aaronwall

I do leave wiggle room in the words because I often analyze how systems are changing. Such analysis is based on hunches and presumption and experiences that can't always fully be revealed publicly without leading people astray or adding unnecessary risk.

If I am too ridged in how I write & then Google changes their approach in a slightly different way, then I look like the bad guy for not being 100% right 100% of the time.

Predicting the future is hard.

And since some people read your writing months or years after you type something, being too rigid in a changing ecosystem is going to lead some folks astray. This is only compounded by the verticalization of search, SEO strategies being different in different regions of the world, SEO strategies having different levels of risks vs reward for different types of organizations, etc.

Also in some cases Google has been known to have a vindictive side, which throws other presumptions out the window. You learn a new part of "the algorithm" when you are put up to vote for public lynching on a Google engineer's blog. :D

That said, they typically are pretty fair. Though there are some absurd exceptions. ;)

I am more for promoting questioning authority & encouraging testing than a static paint-by-number approach. That can make it seem like the writer is being obtuse or translucent, but that is far better than saying "always do X" and then have someone get utterly destroyed for following the tip.

Also we do run a number of sites. And our approach is based on "do what works." I may criticize Google's approach to something while testing how well it works. I don't control their ecoysystem, but I do monitor how it works and run many tests in parallel.

For the record with eHow, I don't mind them existing and am totally cool with Google being fine with them. What I do think is laughable though is the following combination:

- Google claiming they can't judge content quality when they frequently judge the intent of links (with far less information available)

- Google writing an algorithm to catch content farms which torches 10's of thousands of smaller websites while somehow missing eHow

- Google torching some people for using expired domains, but not giving a crap if eHow buys a registrar and does it in bulk (which is yet another side of "the algorithm" most people do not understand)

Ultimately I am fine with search engines doing whatever they feel they should. All I ask is for consistency in enforcement & approach. If they assume you are guilty & should be destroyed for doing x, then they shouldn't preach their moral superiority when they fund someone doing 100x or 1000x worse than what was worth torching you over.

I haven't had any sites fully torched in quite a long time, but I can tell you that the site that was penalized to the most extreme level was not doing anywhere near the same level of shady crap that eHow was doing recently. It was not even in the same league or solar system! But I know if I followed eHow's lead on some of that stuff I would get torched.

The filler text complaint is a common complaint against SEOs, but that is a problem far more common with the likes of content mills. That post includes many things that were not publicly known in the prior context (like TripAdvisor's past link buying).

Content which parochially states "x is never worth doing" is of far lower quality stuff than content which is rich in historical context with actual examples used based on real-world data and experience.

The example of TripAdvisor being impossible to beat (along with suggesting that start ups need to avoid risk) is a quite laughable combination since TripAdvisor was buying so many links that Matt Cutts directly contacted them in person at a conference and warned them about it. They levered up on risk until they felt it was about to catch up with them & then backed off.

That sort of approach is far smarter than saying "take no risk." After all, most start ups end up failing anyhow. Success is not about avoiding risks, but taking smart ones.

I thought that post was rather direct. The points of it were...

- anytime you enter a new market you are typically doing so from a competitive disadvantage

- to come from behind you need a unique strategy (rather than relying on a paint-by-number approach to business)

- it is at best close-minded to call any channel or model unequivocally dead across the board, especially if you do not know much about it

- the people that Chris was describing as impossible to beat established stars of today were indeed gray area players a few years back. If they would have "stuck to the rules" back then & used a similar analysis of the market back then as Chris offers today, then they never would have created their websites...which are now market leaders.

Our membership site has only been open for a couple years (with a 3 month pause in there) and I personally wrote about 25,000 posts in the forums, answering thousands and thousands of questions. It honestly doesn't get much more personal than that IMHO.

If you haven't experienced it then sure it can seem like marketing for the sake of marketing, but the fact that I was willing to shut down the site (make it bring in $0 revenue for 3 months while it was costing 5 figures a month) shows that I am not trying to maximize revenues without care toward quality...and that I am willing to invest in having a quality service.

And Patio11 has frequently highlighted on Hacker News that the best advice he got from us wasn't even directly SEO advice, but tips to help change his sales copy. That indeed came from doing a direct and personal review of his site.

If we didn't deliver on what we promise do you think I would have risked closing the site to customers for 3 months?

How many of those sites had the sustained level of traffic that Mahalo had for years?

Also note that Mahalo enjoyed that level of traffic based on auto-generating pages through shagging third party content (without requesting permission and without any way to opt out of getting your content scraped, since they were pulling in the scrapes from Google's search API & you couldn't block Mahalo doing that without blocking GoogleBot).

In the past when Matt Cutts wrote of such MFA scraper sites he described them as "shoot on sight" http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-webmasterradiofm/#commen...

"In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find."

And yet you have sympathy for Jason? Shows how powerful his public relations skills are! :D

Hehehe ... with a close second perhaps being "using deceptive public relations non-sense to get ink any way possible"

Good things happen to good people.

The opposite is also true.

Congrats Jason! :D

Didn't AdWords advertisers get a quality score discount (through higher ad clickthrough rates + free checkout processing) for using Google Checkout?

The official page for Google Checkout to this day states "Google Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad displays the Checkout badge, meaning more traffic to your site."

That is a pretty clear-cut example of Google tilting their "algorithm" toward promoting another Google product. And in an area where one of our small clients didn't use Google Checkout, that change simply priced him out of the ad auction. His profit margins after ad costs were roughly 10% & with that 10% cut in relative clickthrough rate he no longer had a place in Google's ad auction. He was forced to use another Google product if he wanted to be profitable with AdWords.

Of course one could say that the organic results are different than the paid results, but the Google editions ebooks ranked quickly in the US after the ebook store was launched, Google only rolled out universal search after they bought YouTube, maps & local results now come with tags that earn incremental revenues from the "organic" search results, etc.

Thanks. I try hard :)

I was not saying that eHow's public relations saved them, but rather it is what caused the backlash against content farms.

Spot on ohashi.

The moral litmus test for Jason's about-face would be if he felt so bad about the content mill pages on Mahalo that he deleted them from the web and tested the (alleged) "quality" content as a business model.

IMHO this just one more example of Jason trying to put a thin veneer of polish over a turd.

1.) People pay public relations firms a lot for press coverage. And they pay Google ~ $30 billion a year for AdWords ads. If SEO is way cheaper (and it typically is) then what makes it overpriced (when similar traffic streams indicate that rates should be, if anything, higher)?

2.) Surely you were not knee deep in link building if you felt overpaid. ;)

Have to disagree with that 100%. Maybe 110%, if I am allowed.

Bloglines is now a scraped "answers" website. If I took our old Threadwatch.org and did the exact same thing would Google let it rank based on existing link equity? If not, what would be the difference? Ask is a bigger partner so the editorial judgements are not made against them the same way they might a smaller player.

Google has frequently exercised editorial judgement against some folks, while letter other folks get away with doing the exact same thing in bulk.

Further, those who are creating original high-quality content have real business costs. Google paying scraper sites like Mahalo and Ask to borrow your content & wrap it in ads means that you are sometimes getting outranked for scraped duplications of your own content. That drives down publisher margins and pushes marginally profitable publishers into losing money.

That said, Google wants to get big into television ads. And that is going to mean having better respect for copyright. To some degree as we see the Google business model change we will see their approach of "paying anyone to steal anything & wrap it in Google ads" (to soften up copyright) change to a model where the put themselves as a gatekeeper on DRM content & push the "official" sources of the media (and try to make a cut of the profits).

Slowly but surely the search results will fill up with official hotel sites, official music sources, official video sources, official ebook sources, etc etc etc ... with Google putting a big foot on the gas.

As that shift happens the longtail spam model will lose out on its profitability because it will be forced to compete with higher quality content that is automatically mixed into the search results. (The whole point of universal search was to allow Google to short cut certain types of information right into the core search results...as they start making money from micro-payments and such look for that trend to accelerate).

I can confirm that Patrick knows more about SEO than 98% of SEO experts.

I know this because he is a member of our community and we chat often, I tell him stuff that is off the record & sometimes he evolves the model & pushes my model of thinking in new directions.

If I had his programming skills my goal would to be able to retire by the end of next year. :D

Probably the only thing that holds Patrick back in terms of aggressively using SEO to make a ton of money is that he isn't primarily driven by making a boatload of money. Some people are, but he isn't.

Follow the money.

What % of spam sites are wrapped in AdSense? Greater than 5%? Greater than 50%?

For all Google's talk of content quality, they are clearly willing to make some concessions with who they have as business partners and the type of "content" they are willing to fund.

That comment sorta makes me cringe for choice of branding, as sometimes when anyone who talks bad about someone with a "very popular SEO book" people will assume that it is me.

I would just like to clarify that I have never had a customer paying 5 figures a month that was unhappy with what they got from me. ;)

Also agree with you that spammy links can work better than what one would think if they attended Google's sermons about quality links. Though typically from a risk profile it is better to mix and match so whatever your promoting doesn't stick out as an outlier & get whacked at some point.

This is a bit ironic, but inside the field of SEO I don't think search rankings matter that much.

Anytime you sell something which is a higher end service or an abstract type of service what drives sales is word of mouth recommendations rather than rankings. This is true for the higher end of the legal spectrum, the higher end of the health spectrum, and the higher end for any b2b services sort of business model.

Those who are buying based on rankings will see the Google AdWords ads for $149 SEO and such...and get sucked into buying trash. Those who are even cheaper will get scammed by their domain registrar or web host.

It is hard to make much money in the SEO game teaching others or providing tools to other. It is much easier to make more as a publisher, as Patrick stated.

One of the reasons I haven't invested more into some tools area is just how much stuff is becoming freely accessible. Google's keyword tool is amazing, Google analytics is amazing, some of the competitive research tools are awesome & cheap.

When you get down to it, its hard to automate the link parts without running into issues. Automating some of the link research areas is still an area for innovation, but most the stuff around keyword research, keyword organization & general content creation have already been heavily commoditized.

Another area where some folks work is baking a semi-legitimate cloaking service into their SEO product & then making it seem legitimate by only working with huge brands who agree to minimum contract amounts in the 5 or 6 figures per month. That model works well for the SEO because they typically get paid by the click, but it is pretty crappy for the client because they end up reliant on a tool that can be pulled out from under them at any time.

Brokering links is a huge business as well...but its sorta a gray area.

Also keep in mind that even if the forum is the main thing you are known for, a lot of people learn in different ways. So it is helpful to offer a variety of formats to be more remarkable. In addition to our forum we offer: a monthly newsletter, private paid tools, free public tools, blog regularly, videos & training modules.

Another point I would add are that brand matters a lot ... if you are asking people to pay for something were there are free offerings in the marketplace (even if the free ones are far worse) then people really need to believe in you to want to buy from you. Thus we offer a good number of things for free, including some tools & our blog.

The last thing I would say is that many private membership websites are quickly ghost towns that die. The hardest part is building up the initial critical mass. You can always raise rates later, but sometimes it helps to have lower rates off the start to buy that marketshare and help build momentum. For example, we charged only $50 a month for the first 100 customers & gave our ebook customers a free trial...these meant we had a vast active community right out of the gate. Then over time as we kept adding more value (more tools, bigger archives of information, etc.) we raised prices.

The reason our pricepoint is $300/mo is because our service is nearly/roughly comparable to buying SEO consulting from a top SEO company. The speed with which questions get answered in the forums, the depth of the answers, and how noise free it is makes it an unparalleled/unmatched experience. Rather than creating around "what would sell" I created around what I would want to buy. And since we make plenty of $ elsewhere, part of why we pushed the price up on SEO Book was to increase the quality of the membership base. And it worked well!

And a lot of times when you buy SEO consulting you get strung along, etc. Whereas with us you get direct access to us on the forums and quick direct answers. Amongst our staff and subscribers there is literally over a thousand years of SEO experience you get to tap into. I have been doing SEO since 2003 & some of our moderators have been in the game twice as long as I have.

At some point we will launch multiple tiers / access levels & those who are not paying for access to the forums will have a much lower pricepoint...likely closer to ~ $50 or $60 a month (though we are still thinking this through).

As long as you feel important I suppose that is all that matters. Self-aggrandizing for the win.

The funny thing about your presumption is that you don't realize how much web traffic I control, or that I was able to grow a similar sized traffic stream without bilking investors & without looting third party content without permission or opt out & without cybersquatting.

You take the low road & I'll take the high one.

No matter how many times you use the word troll it won't change the facts. ;)

At some point, doesn't a person who consistently ends up on the wrong side of the truth end up losing the benefit of the doubt?

My guess is Jason was hoping nobody would find that. ;)

The question is, do you feel you deserve such exposure? How did you manage to earn it? Was it what you were hoping for?

I hope your search traffic is up, in spite of what third party metrics tools are showing ;)

I will give you this... nfl-answers.com was (almost) a great Hail Mary strategy ;)

Great citation.

Years ago I registered AdWordsBlog.com and AdSenseBlog.com & then pinged a Google engineer so they could transfer them in. Its the polite thing to do. I did the same thing with SethGodin.net. If you see some stuff like that out there then why not try to help people out who have spent millions of Dollars building up their brands.

The opposite of the above, to register the domain names & then to try to cash in on someone else's branding efforts is a lower rung strategy.

For a person like Jason to cybersquat, and then compare his auto-generated for profit websites to sucks sites protected by free speech laws...it really doesn't sit very well.

If you would have read that article (and followed the advice) you wouldn't have registered names like nfl-anwsers.com ;)

Buying great domain names is just a great/smart/effective strategy.

But cybersquatting isn't something where a person is operating in the gray area of the terms of service, it is something which is clearly illegal.

Now that is something you might expect some low end affiliate to do, or maybe an innocent technique by a person ignorant to what they are doing (if they are doing it on just 1 name)...but to raise venture capital and then deploy it on illegal marketing strategies is a bit extreme.

It would have been nearly as helpful/beneficial to do something like footballquestions.com (instead of nfl-questions.com), and it wouldn't have been illegal.

The curious question is why take VC money if you want to take the low road? Do the investors realize the latent risk embedded in this activity?

Jason claimed that the Youtube founders should have handed their sales money to the original content creators. I wonder if he thinks the same way about money made from JASON cybersquatting on someone else's brand?

And I would love to here Jason explain how/why he feels the 2 are in any way different from each other.

Congrats on the move :D

The thing is ... the harmful emails are never really from paying customers. They are almost always from freetards who remind you that...

- you are expected to provide phone support to them (even though they are not a paying customer & have no intent of being one!)

- you are wrong to set up any type of conversion funnel for the 1% of people who will convert (but which costs the freetard type as much as 30 seconds of their time as well)

- accuses you of selling their email information (when you have not), curses at you, is shocked when you dish them back any of their own cooking, and then calls you non-professional

- they sign up for your free autoresponder series (which is more valuable than most paid courses on SEO) then takes the time to send you a nasty email rather than clicking the unsubscribe link in the emails

----

I didn't have to deal with tons of this stuff when I set up our paid membership site. I mean some...but a fairly small amount. Where the entitled freetard type became enraged was when I set up a conversion funnel and required registering a free account to get our firefox extensions.

And in our support software the contrast between paid customers and freetards is almost unbelievable. As an extreme comparison, the paid person could have an issue like being locked out of their account (which they are paying for) and label it as an issue of low or medium concern and write a polite "please help" type message ... whereas the freetard who is not a paying customer (and will never be one) typically labels their issues as urgent or critical.

-------

The other thing freetards try to do is try to bully you on social networks and stuff and threaten to destroy your brand if you don't self-implode your business model to support their rude behavior.

Some of our posts about freetard culture...

http://www.seobook.com/are-you-fighting-human-nature-measuri...

http://www.seobook.com/i-stopped-caring-about-links-well-alm...

http://www.seobook.com/professionalism

http://www.seobook.com/why-many-successful-people-become-jer...

and people far smarter than I have noticed the freetard culture phenomena being harmful to business http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html

"The basic idea of this contract," he writes, "is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

and, as a sharp contrast to freetard behavior, this post mentions how private paid communities have mechanisms in place that prevent the above types of abuses amongst customers (namely people who pay are of higher quality, and people won't make absurd demands in front of others)

http://www.seobook.com/why-private-communities-work-so-well

"and thought that Goldman was an example of the former"

Clearly you didn't see where the AIG bailout money went to at the time, courtesy of then U.S. Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Thanks for recommending our site. :D

I think there will always be a career in SEO, but what that career looks like will change over time. Years ago it was tweaking page titles and meta tags. Page titles are still important, of course, but then links got added to the mix. And so then it was link trading. And then people figured links had value so it became about buying links. And then Google pushed hard to crack down on that and it became about how to buy links creatively and/or indirectly to maximize returns while minimizing risks. And Google has got more aggressive at folding query stream data into the relevancy algorithms, and they are working on a new infrastructure called Caffeine, which will allow them to fold even more data into the relevancy algorithms. As Google collects more data, eventually the distinction between SEO and marketing blurs as lots of SEO techniques will just parallel strong marketing principals.

As far as doing the consulting business model...its a hard business model to succeed at because it is a saturated market AND...

- some people excel at doing SEO

- others excel at selling SEO

the difference between the 2 is non-trivial...depending on what you are good at, (like if you are better at implementation than sales) you might do better as a publisher than as a service provider. and running your own sites lets you keep more of the profits recurring while also being able to test stuff that you might not want to test on a client website.

further, there are a few catch-22 situations with selling SEO services

- in many ways in the economic sense the SEO consulting market is a market for lemons

http://www.johnon.com/293/seo-consulting-2.html

how this works, is people are told it is risky, so they invest little...and the investment is so small that they hire a scammer. the scammer takes their money and does nothing, and then they think the whole field of SEO is a scam, and are afraid to invest much with anyone else

- the biggest way to get around that market for lemons effect is to be well known and well branded so that people trust you a lot and are willing to pay extra to work with you specifically because they trust you. one of the best ways to do this is be socially active online, go to any offline events you can afford to and network (I got my first SEO conference pas for free for helping stuff all the programming things in the bag and hand them out to attendees), and write a blog. one more key here is that its hard to just try to own the keyword SEO brutally hard ... a better approach is to take a niche and try to own it. reelseo.com is doing video seo. David Mihm is doing local search. and so on. back when I got started I ran one of the first SEO blogs and I wrote an ebook back when it was common knowledge that all written books were out of date (and used that as my strategy in terms of reason for format delivery and product naming). some common niches that people target when starting out are doing stuff in their local area (makes sales easier as you can meet people face to face) and a particular vertical they want to have exposure in (say legal or automotive)

- as a consultant who does a really good job you rarely get to capture 1% of the value you create. even if you charge high 5 or low 6 figures for a project, you typically end up adding hundreds to thousands of times that much value to the company. and you still have to fight the in house legal teams to get stuff done (some what you to have x potential upside and limitless downside exposure).

- one last tricky thing is that if they don't have an in-house SEO they likely don't care enough about it to invest in having a consultant work on it. and if they do have an in-house team there is a fear/risk in the minds of some which sets a limit as to how much they can pay you before they worry about looking incompetent for hiring $x worth of external help when they already have an in-house team

- 2 more tips with consulting here...it tends to be a feast or famine business model...so again publishing your own websites is a great way to smooth out the peaks and valleys. also publishing your own websites lets you be more selective with who you are willing to take on as a consulting client. the 80/20 rule applies to SEO where the top few clients will be most of the income...so anything you can do to create some passive revenues to prevent you from taking on bad clients that won't produce any profits is a win.

- I could write on this topic for hours...but don't want to hog too many more pixels. let me know if you have any follow up questions.

With Google custom search engine you can create your own personalized search service...built off the back of Google, but while delisting any sites you do not want results from.

And it only takes about 30 seconds to set one up. Then you embed the search box wherever you like.

http://www.google.com/cse/

That is the angle Jason used when he created his steaming pile. It doesn't mean that anyone in the industry agrees with Jason's strategy.

And if you want to place the blame where it belongs remember that Google is the company funding all this content scraping with their ads programs.

I just tried searching for a recent post from an official Google blog (about AdSense using referral data for more relevant ad targeting) and found a scraper site with their ads outranking them for their own content. Pretty sad.