Jack of All Blogs » Search Marketing

Bing? Google? Who Cares.

Andrew G.R. — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:38:45 +0000

I’m tired of hearing about search engines and how well they are doing – or not.

A search engine’s success is actually quite irrelevant to me. Like most people, what I want out of Web search is fairly simple:

Bring me what I want and bring it to me now.

It’s not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. At least with those items there is a different taste. Perhaps one is cheaper than the other. Maybe I want people to see me drinking one over the other to portray a certain image.

But search engines are different.

No one is going to walk past my desk and say, “Wow, you’re a Bing man, eh?”

Google’s market share really has nowhere to do but down. And with the amount of money (reported at over $100M) being poured into promoting Bing, at least initially, they’ll HAVE to show some serious traffic.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10266390-56.html

The real question is if they’ll be able to sustain enough market share to remain a player.

Microsoft will make sure the computers they sell have Bing as the default search engine. They’ll load Bing search into every toolbar they can. So of course more people will be using it, but that doesn’t mean it’s better (or maybe it is).

Different search engines might present information differently. They might offer some different filtering options. But at the end of the day…

Bring me what I want and bring it to me now.

Even if a search engine promises to pay or reward you for using it I’m not interested.

Bring me what I want and bring it to me now.

Am I being too demanding? Maybe. But this is Jack of All Blogs after all and we have one request:

Bring us what we want and bring it to us now.

Fantasy and Sex Top Internet Searches

Andrew G.R. — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:36:13 +0000

As 2007 winds down one thing is crystal clear: people are desperate for escape. Case in point, the Top 10 queries on Yahoo! over the past year. Of the top 10, six are female sex symbols, two are faux sports and two are grounded in an alternate universe. Shame on any of you who typed the following words into a search engine in 2007.

10) Jessica Alba. I guess we can thank Maxim magazine’s “Hot 100″ for this search. The Mexican-Danish “actress” has suffered from OCD and has a tattoo of a daisy with a ladybug on the back of her neck. I only know this from searching her name. I swear I wasn’t looking for images!

9) Fergie. She’ll be 33 in 2008, making her the oldest person to make the Top 10, and all but ensuring she won’t make the list next year. She’s a chameleon. Part gangster part “lady.” But even that didn’t lock in her spot. Take notes people, if you wanna land in the Top 10 you just need to piss in your pants.

8- Fantasy Football. I love sports. In fact for a while, I was into all of the fantasy sports. Then one day I woke up and realized that players making the league minimum were still earning six times my salary. And to add insult to injury, they actually like their jobs.

7) Rune Scape. This is one of two items on the list that I am not embarrassed to admit I did not know. Now that I’ve search it, I still don’t get it. Something about casting spells or something. Maybe this is the reason athletes make so much money. Unlike you, they’re not sitting in cubicle playing video games.

6) Lindsay Lohan. Not to be mean but the only reason to search Ms. Lohan is to see if you’ve finally won the Dead Pool. It’ll be interesting to see if she takes the number one slot after she OD’s. Even money says that will happen in ’08.

5) Beyonce. Number one hits, a budding movie career and almost as many endorsement deals as Peyton Manning. Given her media saturation, don’t you people get enough? Maybe you’re searching her obviously fake relationship with Jay-Z. Either way, you can bet her sister Solange is in her room crying, she ranked number 987,872.

4) Naruto. Loud, obnoxious and hyperactive, Naruto Uzumaki is the world’s most famous fictional adolescent ninja. I had no idea what Naruto was. Honestly, I’ll probably forget tomorrow – so I’ll just search it again. Maybe that’s why it ranked so well.

3) Paris Hilton. She’s bared it all on video and served her time in jail. Now that she’s a “lady,” there’s really not much for her to accomplish. Short of killing someone (always possible) I’d expect to see her slide down the list next year.

2) WWE. Yes, wrestling is fake; but it’s still damn entertaining. Whether it’s Vince McMahon accusing his mom of molestation or an A-list star succumbing to roid rage (allegedly) and wiping out his family, the physical soap opera known as wrestling was custom-made for Internet buzz.

1) Britney Spears. She might be pregnant again. Let us set the record straight, the baby is ours. What can I say? We’re a fertile bunch here at Jack of All Blogs.

Yet Another Link Whoring Scheme

capslock — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:39:16 +0000

Just as I thought linkbaiting schemes were a thing of the past, I come across yet another link whoring scheme that I think is all wrong. Do a search on viraltags and viralinks and you will come across this post instructing you to add a matrix of links under any post on your blog, and adding any blog that pings back to your post into the matrix.

So basically it’s link exchange. You get links from people who wish to pingback from your site, and you add their links in return.

Pretty interesting idea, I would say. However, if this concept were to be as successful as the promoters would say, why aren’t they on top of the search results for the keywords viraltags, and even viralinks?

Maybe they used a name of an already existing service (there are sites called viraltags.com and viralinks.com)? Maybe it’s really a fluke?

Here’s what I think. The concept is indeed interesting, as it takes advantage of blogs’ automatic pinging/linking back mechanism in order to “notify” other viralink bloggers that there are people asking for a link back. And we know the value of inbound links in terms of search optimization. However, there might be misplaced enthusiasm about such “viralinking” schemes.

Link farms? The way the links are set up–which are in matrix form–might be thought of as link farming by Google. Come on, we know Google likes links that are interspersed into text naturally. There’s probably more value in a single link coming from a blog post of substance rather than a long list of hundreds of links. Jampacking your post with links would just dilute its link-love value.
Anchor text. The original viralinks post tells of linking using a matrix of dots or stars. Where’s the SEO value there? Aren’t you aware that the anchor text plays a big part in optimization. If you used asterisks as anchor text, then you would just be optimizing the site linked to for the “*” keyword (if there is such a thing). You should use something more descriptive.
It’s artificial. I read some bloggers claiming this would enhance your popularity on technorati. I’m thinking otherwise. I would say the guys over at technorati would think of such schemes as unnatural ways of jacking up link popularity, and hence would eventually filter them out. So whatever popularity you get will likely be short lived.

I guess there may be some merits to getting into link-exchange schemes. But one thing I really hate, and would like to highlight here as such, is how these things uglify your site. I’m not about to add a hundred or so links below my posts (or even just one) just for a link exchange program. I would rather write interesting, substantial, link-able material that everyone would blog about and link to.

Too Much SEO and Everything is Going to Suck

capslock — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:27:59 +0000

Last April I chanced upon a post on JohnChow.com that I thought quite disturbing. I would’ve responded there, but the lazy guy in me thought of postponing it. So here, two months after I’m writing a reaction.

In one of John’s evil SEO trick posts, he says one good way to encourage people to leave comments on your blog is by displaying the top comment authors on your home page. This way they get a link from your front page, and with WordPress this is usually not dumbed down by rel=nofollow (something previously discussed here on JOAB).

This can prove to be beneficial to both blog author and reader. Authors will get more comments on posts. Readers get SEO love from another blog’s front page. It’s much like purchasing a text link, John himself says.

Looking at my Top Commentators lists, I can see that, from a SEO standpoint, three commentators are doing it right and the rest are doing it wrong. Getting a link on the Top Commentators list offers more SEO benefit than traffic benefits. It’s the same as buying a text link. The link sends you traffic but its main purpose to help you improve your Google ranking. Knowing this to be the case, then the anchor text for the top commentator link should be anything but your name (unless your name is very descriptive).

So if you comment on a blog, instead of using your own name you use a descriptive anchor text.

But then that got me thinking. If everyone did this, then no one would be signing blogs using their names or aliases. Everything would be signing as “website copywriter,” “cheap custom content,” or some other text. Maybe people will also start signing as “buy viagra” or “xanax” or some other spammy sounding name. And what happens when that becomes the prevailing trend? You will have a helluva time filtering your comments for spam.

Your spam filters might come up with a lot of false positives. You might end up having to sift through your moderation list for otherwise valid comments.

Worse, wouldn’t this make the line that separates spam from non-spam disappear altogether? And wouldn’t this mean that most of your commenters become spammers by definition?

Personally I have my limits. It’s okay to sign as your blog or website’s name. But if you’re using my comment threads too much for marketing your product, service, or brand, then that’s spam in my book.

Evil, indeed. And bordering on stupid. If I had commenters like that I would block them outright. Search optimization and marketing sometimes just make things too annoying for the regular user.

Is The Link Industry Killing Relationships and Personality in Blogs?

capslock — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:51:56 +0000

A favorite writer, Liz Strauss recently wrote over at the Blog Herald about the dichotomy between relationships and information when it comes to the Web.

What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that I’ve read your content, that you’re relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?

We’re living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It’s the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It’s the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social

From her articles, I’ve come to know Liz as a relationship blogger, so she highly values relationships in her blogging activities. I doubt if she sells ad space or text links on her personal blogs. Who she writes about, you’ll be sure she’s personally recommending them, by way of linking.

When I started blogging, it was mostly personal. My blog was about my life. Sure, it sounds corny, but a good majority of bloggers are blogging on personal matters. Blogs are their online diaries, and not their soapboxes and online newsmagazines. So on my personal online journal, I linked to sites and other bloggers that I found interesting. Back then, the concept of paid links was still not as prevalent as it is today.

But then blogs became popular among search marketers and optimizers for their link value. If you could get a link from an A-lister, not only would you get traffic, but also good link juice. Or if you can’t get quality, you could at least get quantity. And the text link industry was born. Now you see sponsored blog posts and reviews everywhere. Sometimes it’s weird how people would insert paid links within their paragraphs, even though the anchor text is unrelated. Sometimes people would incessantly post, several times per day, just to meet pay per post quotas, (quality drops significantly in these cases, in my observation). You don’t know what’s real anymore.

Going back to Liz’s point, it seems there’s nothing really wrong with being informational instead of social on your blog. I think the point is that blogs these days are becoming more and more impersonal. Pretty soon, the concept of blogs as personal journals might be a thing of the past.