete?
Posted by randfish
Last week, I did a Whiteboard Friday, The Microsite Mistake, in which I called out a practice I see as potentially detimental to SEO - using a separate domain to accumulate links for your content site. I was not arguing against all microsite strategies or all domain separations or even all subdomains, just pointing out that this particular usage wasn’t a very logical one. Then came the comments…
Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love the vibrancy and passion and level of engagement from all our readers and commenters, particularly those that disagree. Honestly, I believe that it is when we disagree and confront one another in positive, constructive ways that we learn the most so please, keep it up! In this instance, though, the comments weren’t a particularly good place for me to address all the many thoughts that arose - that takes a post, and here it is.
Root domains vs. Subdomains vs. Subfolders
Search engines have metrics that they apply to pages, such as PageRank, and metrics they apply to subdomains and root domains (including things like TrustRank, various quality scores, domain level link metrics like Domain mozRank, etc.). Through years of experience, observation and testing, SEOs have observed some very steady patterns of behavior:
For these reasons, if you’re seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content, it’s my personal belief that you should, most of the time, keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com.
However, there are exceptions…
When to Use a Subdomain
Subdomains can sometimes make sense when:
There are other situations, some of them more technical in nature, where it can make sense, but the best practice is to use one subdomain on a root domain for all your content. In my experience, unless you’ve got some serious SEO savvy and know exactly what you’re doing and why, this should be the default.
When it Pays to Use Microsites
Like subdomains, microsites, too have their place:
There are probably several other good uses for microsites and times when it pays to apply them, but they tend to fit with some of the above principles. The big trouble with microsites is that they inherit none of the trust, authority, ranking power, consideration, etc. that search engines give to established, well-linked properties. Mistaking a link between two domains as a signal that the engines can interpret to mean "oh, these two sites are owned by the same company, and since I trust that one, I’ll trust this one" can make for very unhappy execs when it comes time to see the new project’s metrics.
As always, I’m looking forward to your opinions and experiences on this topic.
Source:Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate
Posted by great scott!
Okay, so any of us in the online marketing world have been guilty of obsessing over rankings at one time or another. Well, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand makes the case that Rank Tracking may not be the end all be all of SEO metrics, at least not by itself.
Take a look and see what else you need to be monitoring in order to make rank tracking truly worthwhile to your sites and those of your clients.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - When to Track Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Posted by randfish
2009 is shaping up to be my busiest travel period ever (and that’s saying something). I’m going to be on the road a lot between February and June, and while it’s nothing like the 250+ days per year guys like Enquisite’s Richard Zwicky spends away from home, it does present a great opportunity to meet with lots more folks from the SEO community - quite possibly my favorite part of the job.
2007/2008 Travel Photos from Sydney, Madrid & Beijing
If you are planning to attend any of the following, please keep an eye out and say hi!
Friday, February 5th | San Diego, CA
I’ll be speaking with Todd Malicoat & Lauren Vaccarello at the Online Marketing Summit - and I’m really excited about the session we’re giving:
Stories from the Front Lines of SEO
Tales of mishap, success, woe and delight from decades in the SEO business. Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat & Lauren Vaccarello will share some of their most fascinating stories of mishap, success, woe and delight from their years in the search engine optimization business. If the best learning is doing, the second best is surely hearing how others have fared and applying that inspiration, so don’t miss out. Note that some accounts may be anonymized to protect the innocent (and the not-so-innocent).
I expect it will be one of the more unique and hopefully valuable presentations I’ve given. If you’ve ever leaned your ear over the booth at a crowded SEO bar meetup to hear the war stories fly, expect more of that at OMS.
Wednesday & Thursday, February 11-12 | Santa Clara, CA
I’m on two panels at SMX West:
In House: Training the Company on SEO
In-house SEO isn’t easy, and often short staffed. In this session, you’ll learn how to bring in an SEO novice and work with the entire development team to help you execute SEO campaigns.SEO Status Report Metrics
How are your SEO efforts going from a technical standpoint? This session looks at "status report" metrics you can tap into such as link counts, page counts and more.
For the In-House panel, I’ve got plans to talk about our experience training folks at large organizations like Microsoft, Real, NPR, etc. and how to build a culture of SEO into your business, rather than just apply it as an afterthought. On Status Report Metrics, we’ve been doing some really cool research about using metrics to predict both traffic and rankings, and I’ll be sharing some of that for the first time publicly.
February 17-20 | London, UK
I’ll be speaking on the Orion Panel on the second day of SES London, where I’ll be interviewed by Mike Grehan, alongside Brett Tabke, Kevin Ryan, Chris Sherman & Jill Whalen. Definitely looking forward to not only London itself, a town I love, but this panel in particular, which I expect to have a lot of energy and some very unique opinions - as evidenced here.
March 10 | Portland, OR
I’ve been invited back to one of my favorite small conferences, SEMPDX’s Searchfest. Danny Sullivan is keynoting this year, and I’ll be speaking on the business aspects of building an SEO company - an interesting change of pace, but something I feel (finally) qualified to tackle. The best part, of course, will be re-joining my many Portland SEO friends & colleagues. There’s a terrific group of folks down there and a very vibrant SEO community (something we really need to grow here in Seattle).
March 20th | Reykjavik, Iceland
Kristján Már Hauksson and the awesome crew from Nordic eMarketing are hosting an exceptional conference experience in Iceland. We haven’t determined what I’ll be speaking on, but I’m thrilled to finally make it out to Iceland and speak alongside some very impressive search marketers. Given the incredibly low airfares (and the low cost of the conference itself), you should put this on your list of potential events if you haven’t already. I’m particularly excited at the prospect of meeting some of the search folks from Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, as I don’t have a lot of experience there.
April 2-3 | Sydney, Australia
As promised, I can’t resist the pull of SMX Sydney and Barry Smyth’s amazing hospitality. Last year, I wrote that this may have been the best conference I’d ever attended, so a repeat was certainly in store. Again, plans aren’t yet finalized for what I’ll be speaking on, but I’m certain there will be a few exciting topics (and maybe some more on-stage outing of spam).
April 22-23 | SMX Munich
I’m extremely excited to return to Munich, this time to keynote the SMX conference. My talk will be:
What the Web’s Link & Content Structures can Teach Us
There’s a tremendous amount of information we’ve gleaned and lessons learned from building and researching an index of the WWW. Share in the fascinating statistics, and examples of both success & failure that can inform your search marketing strategy.
I think this will be one of my most unique presentations, as the data from our index and our efforts to building a considerable portion of search technology are revealed in a way best suited to help SEOs.
More to come as it’s finalized (including, most likely, SMX Mexico City in November)… During this stretch, I’ll also be in Boston, Washington DC and San Francisco, but I’ll try to provide advance notice via the blog of any public events. It’s certain to be a busy few months, but I’m looking forward to spending some time away from rainy Seattle
Source:Where's Rand the First Half of 2009? London, Munich, Sydney, Reykjavik and More
Good design makes quality content look and feel better. Design can help improve conversion rate, makes a site more linkable, and sometimes a site generates additional links and mentions just for having a great aesthetic design.
I frequently get asked how we can run a wide array of websites with only a few high-quality part time employees. One of our secrets is staying away from the stuff we are no good at - like web design. I could show you my attempts at design, but you would think less of me if I did. 
Rather than going the DIY route, I have been getting quality custom website designs from Wildfire Marketing Group for many of our newer sites, and they look great. I liked their services enough to work a deal with them to get SEO Book training subscribers $100 off their designs, which start out at $765 for a basic design and $975 for a design + a Wordpress theme. Their services page is here, and the coupon code is here.
A couple other people I would also recommend for design work without hesitation are Sophie Wegat and Chris Pearson. Though Chris Pearson is working on Thesis and no longer is available for hire. Luckily we have a 20% off Thesis coupon too.
