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Aaron Wall has written a thorough and unflattering overview of Yahoo search traffic following the release of search numbers that show Yahoo gets well over half its search volume from its partners.

Aaron discusses how this impacts arbitrage and motivates poor quality. Though possibly just a little harsh, it is worth reading and keeping in mind.

Recent numbers from Efficient Frontier show that Yahoo has nearly three times more search partners than Google - funny given Google has over three times more search volume. And as Aaron notes direct search converts “nearly twice” more than partner search traffic.

Not good numbers moving forward in a battle for the search industry. But I always managed to convert Yahoo traffic at a better CPA than Google in the financial vertical. So maybe there are niches where Yahoo benefits from its partners…. will have to keep track of this one.

Wired? Or Weird? The Matt Cutts Interview on Epicenter in The Wired Blog Network.

The Question is no longer: “Is Google God?”

Wired knows the answer: Matt Cutts is. A god with a little g. Or at least “like” a god. Not just any god. An Internet god.

“Among search geeks and online marketers, Matt Cutts is like an internet god,” wrote Betsy Schiffman in her blog post.

Last week when soliciting reader questions, Betsy called Matt one of the most “feared, loathed and revered men on the internet.” He was “Google’s search stud.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Matt Cutts would be deified. We just thought Wired might have made him a saint first. (cat god = inside joke for Cuttlets)

Nothing against Wired. I love Wired. So much I paid full retail price (less my Barnes & Noble discount) for the print magazine just to read Chris Anderson’s “Free-conomics” before it was available free online.

Before readers reach the Q&A they have to hear the porn cookie guy story. Again.

Wired or Tired? You decide.

USA Today reviewed “The Google Story” by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed back in November of 2005:

“Take, for instance, the developer of Google’s SafeSearch filter, Matt Cutts, also know as ‘porn cookie guy’: “Cutts got his moniker by giving out his wife’s tempting homemade cookies to Googlers who help him find unwanted porn.”

Then there’s Porn Flakes, the Google cereal story (via SEL?). Thanks but we’ll have our breakfast of champions with attribution, Betsy.

Cereality! Matt got his own cereal box on the Google campus. No mention of Raisin Brin, LarryO’s or Porn Flakes?

Danny posted today about Rand’s Feb 29 video interview with Matt.

Last week I linked to Eric Enge’s phenomenally popular, full text Q&A interview with Matt Cutts.

Today I’ll link to Aaron Wall’s #1 ranked (in Google for “matt cutts interview“) done in 2005.

All Matt Cutts All The Time: our new Search Engine Watch mantra.

So in the interest of fair use, here are the 7 Deadly Questions Wired asked Matt:

1. Does SEO (search-engine optimization) work?
2. Where do you see search in two to five years?
3. What about social search?
4. Will you ever roll out for-fee webmaster tools?
5. On video search, is there a bias toward YouTube videos?
6. If you were to start a web-based business tomorrow, what key things would you do?
7. What’s going on with Google bombs — are you still seeing them?

Continue reading for three Matt Cutts Wired Quotes of the Day:

Click to read the rest of this post…

Seems Yahoo has really been falling behind in updating their databases, according to Aaron Wall’s article today.

This is something all people who work in the SEO area should be taking notice of since Yahoo has had good conversion numbers for many of us and if the efforts to add more content are not being recognized by Yahoo then efforts may be better spent improving existing pages - though even this may not be possible.

Yahoo has gone through a number of changes both to its system and its personnel lately so hopefully this will soon be remedied.

First, maybe you’re in-house, working for a CPG big-brand,  e-marketing multi-million dollar health insurance products, a solo designer, are president of a boutique SEM shop in Toronto, or perhaps your wild-thing is classic PR. This post applies to you.

Every professional needs someone. This timeless axiom is especially relevant to both those who consume and those who provide search marketing services. aimClear interviewed 21 marketing companies and solo practitioners for this article, in order to clarify our anecdotal understanding of how industry peers view strategic partnerships.

Let the Games Begin
In 1999 it was feasible to be a small search marketing shop or in-house team and literally cover all the bases: SEO, paid search, social media, link/traffic building, analytics, and content development. Now SEM has exploded on to the scene, becoming the most relevant skill-set in the entire marketing universe; the multi- headed hydra of interconnected disciplines which can’t easily be handled by a single small (or sometimes medium) SEM department or agency.

In-house or out-house (always wanted to say that) healthy business things result from crafting strategic partnerships amongst specialized and trusted peers with complementary skills. Herein lays the golden path for many a marketing team to remain compact and efficient, whilst providing world class solutions to satisfy any client’s needs.

"Although we position ourselves as a full-service SEM agency, we’ve been partnering (more than ever) with what I would have considered competitors in the past. For one company, we manage PPC while a partner of ours manages SEO. In another example, we provide strategic consulting for a content portal, while the current SEM firm will manage the launch and ongoing activities.

I believe it’s a win-win-win in most cases, as the client gets best-of-breed service providers while the vendors get a unique opportunity to learn from each other and share revenue.”
Kent Lewis, Anvil Media, Inc.

Full Service SEM, Circa 2000
Back in the day, social media was a phenomenon looming intangibly on the horizon and required little attention. ” Socially informed search” meant humans maintaining the Yahoo Directory and community meant AOL chat rooms, IRC, and Yahoo Personals.

Overture was easy to operate, dominated the paid search landscape (there was no Google AdWords) and organic optimization was easy for the well-informed.  Analytics were rudimentary, conversion tracking was an afternoon cookie-bake for the clever, and link building meant directories, exchanges, and cold phone calls. Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Aaron Wall, and other “old fart” SEOs hadn’t invented terms like “linkbait” and search engine algorithms were refreshingly easy to reverse engineer [sigh].  

The search marketing industry was about to undergo an explosion of epic proportions, bringing the entire planet’s media empire paradigm to it’s very KNEES. Those were heady times indeed. A small SEM shop could make a massive difference for any client on any “best-practices” front.  We could literally do it all ourselves.

“Our in-house SEM department is changed with targeting 15-24 year olds artsy types.  These days the young are incredibly savvy and demand that we serve them by publishing with increasingly familiar tools. Even with our [significant] in-house marketing resources, we delegate out design, some application development and even SEO projects. 

The in-house/out-of-house hybrid approach results in better conversion and ROI, satisfies our customers’ expectations, and our team is always current with crucial SEM information. In the end it costs us less and we sell more.”
Lance Sabin, Institute of Production and Recording

Not Your Mother’s SEM
Things have certainly changed! Social media participation permeates the very fabric of society. Organic optimization remains an intense mish-mash of authentic content, publishing technique and hundreds of distribution channels. Link-building has crossed over into social media. This is especially intriguing as organic optimization and SMO (even Social PPC like Facebook) fold into the realm of social media practitioners.

“I’m a social Media marketer. That said, we social-side SEMS sure know we don’t live in a bubble, sweet as that would be. It’s in my best interest to have relationships to share with my clients… a diverse set of brilliant professionals. Then my clients can do anything, and I happily play my part. “
Shana Albert, SocialDesire

Personalized and Universal search blew “old” SEO out of the water.  Client relationships begin with taking inventory of digital assets and highly complex PPC campaigns sport millions of keywords, where sharpshooters mine long-tail ROI.  Each specialized endeavor requires deep commitment to craft and have become cottage industries unto themselves.  It’s easy to understand why solo or small SEM practitioners often choose to focus, as opposed to attempting to do it all it all. 

“Our focus is our agency’s organic search, paid search, and social media. We keep these functions in-house as we have the knowledge and expertise. Other activities where we don’t feel we have as strong a competitive advantage (usability, email marketing, web design, and affiliate marketing) are outsourced to experts we view as being the market thought-leaders.

Often our strategic partners bring us work that’s perfect for what we do best. In the end, it’s all about working together to get clients the results they expect in this incredible age of specialization and heightened expectations.”
Jeff Quipp, SearchEnginePeople

Should Relationships be Transparent?
Some of the firms we interviewed transparently share subcontractors with their clients, even to the point of direct billing and no marked up fees. The advantages can include more efficient communications channels, clarity, and shared customer service responsibilities. Points of danger are sometimes fragmented communication, lack of a coordinated front, a confused client and more complicated communication.

Other strategic partners find it less complicated to remain in the background. In our interviews we heard repeatedly that a key advantage to having the partner-firm remain invisible was that the “originating” company nearly always has a better understanding of the client’s goals and makeup. Decisions as to the “transparency issue” are personal to every strategic partnership and should be embarked upon intentionally.

“We’re an advertising agency that specializes only in pay per click. That’s all we do. Maximizing conversions is critical for our clients, so we partner with web designers analytics firms and a range of others. Reciprocally we also partner-out, usually transparently, to agencies who subcontract PPC work to us, so they can provide top service to their clients without maintaining an expert staff in-house. It’s just easier’.
David Szetela, ClixMarketing

PR agencies are all over the SEM revolution and have learned to partner with SEM shops. Social media is such a huge component of the “new” PR and so makes total sense that “traditional” practitioners appreciate the benefits SEM-type thinking brings to the arena. Savvy PR practitioners embrace social and are partnering more and more with SEM shops

 "SEM agencies and PR agencies are usually 180 degrees apart on the spectrum of measuring results of their efforts.  To SEMs, immediate feedback means spreadsheets with detailed analytics. PR clients are more used to clip-books with column inches counted months later. These days, clients want immediate feedback and statistics as to their efforts. We’ve learned to embrace this conundrum and partner to capitalize on the advantages of both PR and SEM. Using strategic partner-vendors helps us link PR results with the magical measurement capabilities of the modern SEM.”
Janet Johnson

 “Search marketing is expanding and becoming much more of a specialized field. We’ve found it highly beneficial to partner with key providers and concentrate on our areas of specialty. Our entire approach to the web is to unify the various components of marketing under a strategic umbrella, so it often makes sense to augment our strong points with complimentary solo consultants directly for specific projects. This is the model we’re working with and it’s been successful.”
Adam Audette, AudetteMedia 

In-House, CPG, big pharmaceutical, independent designer, local SEO or up and coming carpet cleaning company — everybody needs somebody else sometimes. The timeless reality of the interdependent corporate web has never been more obvious than in the field of search marketing. Paid search, organic, social, PR, email, and every classic node, there’s work enough for everybody. Specialization, as the SEM universe expands, is inevitable.  Many of our peers reach out to forge strategic relationships.

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SEOBOOK’s Aaron Wall, in what will likely be a hot post around the social news and bookmarking universe, serves up candid and insightful thinking on the long term competitive advantage of classic search engine optimization vs. pay per click. His writing style is hungry and tone passionate. Aaron’s got his Mojo on in this delightfully self-effacing comparison of SEO & PPC’s long-term value.

Wall writes, "This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can’t just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul."

Many A-list SEOs have weighed in to the dialog regarding the Tao of SEO and PPC in tandem and separately. For additional perspective read "PPC vs. Organic," David Naylor, Lee Odden’s classic 2006 "The Lame PPC and SEO Debate," and sugerrae’s recent rant, "The Lazy SEO vs. The Lazy Monetizer." In a street level video interview, Rand Fishkin discusses using PPC to test organic concepts, PPC vs. SEO in China, and other useful concepts.

You hear it all the time, “the world moves fast” with high speed connections and wireless access, we have come a long way in a very short time.

While the web is enjoying its Sweet Sixteen - even back at the beginning the connection speeds were limited - 14.4 modems were fast and maxing out phone speed connections had not even occurred.

I saw a piece on television today about the Daytona 500 finish in 1959 that was so close the second place person protested and it took 2 days to develop the film to determine he had won the race. That had me thinking about how fast our technology has changed.

We tend to take things for granted…. in the beginning there was Alta Vista, Northern Lights and a number of other search engines. I used Lycos alot back then and was an early user of Google when a few college friends told me about this engine from Stanford called BackRub.

They were fun times and a great article about the history of search engines has been written by Aaron Wall.

For people new to the industry having a sense of the history of our industry is handy. Just realizing how fast things have developed and how quickly front runners have dropped away is important. Things move quickly and even Google with its monster share of the search landscape is not immune to this rapidly changing loyalty.

One of the things I like best about attending conferences is talking with the people I have known in this space for years. I know I may be one of the “old guys” but that just gives me a deeper perspective on how things change.

If you are attending SES London this week take the time to speak with some of us older members of the industry. When a few of us get together and talk it is like listening to parents comparing stories about their children - we love them but have had 16 years of ups and downs dealing with their erratic behavior.

In 2024, SES San Jose will be 25 years old… I have already said I am sponsoring the walkers for the older members of our industry. Many of the people who were involved with the industry back then will be moving as slow as the modems that first connected us to the web.

Hope to see you this week in London.

In this evolutionary algorithmic age every search marketer charged with boosting rankings on the organic SERPs knows, with fearful certainty, that building inbound links is essential. Utilizing social media communities to do so is a front-and-center tactic for many.

Sure, we’re all aware of mainstream players like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Propeller, etc…

However, there are hundreds of social communities other than the biggies. These niche’ player-communities can be terrific venues to engage readers of similar ilk, make friends, drive focused micro-busts of traffic, and build links. Some communities are junk. This post offers niche’ social site examples and provides links to lists which index and profile dozens of useful ones.

Dofollow and Nofollow
A quick word about Do/No follow. Most blogs (and many communities) these days attempt to discourage spam by removing "link-juice" passed on links dropped in discussion threads. That’s called "Nofollow." (Wikipedia is a classic example of Nofollow.) Nofollow links deliver traffic but there’s no SEO benefit. If you view the source code of this page, you’ll see that some of the social site links are Nofollow and therefore do not pass energy.

When evaluating the potential benefit of social community participation, it’s best practice to understand the objective and potential gain. Whenever a site, with decent Pagerank, "forgets" to turn off Dofollow, it’s an opportunity of sorts to build links of varying strength and value. The most important caveat is that gratuitous link dropping, without offering true value to the community, is spam and will likely be treated as such.

Every search marketing professional knows that garnering good quality, relevant, and "natural" inbound links to your site or blog is critical to drive your SEO ranking efforts. Honest participation in niche’ social communities, relevant to your product & services, is the tactic that many savvy SEMs reach for to build their site’s inbound link-profile. In addition to the community site links themselves, “hot” posts can result in feed subscriptions, increased readership, and links from other relevant and valuable sites.

Fark is a social news site in which moderators approve user link-submissions and post them to the homepage. The links are Nofollow but can drive noticeable traffic.

Slashdot is a community where techno-heads hang out and geek-jam. However, users submit stories about entertainment, politics, and other fun stuff. If editors approve a submission and it’s promoted the homepage, measurable traffic can result. Also, links in the body of each post are Dofollow and pass juice.

Metafilter is a moderated community, both by site administers and users, in which participants share interesting web content. Links are Dofollow.

Mixx is widely regarded as an up-and-comer in the social news world. A potentially mainstream Digg replacement site, many SEM folks had early-adopter Mixx profiles for fun and future marketing bang. Oh yes, they forget to turn off Dofollow so the links pass juice.

Hugg is a smaller community engaged in dialog surrounding environmental issues. There’s social exchanges about technology, politics, and science as well. Links are Dofollow.

Sk*rt is a Dofollow PR 5 fashion, food, and technology community, primarily comprised of females.

Stirr’dup is a smaller NoFollow social news site which categorizes news as technology, entertainment, news and politics.

Linkinn is a PR5 site specializing in offbeat video and pictures. Links are DoFollow and pass juice.

Lists of Useful Social Media Sites:

48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities
Tropical SEO: Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)

Respected blogger Sugarrae has posted a serious interview with industry leading link-building experts and is a must-read. Interviews include:
Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire
Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com
Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and Clientside
Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, his link building blog and course author SEMPO Institute
Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO Blog
Andy Hagans, the lazy SEO of the Tropical SEO Blog
Jim Boykin of We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas
Rae Hoffman, CEO of Sugarrae and MFE Interactive

Since late December, best-of-breed search marketers have been chattering about a supposed and creepy “Position 6” Google SERPs punishment pattern where pages which, by all indications, should dominate the organic SERPs somehow place at lowly #6. Google’s Matt Cutts has previously dismissed the notion that Position 6 is real.

Yesterday the debate amongst search marketers flared to full blown public jamming in major SEM blogs and virulent comment threads. Aaron Wall, venerable blogger-purveyor of SEOBOOK, restarted the conversation with his post, “How I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed.” The post was bookmarked in Sphinn and SEO scientists argued about Position 6 throughout the day, resulting in passionate posts (and even arguments) in trade publications.

Is Position 6 real?

Respected SEM technician Sebastian reflected the position of many SEM pros and noted a lack of studies that that provide ”proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on today’s popular band wagon that aren’t plausible nor verifiable…such beasts don’t exist.”

Danny Sullivan joined the fracas with an SEL post and his impression that Position 6 is real. “Well, I’ve personally seen this weirdness. Pages that I absolutely thought ‘what on earth is that doing at six’ rather than at the top of the page. Not four, not seven — six. It was freaking weird for several different searches. Nothing competitive, either.”

Is Position 6 an actual Google penalty or fodder for SEMs who are imagining patterns where none exist? Have you experienced Position 6? Real or imagined, it’s certainly generating a lot of attention and links amongst search marketers and webmasters. Stay tuned and watch your Google organic SERPs.

Since late December, best-of-breed search marketers have been chattering about a supposed and creepy “Position 6” Google SERPs punishment pattern where pages which, by all indications, should dominate the organic SERPs somehow place at lowly #6. Google’s Matt Cutts has previously dismissed the notion that Position 6 is real.
Yesterday the debate amongst search [...]