Category Archives: search

Wrapping up day 3 of SES San Jose Search Strategies Conference

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For great session coverage of SES see the following sites:

SEO Roundtable

Search Engine Land

SEOmoz

Bruce Clay

Technorati “SES” tag

TopRank Blog

Yesterday’s “Is Buying Links Evil” was by far the most interesting and heated of the sessions. Google’s Matt Cutts was under heavy fire from Todd Malicoat and Michael Gray regarding Google’s aggressive policies on paid linking and the application of the NOFOLLOW tag. The best question came from Rand Fishkin who asked Matt Cutts if it would be preferable to do without NOFOLLOW and have better, scalable, algorithmic ways to determine link relationships. Matt indicated it would and this gets to the huge middle ground in the paid linking debate. I think SEO folks, especially those who worked back in the gravy days of massive paid linking, should have expected Google to crack down on the practice but I would *strongly* criticize Google for not bringing more transparency to this issue by clarification of their paid link penalty structure and what appears to be a lot of leniency for paid linking in many situations. Many links, such as those a brief aquaintance might give to another person who opens a new website, are probably in line with guidelines but are essentially identical in structure to a paid link. In this case adding nofollow is totally inappropriate since the goal is to indicate a mild endorsement of the new site. I suspect this type of link is treated favorably by Google and I’m wildly guessing that they err on the side of not penalizing this type of link, but that is not clearly indicated in the policy statements or in the talks I’ve had with Google search folks. This failure to clarify, combined with Google asking for “help” in finding paid links, has led to more frustration in the Webmaster community than Google thinks it has caused. One indication of this was the huge applause given to parts of the “anti Google” presentations yesterday. As always Matt Cutts handles this with great composure and I think a very sincere desire to make things work well for all players, but I’d recommend that Google really examine the linking policies carefully and issue a detailed and full clarification of “legitimate linking practices” with, literally, thousands of examples. Will this be reverse engineered for SEO benefit? Yes, but if it’s written correctly it can improve the web rather than leading to confusion about linking and the rampant continued use of paid linking schemes.

Links are a big theme here and I’m now off to Danny Sullivan’s session on “Search Engine Q&A On Links”

Marissa Mayer on intersection of strong AI and search

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Marissa Mayer of Google gave today’s Keynote conversation. It’s no wonder Google does such wonders when people like this are in charge. I did get a chance to ask about the intersection of search and AI and got a fantastic answer – she thinks they will intersect, and this could happen within about ten years. Also interesting was that she said they are now seeing things that “look like intelligence” emerging from the search algorithms. This is not thought, but she indictated that it’s possible to have thought like processes emerge in this fashion rather than with the massive computational approaches that were popular several years ago. This is consistent with Kurzweil’s notion that it’ll be massive parallel processing and not massive supercomputing that will probably bring the mechanical mind “to life” within the next decade or so. I’m glad Marissa Mayer seems to agree and I hope this is a focus for Google in the future (I got the idea it’s not a focus now).

I had a chance to ask Matt Cutts of Google engineering fame the same question yesterday and he was not as optimistic, thinking that it could take another 50 years to get conscious computing. But Matt correctly noted that Marissa would be more optimistic than he was because his Master’s program at University of North Carolina was lacking in much AI content due to the AI skepticism of the architect of that program.

Larry Page’s recent remarks suggesting that a viable human thinking algorithm may appear fairly soon are more in line with Marissa’s optimistic view that within a decade we could see mature, conscious, artificial intellects. The staggering implications of conscious computing are lost on many people in computing for reasons I simply don’t understand, but I think are related to the current focus on computing science as an engineering and calculation paradigm rather than a biological one. As the brain is reverse engineered and we begin to enhance neurons with forms of programming it seems reasonable to assume things are going to get … very interesting very fast.

SES San Jose “Mini-Interviews”

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I’ve had a chance to talk in depth to several folks and will post that later, but wanted to check in before the session on “Is link buying evil” which will feature Matt Cutts from Google and some notable advocates for strategic link buying.    I’ve been surprised to hear from some really good SEO folks here that link buying still works well as part of their strategy, though I think they’d agree it’s very difficult to find the types of links that “work”, and from my perspective you always have a potential gun to your head from SE’s which do not like this practice.   So perhaps the best advice for most is to avoid link buying unless you want to live dangerously.

I had a nice talk at lunch today with Matt Cutts about his view on AI and  severak search themes but no time now to spell out the details.  

A key theme here is the number of SEM firms – many that seem fairly inexperienced.  Lanzone mentioned that it’s  increasingly common for large clients to buy out their SEM firm to bring it all in house and I think that may be a new strategy for the players in SEM.

SES San Jose – Jim Lanzone on Ask’s upcoming billion dollar search deal

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ASK CEO Jim Lanzone was the first keynoter here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, and Lanzone gave a lot of insightful answers to Chris Sherman’s excellent series of questions about ASK’s future in search and advertising.   A few highlights:

“It’s not a zero sum game” said Lanzone, noting their cooperation with Google in a 100,000,000 ad sponsorship deal and saying the next deal will be in the billions and could be with other players as well as Google.  

ASK 3d is leading to some interesting findings, esp. that 50% of the ASK 3d activity is not in the search listings portion.  Lanzone feels the sweet spot is in the “Collective Context” that billions of searches are bringing to the table now.    ASK’s new “Edison Algorithm” will seek to make sense of the maelstrom of data ASK has from their search property as well as the dozens of separate IAC online businesses.

“Search is now your co-pilot”, said Lanzone, and suggested that the value of search based ads is still very high compared to traditional media.  

Sherman noted that Lanzone’s “Etour” was similar to StumbleUpon.   Lanzone said it was before it’s time and was “Darwined out”.   No plans to revive it are pending. 

Search Engine Strategies – Google Party

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Day one of the four day SES conference is wrapping up although a lot of the conference action takes place at restaurants and bars after hours.   I think for most people the highlight of SES is the huge Google Party which will be held tomorrow night at the Googleplex in Mountain View.   “Meet the Engineers” is one of only a handful of times each year when you can talk directly to a large number of people on the Google search team – the other is WebmasterWorld’s “PubCon”  in Las Vegas.

One thing I learned today is the Google’s Marissa Mayer is an expert in Artificial Intelligence (yikes – ValleyWag says Marissa IS an Artificial Intelligence!), and I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to ask a few questions tomorrow after her keynote about where she sees Google’s AI efforts heading over the next 5-10 years.  Larry Page was recently quoted as suggesting that a human-like thinking “algorithm” could well be cracked fairly soon, and Google is one of the places where this type of innovation might actually take place.  That said, based on my talk with Matt Cutts a few years back I don’t think AI as a search driver is a Google priority.  I was surprised then to hear that Matt felt quality AI driven search was still many years away.    Google has to maintain a practical edge to things so they probably can’t put a huge effort behind a “conscious computing” effort, though I get the idea from Kurzweil’s book that a Googley “massively parallel” info architecture may be more likely to bring consicousness to a machine than, for example, the IBM Blue Gene style supercomputer.

Blogs covering or writing about the SES Search Conference

Session coverage roundup from Barry at Search Engine Land

Search Engine Strategies

SES San Jose

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I’m excited to be at the Search Engine Strategies Conference here in sunny San Jose.  This is the *big event* of Search Marketing and it’ll be fun to cover it as a press person.   Rather than intense live blogging I’m going to try to summarize the day each evening with a post and extensive links out to others who will be doing more authoritative coverage, like Barry and the Search Engine Roundtable gang.    Barry has been doing simply outstanding play by play blogging of search conferences for several years and you can get a great handle on things following conferences from his website.    Even when I’m *attending*, as here in San Jose, I like to read the Search Engine Rountable session summaries.

Marc – Got Blogs?

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Marc Andreessen has been posting some very thoughtful and helpful blog stuff since his recent blogmeistering debut, and today’s post about his lessons from five weeks of blogging is no exception – it’s a great article about why blogging matters a lot more than most people realize, and why we have a lot of work to do to improve the sport.

The most provocative idea is something I’ve been puzzling over for some time – how can blogging evolve from the current form to one where the conversations are more interactive and equal, and can more actively include non-bloggers? I don’t mean equal in the sense everybody gets equal space or attention or time, rather in the sense that great comments on blogs are now relegated to far too low a status. Many “A list” bloggers hardly comment at all unless they are attacked or challenged, making it too difficult to get a spirited conversation going about many of the most important topics.

Marc has even stopped the comments at his blog due to junk comments and spam. Understandable but unfortunate because I’m less likely to read posts when I can’t get in my 2 cents in the comments. Trackbacks are good for people like me with blogs, but unless the topic is something I’m really interested in I won’t want to do a whole post about Marc’s interest du jour.

So, what is the solution to creating better blog engagement for all? I still think it’s some form of hybrid between blogging and forums where topics evolve through participation and then all participants have simple ways to engage in the conversation, and if necessary to disengage from spurious comments.

Gabe at Techmeme solves some of these problems by having his routine choose “newsworthy” items and then showing other blogs that have linked to the main posts.   This allows ‘second tier’ blogs to be featured along with the ‘top tiers’, helping to showcase the value of the topic and the conversation that surrounds it.

Technorati, the brilliant blog search engine, brings a lot to the table but to my way of thinking has not really solved the key challenge of blog conversational engagement.   Technorati APIs may have created the groundwork for the perfect application and perhaps Dave himself will develop the “golden mean” approach to navigate the blogs and the conversations that surround them.

The World According to Cutts

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I really like Matt Cutts. He’s one of the most personable people in the search business while at the same time discussing and blogging complex search topics in an articulate and authoritative way.

Two really interesting issues are in discussion over at Matt’s blog. The first is Lauren’s controversial “official” Google post criticizing the movie Sicko and suggesting that advertising purchases at Google are the best way to win the info wars. Here’s my take on that little episode:

The challenge with big company “official” blogs is that they tend to suck. They are at best basic information outlets and at worst bad PR nightmares. Not because the authors are bad people, but because “official” company blogs reverse the optimal relationship between blogger and reader. For example here, at Jeremy Zawodny, and at Scoble (when he was with MS), the blogger develops a trusted, somewhat personal relationship with the reader. A company blogger can’t really do that. They are generally trustworthy honest people but they are constrained by not being able to bite the hand that feeds them and also contrained by our expectation that they are beholding to the employer.

Ironically Lauren crossed this line in both directions by giving her own personal opinion (good) at a corporate blog (unusual). But her opinion happened to line up very well with Google’s advertising agenda (hmmmm) and her own personal agenda of selling more ads (hmmmm).

The debates over conflict of interest at blogs are really heating up as they should until we can find ways to keep things transparent, honest as we continue to keep the discussions lively and robust.

The second issue is one I need to digest a bit more. Matt is rejecting the idea that Google’s webspam fight is a sham. Certainly Matt’s team works hard to fight search junk but the spam issue is a lot more nuanced than Matt acknowledges. Clearly there are conflicts between maintaining profits and providing users with the optimal experience. Lighter shading of Google advertising is a good example where it is unlikely users benefit from the lighter shading, yet it is certain Google gets a lot more activity from that User Interface “improvement”. Also, the definition of spam itself is very subjective and also very query dependent. If I’m searching for “Hotels” and get a list of Viagra sites the results are clearly “spammy”, but if I’m searching for Viagra those same sites may be exactly what I want.

Uzbekistan Travel and the Province of Djizak

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Update – both this page and our Uzbekistan Travel “Province of Djizak” page are now ranked very high for “Province of Djizak” searches.    Thank you Google for ranking us properly.     Also note that my old experiments on this term were messed up by blog changes, so I think the great page I created was left hanging, and it’s to Google’s credit they wound up ranking the OHWY page (correctly) as fairly authoritative.      Fairly clear to me now that our  earlier troubles were a from a site-wide Google downrank penalty.

The old story:

Normally I would not be writing so much about Uzbekistan Travel.    We already have a great guide to Uzbekistan over at Online Highways’ Uzbekistan Travel section that was put together for us by Marat, a magazine publisher over in Tashkent, Uzbekistan who visited Online Highways in Oregon a few years ago.

However, writing about the Province of Djizak has been an excellent way to get some information about why Google has been punishing OHWY.com for the past few years.  I’ve created the world’s best Province of Djizak page at the OHWY blog and linked it up.  Due to spelling irregularities for Province of Djizak clearly the new blog page is *a great page* that most users would probably want if they were searching for Province of Djizak.

However, it’s the blog posts here that seem to “stick” as the number one page for that term, with the better page going from rank of about 200 to rank of 3 to rank of about 200 again.

The conclusion?   A sitewide penalty by Google that downranks even great, user friendly, advertising free, must see pages about Province of Djizak.

Hey Google, that’s arguably not a good approach if the goal is to give users the best information, especially when there is still no Google mechanism to tell a legitimate site why the Algorithm thinks that portions of the site suck so much that the computer is punishing the whole site.