Category Archives: Webmasterworld

SES San Jose – exhibitors are followers, not leaders

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Note to middle sized companies that have exhibit staff – you’d probably be surprised to see them in action. Although I’m usually impressed by the people from Google and Yahoo who are typically well informed, enthusiastic, and polite, many of the technology exhibit folks seem poorly informed about the marketplace and too focused on their own pitch and “sale”.

I’d guess that the return on investment is negative for all but a few exhibitors, though perhaps the leads they get at an event like SES San Jose – the world’s top Search related conference – are golden and therefore hugely valuable?

The good news for me is that I now understand *very* clearly that outsourcing any search optimization I want to do would probably be a waste. Some of these places don’t even keep up with the freshest SEO news from Matt , WMW , or even SES. There are some exceptions to this SEO ignorance by SEO companies. I’m always very impressed with Bruce Clay . His approaches reflect recent SEO information. Bruce is always very well informed and helpful even to non-clients. Another exception would be freelance guys like Aaron Wall of SEObook fame. However, I’d say there are only a few hundred people in the world who know enough about SEO to make their insight more valuable than, for example, a clever high schooler who spends a few days absorbing information from Matt Cutts, the Google Guidelines, and Danny Sullivan posts. I’m increasingly skeptical that time spent at WMW and SES forums does more than create noise and confusion. This idea was supported even at a conference party by comments from the real engineers at MSN and Google who post at WMW as “MSNdude” and “GoogleGuy”.

SES San Jose – it’s almost like I’m not … here.

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I’m sitting in my San Jose hotel room a few blocks from the Search Engine Strategies conference thinking how much better the information about the conference is … right here on my pc … than at the conference itself.   I’m not knocking SES (yet), just noting that a broadband connection and good website coverage means that even up in my little Oregon town I can “see” the emerging online world as well – in some ways much better – than hanging out in the middle of things here in Silicon Valley.  Microsoft’s MIX06 had more PCs all over the place where SES, like last year, has a long line to check mail unless you want to lug your own pc all over the place.   Also an inconvenience if you want to check up on blogs or conference updates.   The key point?  The virtual 24/7 conference online is rocking, and will only get better over time.

I shouldn’t knock the conference because I’m just an “exhibits only” attendee and SES clearly has emerged as the key search conference.   Also, Danny Sullivan is arguably the sharpest SEO observer in the world and based on comments by some presenters I know he treats his peeps well …

YET …  it sure seems they have the same tired “Our SEO is the best ever” exhibitors and perhaps as many as 60+% of the same presenters show after show, most pretending they are better at or more helpful with PPC and organic optimization results than … a smart high school kid … which is not supported by much evidence I can see, especially on the organic side of SEO.   I do hate to miss Matt Cutts comments and the Eric Schmidt interview but maybe I’ll bump into them at the party at Google tonight.

After going to 3 full Webmasterworld conferences, two SES as exhibits only, and one AD-TECH (where they more-nicely-than-SES allow exhibits people to attend the keynotes which are the best part of that conference), I think Webmasterworld offers the best insights and networking.  One presenter who appeared at both told the WMW crowd he had to dumb down the presentation for SES. Perhaps he says the opposite here, but I think SES, at three times the price, is not even as valuable as a WMW conference for all but a handful of niches such as Vendors, who’ll do better at this venue because they are selling things rather than dispensing quality information.   (Man there are a lot of SEO clueless salespeeps in SEO!)

Of course personal contacts are important, but I know I’ll find some people I know over at the Google Party later this evening.

Google Party at SES 2006

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Tuesday is the 5th annual Google Party in Mountain View at the GooglePlex, one of the biggest social events of the internet year. It’s held in conjunction with the Search Engine Strategies conference at the San Jose Convention Center. I was just down in Silicon Valley about 3 weeks ago for Mashup Camp 2, but I can’t miss the Google Party!

One of the highlights last year was a chance to talk to several of the Google Search Engineers. Here I am pestering Kekoa – I think about 302 vs 301 redirection and ranking items:

Kekoa at Google Party

Matt Cutts is generally in *high demand* at conferences as well as here at the 2005 Google Party webmaster talks, which are held away from the really big crowd outside. In fact in Boston at Webmasterworld he told me he hardly got anything to eat at this 2005 Google bash because he was constantly mobbed.  Thanks to my good friend John for shooting these pix.   He’ll be joining me again this year at the Party.

Matt Cutts at Google Dance 2005

Must be Good to be Google

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Just in from my “biting the hand that is going to feed me at next week’s Google Party” department:

It must be great to go unchallenged in your sector, especially in the hyper-competitive big money internet extravanza.

Over at WebMasterworld people are doing their usual fawning over the greatness of Google search, this despite the fact that Yahoo and MSN are close in quality according to most objective analyses, that history suggests dominance is often short lived, and that search dominance really does not bode well for anybody except Google.  I posted the following comment over there:

———–
I still use mostly Google out of habit but I predict that Yahoo’s recent move to bring social network and tagging information into the results will be successful and may even land them on top until Google relaxes it’s “no human ranking” approaches.

This thread surprises me as most objective measures indicate that Google  is the best, but not by much and certainly not always best if compared to good vertical search tools.  Habit is driving SE choice, not careful analysis of result sets.

Also, I think there will be legal battles when Vista launches over default search in future versions of IE browsers, MS will win most of them, and Google market share will go down with new users.

Search dominance is not healthy for users or webmasters – this community should recognize that more than most.
——————-

Mashup University – Higgens Trust Framework

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The Higgens Trust Framework is very promising way to standardize personal information for use across multiple platforms. Yikes – that sentence means I must be writing from Silicon Valley. If I was in Oregon I’d say it “tells programs who you are”.

I tend to agree with those that think filling out yet another form is a barrier to participation, though the upside of such things is that they provide an incentive to make sure the content / program you are signing up to use is worthy of your time and attention *before* you sign up. Will this openup a new plethora of junk applications just fishing for clicks?

Google Sitemaps. My good news and my bad news.

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Elite SEO Dave Naylor was complaining a bit about Google Sitemaps and I've also been unconvinced that sitemaps really does help straighten out ranking confusion.   According to Google Sitemaps my old-and-in-need-of-great-repair Airport Directory has some incredibly impressive sitemaps stats  (e.g.  Sitemaps says I'm number ONE for term "hotels")

Term   |   Rank 

  1. hotels in new york   1
  2. airport codes   1
  3. ord   1
  4. washington dc   1
  5. international airports   1
  6. hotels   1
  7. ord ohare   1
  8. chicago   1
  9. houston airport   1
10. airport city codes   1
11. airport maps   1
12. charlotte nc airport   1
13. john wayne airport   1
14. orlando   1
15. las   1
16. airline codes   1
17. city codes   1
18. major airports   1
19. salt lake city airport parking   1

Unfortunately QuickAid.com does not  rank for any of these terms.  In fact I'm under some form of downranking that means I get little Google traffic at all despite the fact I'm one of the most linked to Airport sites on the web. 

I've seen this type of bizarre sitemaps stat for some time so I'm not sure what's going on, though I do have some framed content and this could reflect the rank of sites appearing in the frames.

The good news is that my NMOHWY.com experiment has been languishing but it may be because I failed to load the sitemap when I moved to new server over a month ago.   I just loaded it now so hopefully my new pages at NMohwy.com will get indexed soon rather than Google showing the old supplemental pages, using old cache dates of June 2005 and similar.

Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.

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I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.

Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.

Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.

I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.

Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".

WebmasterWorld Boston Site Reviews, part Deux

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More site reviews from WMW Boston, continued from HERE

6. eomega.com 

27 years teaching Tai Chi and other personal enrichment technniques. Want to rank better for terms like Tai Chi since they are a key resource.

Tim: Not clear from site what you actually do at the institute. Write more about your key focus which helps both people and SEs figure out the site. Put "Yoga" and "Tai chi" keywords on home pages!

Bruce: Look at competitors Static pages with more decriptions would be better. Send more NON volatile content to home page. [By Non Volatile he means less flash, dynamic, changing material which can confuse the indexing process]

Matt: A good site map is important. If you use java mouseover navigation FIND ANOTHER WAY.

"Treat Search Engines as dumb little kids with short attention spans"
(do a separate post on this concept which is important)

Change your huge URLs to more intuitive reading like /carol-anderson/. Weird or long URLs can fool the search engine and you have a lot of them.

Thomas: List of workshops is WAY too long – cut it up into sections with better categories which will spider better. (Matt nodded that this was a good idea).

Jake: All Title tags in the site appear to be the same! Bad.

7. Shopping.com [this is one of the largest shopping portals]. They appear to be having big ranking problems though they have a huge number of indexed pages. He said 80% of their server load is from SE crawling(!).

Matt: Mouseover problems? Always use DASHES as separators rather than underscores. Underscores will be treated as connecting the two words.

Jake: Load balancing at the servers can lead to duplicate content filtering.

[Shopping.com said they had som latency (slow loading page) issues. Matt indicated this is UNlikely to cause problems with Google but might with MSN.

Users have complained about empty epinions.com pages – get rid of them.
Use more user friendly URLs – more for users than for Search engines.

8. CorporateCasuals.com. Now in top 60 for most terms but can't rank for "embroidery".

Tim: More descriptive anchor text needed.

Matt: 3 parameter URLs are not good. DO NOT use ID=. Best to use NO parameters but keep to 1-2 if you must do it. Stop using nofollows on (internal?) links. These prevent the SE from following internal navigation and beefing up the site.
Think about attracting attention to the site to get more inbound links.

Bruce: Descriptions are NOT unique and that is bad.

9. Arcamax.com "We syndicate content. Site Tips wanted. Comics are top read at the site. They send out joke of the day. 30-40 subscribers per week from home page and position of subscription box on home page does NOT appear to affect this. 40-50% leave home page without going in to site.

Matt: I see irrelevant ads and a toolbar download that might scare people. Focus on other things like jokes and cartoons.

Tim: Leverage RSS power. Need content surfacing [more readily available?] Make more specific calls to action.