Category Archives: SEO

When too much is not enough and a little is just right. Google > Yahoo

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Today a very sharp friend said that even though he uses Yahoo mail and some of their default screen navigation, he always uses Google to search. Why? Because Google is not cluttered and makes it very easy to leave Google to visit external sites. Yahoo, especially Yahoo News, he felt, tries to keep the user at Yahoo too aggressively.

A similar point about the ease of navigating to external sites was recently made by Mike Arrington when talking about Web 2.0, noting that it’s important to let folks feel they can easily leave the site for other web locations if you want return visits and credibility.

Relevancy, conspicuously, was not the concern of my friend. He just didn’t like the Yahoo search user experience. I agree and realize that for me it’s the fact that with Google I can get and visually scan *a lot more results* much faster than with normal Yahoo search. Like my friend it’s not the relevancy as much as the navigation that keeps me at Google despite the fact I own Yahoo (well, actually I own about one two-millionth of Yahoo). I don’t trust either engine to give me great results, but I know that I’ll usually find what I need somewhere in the first few pages of sites. Google makes it easier to preview a lot of sites fast.

I have stronger negative feelings about most of the travel sites. Online Travel 1.0 is a nightmarish blend of booking screens, pitches for Hawaii and cruise packages, and tourism sites all trying to convince you they are the only destination both offline and online.

It’s particulary frustrating when sites expect me to learn their navigation and nomenclature just to use their damn site, especially if I’m trying to preview dozens of websites for a trip! Most of the worst offenders are overproduced by expensive print media firms using the pretense they know about “online marketing”. In fact most big firms have about as much web savvy as an inebriated, obnoxious, and arrogant tourist and appear to be designing the sites for …..themselves.

Like most users I’d prefer a Craigslist format so I can easily jump to the information I need rather than wading through popups, pictures, video, and other nonsense when I’m trying to plan a trip. With some exceptions the mantra “just the facts please” would serve online travel promotion better than the foolish extravagances that confuse users and also search engines which struggle to find meaning in garrish flash and pages filled with 100k high resolution photos.

What will Travel sites look like as Web 2.0 shakes out? I’m optimistic that they’ll be much, much better, and hoping to figure out how before it’s obvious to everybody.

SearchMob, like DIGG, is struggling to avoid mob rule.

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One of my favorite blogs is John Battelle’s Searchblog. John provides the best and the most intelligent analysis and discussion focusing on the search industry.

So, when John (and his readers) started experimenting with a digg-like reader-controlled “SearchMob” run using the very clever Pligg community software to provide reviews and links to search related news and articles I was very optimistic. In fact I quickly became one of the top submitters and voters at SearchMob.

Although I write a lot about search issues I have avoided posting my own articles there. I don’t think there’s a problem posting a few of your own pieces, but the system becomes fairly useless if the bulk of activity is self-promotional. This appears to be a problem at SearchMob now.

Of the “top stories” listed this afternoon it appears that every single one was posted by the author. It also appears that some of these authors have several SearchMob accounts so they can vote for their own stories which pushes them to the top.

There are some easy spoofs of the current system, which does not require a log in to vote, that make it easy to push your own articles to the top of the heap, and I fear this is driving the top stories rather than reader interest. This also keeps “legitimate” stories from appearing where they can get more votes, further undermining the integrity of the system.

Solutions need to be largely spoof proof, especially in a reader community filled with SEO specialists. I think requiring complete contact information for anybody posting articles might help to make abuses easier to track. Also it may be necessary for the community to start hassling those who are using this too opportunistically via the discussion feature, though this does not seem to be the intended use of “discussion”.

Here are the top 4 stories now, all appear to have been submitted by the … author and most have questionable vote totals:

An Investment Approach to Marketing
http://googlejet.blogspot.com

Mobile Sites for Information
http://www.resourceshelf.com

A social news service for free advertising
http://targetyournews.com

Google Checkout Now Working with Froogle
http://www.oneparkavenuereality.com

Is that blog tag spam in your “Rochesters Big and Tall” pants or are you just happy to see me?

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Technorat’s top tags today are very conspicuous.    Look at all the references to Rochester’s Big and Tall”, a retailer serving…..big and tall guys.   Looks like some form of blog spamming or odd tag SEO going on.   

I’m still getting a lot of milage from my test Cicarelli post of last week even though she’s dropped to 12th place. 

And will somebody PLEASE blog about the winners of the Yahoo Hack Day?!   Wait…here it is at Techcrunch That event was so great…..nobody had time to blog it thoroughly except to link to the very clever Beck Video.     Beck and his band – themselves mashup mavens and sometime hackers – gave a killer concert at the Yahoo event that will probably go down as one of the best gatherings of the year.  

Top Searches

  1. Jonny
  2. Pinky
  3. Foley
  4. Mark Foley
  5. Google
  6. So You Call Thi…
  7. Hack Day
  8. Hackday
  9. Teacher
  10. Netvibes
  11. Cicarelli
  12. Video
  13. Yahoo Hack Day
  14. Naomi
  15. Podcast Expo

Top Tags

  1. Bush
  2. rochester big and tall
  3. Republicans
  4. office chair big and tall
  5. rochesters big and tall
  6. web-20
  7. Iraq
  8. youtube
  9. wordpress
  10. Terrorism
  11. man belt big and tall
  12. big and tall merino wool sweater
  13. big and tall clothes for men
  14. War
  15. Comedy

Search game score: US History: 37,600 US History Regents: 866,000 !

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I actually grew up in New York and took the New York State Regent’s Exams but even I didn’t initially make the connection when doing some research to see how our site U-S-History.com is doing for various “US History” searches at Google.

Incredibly, the number of Google (and presumably other SE) searches for “US History Regents” appears to be many times those for US History. us history.com was pretty high with 216,000 but the “US History Regents” win by a landslide.

Update:  I may have been confusing the number of *results* with number of *searches* here…

Generalizing from this, Myspace success, etc we are starting to confirm a hypothesis that suggests online search activity is high school centric. I’m suggesting far more than most studies suggest – perhaps due to survey response bias or time online issues or the fact many studies are looking for info about more commercially viable audiences than a 15 year old teen boy.

Blog readers vs writers III – Cicarelli’s fleeting fame

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Even thanks to a highlight by A-list blogger Jeremy of my AOL lawsuit post yesterday it looks like my Cicarelli “test post” is by far the top interest item here at Joe Duck, and it appears this is due to high placement at MSN for the term … Cicarelli.

This little Cicarelli experiment is suggesting to me that the gap between readers and blog writers is much wider than I’d thought, and it may change my approach to blogging.   Perhaps throwing in junk topic posts every so often is a good way to shake up search prominence even for non-junk topics.   Hard to test that but it seems to be happening – presumably as people who come for Cicarelli stay to read about …. Web 2.0 or Global health and welfare?!

But alas at Technorati we see that Cirarelli is down to search term number 9. I fear her fame, and mine, shall be as fleeting as a teenager’s search preferences.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
Technorati Chart
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John Battelle’s Search Mob. Mob Rules. Rules for the Mob. Search Mobsters?

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John has launched “SearchMob”, a Digg-like story submission and review community thing where users send stories they find which are reviewed by others to attain popularily. He asked for feedback and I suggested this:

I’m somewhat confused by the voting both in terms of low numbers but also because the articles with many votes usually show only 2 or 3 names under the discussion list.

Without trying to be too provocative here I’ve wondered if the articles with high votes are simply folks who are voting for their own articles – or asking others to vote – from different machines. In this environment it’s easy to spoof interest and attain the top spot.

Based on limited data I’m now thinking that most of the people come here for John Battelle insights (ie the JB filter) and simply getting articles by other users (ie the JB Search community filter) is not stirring much interest.

Therefore instead of Searchmob, John, you need to become a Search Cult leader and hole up in a heavily armed Palo Alto Coffee Shop with your search apostles while the FBI files motions to get YOUR database of intentions.

Blog readers and blog writers redux II.1 The downfall of Cicarelli?

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This blog readers vs writers thing remains intriguing. Now, “Jonny” is the top blog search and I’m having trouble figuring out exactly why since the name refers to several pop icons. In fact that may be why it’s up top – it’s a term that overlaps several popular searches for people named Jonny. My own “cicarelli” post is getting some traction but the top referrer for me by far is a reference to my first post about this readers vs writers issue and it’s coming from people over at Technorati searching for “Assparade”.

 

From an SEO perspective it appears we may be seeing signs that writing about the top term is less likely to get a lot of traffic than writing about highly searched but secondary term that is getting much less press. Still way too early to come to this conclusion though.

 

The Technorati search list is changing more day to day than I would expect, perhaps an indication of the fleeting nature of human interest and big media focus. The tag list seems more stable and that would make sense if we assume the following about writers vs readers:

 

Blog writers are a smaller, more focused group

Blog writers tend to stick to same general topics

(?) Blog writers tend to address richer, more stable, deeper subjects and therefore these don’t change at the whim of masses and mass media.

 

 

Top Searches

  1. Jonny
  2. Cicarelli
  3. Pinky
  4. Xing
  5. Bitacle
  6. Openbc
  7. Stuff Happens a…
  8. Bin Laden
  9. Lindsay Lohan
  10. Video
  11. Asian
  12. Paginas Da Vida
  13. Ubuntu
  14. Mandingo
  15. Axis of Sketchy…

 

Top Tags

  1. Islam
  2. Bush
  3. youtube
  4. Iraq
  5. Microsoft
  6. Politica
  7. Terrorism
  8. ebay
  9. sexy
  10. War
  11. web2.0
  12. foto
  13. bin Laden
  14. web-20
  15. Poesie

Blog readers and blog writers redux. Cicarelli still rules

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Gee, the top blog search is still Cicarelli.

 

My earlier post with these technorati search terms seems to be getting a some attention for the term “Assparade” rather than the post I thought entitled “Cicarelli“, but I don’t have good stats yet.

 

I shall say with great pride and elitism that at Technorati this morning I was the top search result for “Assparade”, apparently simply because I put up the technorati list on my blog.

 

Today’s technorati terms are different but still indicative of the chasm of diversity between blog readers and blog writers.

 

 

Top Technorati Blog Searches September 23 (or maybe Sept 22?) – what are blog readers trying to find?

  1. Cicarelli
  2. Jonny
  3. Xing
  4. Pinky
  5. Openbc
  6. Bin Laden
  7. Bitacle
  8. Hugo Chavez
  9. Assparade
  10. Asian
  11. Axis of Sketchy…
  12. Grey’s Anatomy
  13. Richard Hammond
  14. Daniela Cicarel…
  15. Google

Top Technorati tags – what people are writing about.

  1. Bush
  2. Islam
  3. Pensieri
  4. Comedy
  5. Microsoft
  6. youtube
  7. Amore
  8. iPod
  9. sexy
  10. fashion
  11. foto
  12. Politica
  13. wordpress
  14. Politik
  15. torture

 

Although I do understand the diversity to some extent, particularly interesting is that “real” news like “Hugo Chavez” is not getting written up as much as it’s getting searched for.   I’m guessing that the blog writer demographic is still very narrowly “tech focused” but I wonder how it is politically?    Probably polarized, such that people with “strong” political views are far more likely to blog in that space.

Cicarelli

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This is an blog search test to see how many click here for information about Cicarelli, the top search term at Technorati today. Cicarelli is Daniella Cicarelli, a Brazilian model featured on a rogue paparazzi Youtube video clip (no longer available) that featured Cicarelli and her boyfriend “fooling around”.

Wikipedia reports:

On September 18th, 2006 a paparazzi video showing Daniela on a beach in Spain in intimate positions with her boyfriend Renato “Tato” Malzoni leaked on the Internet and was uploaded at YouTube, but was deleted at same day. The episode echoed in both Brazilian and Spanish media.

Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
Technorati Chart
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SEO for Talent, Oregon? Google this shouldn’t be so hard.

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When I agreed to help Star Properties with their new website I thought it would be easy to make them appear first at Google for “Talent Oregon Real Estate“. Why? They are easily the most relevant site for that search being the (only?), first, and best Real Estate office here in Talent.

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Google, but what seems to be happening is that my blog posts are rising to the top for this term rather than Star Properties’ (more appropriate) Talent Oregon real estate site.

It’s somewhat reasonable for Google to wait until a site is verified as “non spam” before they rise to the top for highly targeted searches, though it is also a search defect as it keeps the best sites from appearing for that waiting period, sometimes called “sandboxing” by SEO peeps.

I think what this indicates is how significant blogs are becoming to the search experience. Google correctly assumes a blog is fresher and more relevant than most sites.

Note that under the local listings there is a “Star Properties” but it links to the wrong site – one that just mentions them but has incorrect email and old website info.   Google does have a procedure to correct this bad listing.