Category Archives: SEO

The NMohwy.com Experiment

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…. and so another chapter in the saga begins….sort of….my ambitious – some would say reckless and foolhardy – attempt to regain the good graces of Google search for a part of what was once one of Google’s favorite travel websites – www.OHWY.com

This chapter began a few weeks ago when I resurrected NMohwy.com which for about 8 months has been 301 redirected to www.ohwy.com/nm/   The redirection was thanks to recommendations by Google support, Google Engineers, and a major SEO firm.    So why defy all that brilliant conventional wisdom?   

Because things still aren’t working.   So I’m taking the blogged advice of Matt Cutts and “experimenting”

The basic story is that our major travel site – OHWY.com or “Online Highways”, was downranked by Google on February 2 of 2005.   The drop in traffic was severe – about half gone, and we had to lay off people and restructure the company.   On February 1 we had about 50,000 visits from Google searches and on February 3 we were down to about 5,000 which fell over the next few months to about 500.

The site had been growing for years and we’d set up domains like NMohwy.com which were specifically targeted to states – in this case New Mexico.   After the drop we were advised that consolidating the 12 or so domains into our “mother ship” of OHWY.com was advisable and we did it.  

 

WordPress vs Blogger & thank you Todd

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Thanks to the advice of Todd over at his blog suggesting I change formats, and the fact that Uber Blogger Scoble switched to it I’m going to switch to WordPress blogging very soon. The biggest challenge with blogger is that you can’t categorize the posts which is VERY helpful even as the author looking back to see what you already wrote.

Todd by the way, has one of the best SEO blogs out there. This is because he’s one of the top SEO guys anywhere. He often speaks at conferences about “link building” and is always insightful about complex SEO topics.

Content is … Pawn

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Not only is content’s role as KING becoming questionable, I think we may be entering an era where content has effectively very few “rights” attached to it, and instead it’ll all be about the aquisition, distribution and organization of data rather than it’s creation. I have mixed feelings about this as we spent a LOT of money assembling a LOT of data at Online Highways and it’s clear a lot of it got nabbed by other sites and scraped into “made for adsense” sites that use legal snips of information to displace more legitimate and better sites in search rankings.

I think Mashups may become king very soon and that’s probably …. OK with me.

IF Web 2.0 > Web 1.0 THEN Yahoo > Google

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I think the most profound issue in the online world right NOW is “where are we going with web 2.0”?

I hope to answer this question, at least in part, at next week’s mashup camp
in the heart of Silicon Valley. The event is really shaping up to be great, with 300 developers, observers, and API providers coming in from all over the country to share ideas, mashups, and a few beers. In addition to API folks from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, ASK, and others two of my favorite bloggers will be there – Robert Scoble from MSN and Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo. These guys are among the best known tech evangelists for their companies and what THEY blog about is often what *everybody else* will be talking about in a few weeks or months.

Joe Bio

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No time to blog today so I think I’ll just post the bio I just sent to the excellent folks handling the Nanjing Search Conference where I’m hoping to speak in March. This way I’ll NEVER lose it!

It’s always funny how you focus in on some things more than others depending on your audience, mood, and other factors. It’s hard to be modest and sound expert and experienced at the same time.

Hmm – maybe I should have added how I fixed my parents sump pump and garage door today just by jiggling them. That’s pretty talented, no?

Joseph R. Hunkins
jhunkins@gmail.com
Age: 46
Residence: Talent, Oregon, USA
541-535-7640 (home/office)
541-324-4800 (cell)

Education:

Masters in Social Sciences. 1990, Coursework in Multimedia, GIS, and Geography.
Southern Oregon State College (Now S.O.University), Ashland, Oregon 97520.

Bachelor of Science. 1981. Majored in Botany and Psychology.
University of Wisconsin at Madison, WI.

Professional Experience 1990-2005.

Coordinated Internet marketing and multiple website development for the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, a large regional tourism promotion group covering seven counties of Oregon and over 14,000 square miles. Developed organic and pay per click search strategies for several websites.

Managed grant and deployment of statewide touch kiosk Internet system for the state of Oregon, a partnership with the Federal Scenic Byways Program, Oregon Department of Transportation, State Tourism, and the Southern Oregon Visitors Association. Developed organic and pay per click search strategies for several websites. Developed the first commercial websites for Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument.

Presented findings of one of the first online Internet conversion studies at the Travel Industry Association of America’s (TIA) national education conference in Vail, Colorado. Has also spoken extensively in Oregon about Internet marketing strategy for the travel sector.

Board member: California Oregon Intelligent Transportation Systems project. Helped review policies and deployments of travel technology (such as road web cams) for the Northern California and Southern Oregon regions.

Winner of Oregon’s Governor’s Award for Innovative Tourism Development for creating the partnership and grant that led to Oregon’s first state travel website “TravelOregon.com”.

Owner: USA3.com. Joe publishes travel information at several regional and national websites he owns using promotion tools including pay per click campaigns and organic search optimization. His largest site is the QuickAid.com Airport Directory which is currently undergoing extensive changes.

Partner in Online Highways LLC. This Florence, Oregon internet publishing company works in conjunction with two of the Pacific Northwest’s leading travel magazines “Northwest Travel” and “Oregon Coast Magazine” to produce one of the most comprehensive online travel resources in the world: “Online Highways” website: http://www.OHWY.com. In addition to approximately ten staff in Florence the project established an Indian owned and managed support office in the state of Kerala India in 2003.

Joe’s work with Online Highways has been primarily in search and company strategy and online advertising development.

Who’s in charge dot com? – sure isn’t the publishers.

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The the balancing act going on between the forces I list below is very interesting, and will grow more important as the internet consolidates it’s position as the key publishing and communications tool of the times – perhaps of all time.

Users of the internet look for info and click on ads. These guys pay everybody’s bills and should be demanding better treatment. Google makes something like 95% of it’s money from … you!

Publishers provide the content and also help make Google and other big company insiders rich in exchange for modest revenue shares to the publisher (probably about 50% for Yahoo Publisher Network and Google Adsense, though neither Google nor Yahoo share this revenue sharing data with the publisher). Over time the rev share should tend to increase as it did with Hotels, which rapidly went from early days at 20% to the current 50% and up on the room commission.

Big companies must maintain profits AND market share, which may compete with each other. e.g. For Adsense and YPN higher payouts mean lower profit but a greater market share of publishers. Loyalty on the internet is a fickle thing – most people are willing to jump from a previous favorite as soon as the strong prospect of greater profit beckons.

Little companies who must promise big profits to investors. Take Squidoo for example – they are trying to minimize the cost of publishing. Will the “experts” cooperate and if YES, how much revenue will they demand? The balance is extremely important to publishers. If Squidoo can get publishing on the cheap from the legions of well qualified yet bored and “ready to write” internet users, most “quality” online publishers may be hard pressed to match that content with even poorly paid writers.

Higher quality, extra interesting publishers may be able to maintain an audience and tap into the type of thing John Battelle is working on with his Federated Media project – a high yield advertising system that matches users/advertisers/publishers in new and better ways.