Blog SEO from Matt Cutts

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Matt Cutts, of Google fame, recently spoke at WordCamp gathering for WordPress blog enthusiasts (like Matt himself, who blogs with WordPress rather than Google’s excellent blogging product “Blogger”).

This blog post points to Matt’s PowerPoint and several other sources for summaries of this presentation.

Matt’s view on SEO is important because most experts would suggest that he’s probably the most knowlegeable search expert *in the world* and is one of the few search engineers who is privy to basically all of Google’s Algorithmic secrets. Also, in my opinion Matt is honest and straightforward with advice, and therefore if he’s suggesting an SEO approach you are well advised to take it. I should note though that this view is not shared by some of the elite SEO people who seem to think Matt will sometimes “misdirect” people to protect the precious Google Algorithm.

My comment over there was:

Excellent post and links here Matt.
However I have a “beef” with the emphasis on linkbaiting and basic SEO as good ways to rise in the ranks (they ARE, but should not be).   I’d argue that in an ideal search environment SEO would have effectively *zero* effect on ranks (because it’s communicating with the bot not the user), and linkbaiting things would have only a minor effect unless they were highly relevant to the query.
We now see a lot of SERPS where you see a bunch of sites, all similar, ranked more according to how their SEO, history, links, structure match Google’s expectations rather than how a user would view them. Google generally argues that these are essentially the same but they are probably only roughly correlated.
The fix for this would be greater transparency in the ranking process combined with greater penalties for being deceptive.  If Google is going to aggressively defend the integrity of the algorithm the ranking process should be more accessible, especially to mom and pops who will increasingly flirt with disaster as they try to find ranking advantages.

Take two Resveratrols and call me in the morning ?

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Noting the number of scams and bogus claims in the nutritional supplement biz I’m always reluctant to accept claims of new “wonder supplements”. However Resveratrol as a “life extension” really looks promising and seems to hold up to scrutiny the more it is tested. 2006 tests on mice prolonged their life significantly, and although human and mice biology differ it’s reasonable to assume we fellow vertebrates have a lot in common. The resveratrol appears to offer benefits related to caloric restriction which is well documented as a way to extend the life of mice. Unfortunately we humans, especially meat and potato guys like me, don’t like caloric restriction.

I’m going to break my normal rule of thinking supplements are not worth the cost and trouble and start taking this supplement.     I’m also going to hope Ray Kurzweil is right that if you can make it to 2040 ….. you’ve made it to eternity due to the coming explosion of AI merging with our biological selves.

Got AI?

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If you are not familiar with the ideas of futurist Ray Kurzweil you should read some of his rather remarkable but reasonable notions of how artificial intelligence will pan out over the next few decades.   In short Kurzweil sees an explosion of artificial intellectual capability changing our culture in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

We were pondering the intersection of humans and technology during our 5 days of camping with friends on the Oregon Coast at Honeyman State Park.    It’s a simply beautiful park with huge dunes, 2 pretty lakes, and nice campsites.

Google Phone coming in 2008

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Computer World says that Google may market an iPhonesque mobile device next year.  I bet it’ll be great.    I wrote an article over at the TechDirt Insight Community about this a few months ago (before the news from Computerworld – I didn’t realize Google had a phone project in the hopper already).

Here’s what I wrote over there in response to an insight community issue:

Google is in a spectacular position to launch a mobile device for many reasons, here are three:

1) Branding power.   Google is already verb “to search online” and could become a noun with the “Google” handheld broadband/phone/pda.

2) Speed of development due to corporate structure.

3) Existing prototype.
Apple’s iPhone already exists as a new standard for this type of device, effectively saving years of prototyping.   The Google device will have all this functionality PLUS better web integration (thanks to Google’s greater familiarity with online systems and also will have a LARGER touchscreen, which will ultimately determine the winner in this category because browsing ease is the greatest appeal of these devices.

Apple has hyped and branded this type of device already.   However, it will have poor initial adoption due to cost and competition from inferior but similar devices.     Google can subsidize the devices in part by letting this device Google’s mobile advertising platforms, undercutting Apple’s cost by hundreds of dollars per device.

Features and functionality:  Much like the Apple iPhone, the device would have a relatively large touchscreen interface (but larger than iPhone –  a key marketing point for the Google).  Flexible web browsing without mobile programming required for sites.   The device will provide a quality phone, high quality camera, and have PDA functionality.   Pictures, voice, and PDA functions will automatically integrate with an online control panel the user can access from the device or from any computer.   Google mail and Calendar online entries would synch with the device to allow offline mailing and calendar access.   This feature would also serve to enhance Google’s existing Calendar and mail which suffer from “only available online” challenges.

What would you do to make it a valuable addition to the Google product portfolio?

Mobile advertising is an explosive market, and without hardware control Google may lose market share to companies that have hardware advantages.   Also, for reasons stated above Google could create a superior device, thus winning both as a hardware and as an advertising provider.

Good luck Google.   As a stockholder in Yahoo I sure wish they would create this type of thing but I fear … they won’t or can’t.   Google can.

 

 

David Berlind’s dumb and dumber hypothesis is right on

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David Berlind is a very insightful writer over at ZDNET and I loved yesterday’s post. David observes that those who think we should not complain about computer problems are *dumb*. He also notes that even dumber are those that think their ability to solve computer problems means that others are idiots.

I’ve fixed my share of problems and as any regular computer user *must* note, many times the fixes are counter intuitive or lucky. Generally the problems that are easiest are those you spent many hours suffering with at some previous time. There’s nothing more annoying than wannabe pseudo-expert PC-hardware-hack jerks who make others feel bad after they stumble on a solution rather than noting that computers still suck in many respects. They’ve come a long way and it’s not reasonable to suggest it’s easy to redesign things to work seamlessly, but it’s downright ridiculous to suggest we should not try. Things are improving but they have a long way to go, so I agree with David and say:

Keep on complaining!

(just keep it polite – that will work better anyway)

Dvorak – 2.0 bubble to burst for sure. ?

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The normally perceptive John Dvorak may be showing signs of his “old computer” and “old media” roots by predicting that Web 2.0 will be collapsing for sure. He’s certainly correct that things *might* collapse but everybody knows this. New massive economies – be they the online economy or China’s exploding economy – are inherently somewhat unstable as they rapidly change and flex to meet new demands and bring in new ideas.

However I think John’s missing the fact that the online economy is now well established enough that although players – even big ones like Google – may fall or stumble it is very unlikely we’ll see the widespread systemic meltdown of the late 1990’s. The most important reason is that online advertising is more effective than offline advertising. Ads are the mother’s milk of online business. Google revenues, for example, are about 99% advertising. Can this market collapse? Unlikely unless because it’s delivering superior ROI to advertisers even as those advertisers continue to spend on less effective offline media, which is still the lion’s share of total ad spending.

In the 1990’s the PE ratios for companies were often off the charts, where now we see Yahoo, MS, and Google all well within the historic ranges for technology companies. The names may change but it’s very unlikely that the revenue base – advertising – will dry up anytime soon. Ergo, the web will continue to grow and evolve and continue to replace traditional media with …. better stuff.

Sorry John – time to write that screenplay?

Don Dodge has this right – Old media influence, not Web 2.0 media, is what John should be fretting about.

Caveat:   As I’ve noted before many times the new paradigm for Web 2.0 companies is an evolutionary model.   As with species we are going to see that most of the Web 2.0 companies will fail and die.  But this is NOT at all a ‘collapse’ because the system as a whole will continue to expand and thrive.    We are seeing high numbers of low capitalized companies  with VC funders of those few that get money simply hoping for a few winners.  This is, in some ways, analogous to the way nature kills off most gene mutations, leaving the most successful animals to thrive and be copied (aka reproduce).   This is not an old business model but it’s a perfectly reasonable one … unless you get killed by it in which case it’s still perfectly reasonable, you just won’t like it.

Transhumans of the world … unite!

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The Transhumanist Association gathered last month in Chicago to discuss issues relating to the idea that humans are in the process of evolving from organic beings to a sort of machine/organic hybridized animal that will have spectacular mental abilities and will effectively attain immortality when Artificial Intelligence routines are sufficiently developed.

Sound a bit crazy to you? In my opinion this techno-hybridization of our species is already happening, and the process of integrating biology and technology has been going on pretty much since the beginning of tool use by primates. Corneal transplants and lasik surgery, for example, are fairly significant modifications and enhancements to our “natural”capabilities. Artificial organs even more so. Use a computer lately? This is just another of many ways we use technology as an interface between our human intellect and non-human helping devices.

Sure it’s another step forward to have our brains getting downloaded or to have neurons integrated with chips (lots of neat experiments are going on with this organic / silicon stuff now), but it’s not to be feared. Rather we should embrace the potential here to solve many of the most pressing problems of the world – problems like global poverty, warfare, and health that we often fail to adequately address, let alone solve.

Here’s a nice article about the Transhumanist conference

Kurzweil’s newsletter noted that one of the provocative notions at the conference, from Sirius Satellite founder Martine Rothblatt

… The idea is that people should be creating digital mindfiles throughout their
lives that could be used to revive them by means of mindware when
sufficiently strong artificial intelligence is developed …

Wow, how’s THAT for an Attention based economy? More like an Attention based Jean Paul Sartre “Being and Nothingness” philosophizing extravaganza. Cool. Count me in.

Living on the fringe?

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Why was I thinking that the top two states in population were California and New York?  Must have been an old thought because Texas is second.

A bit more wikipediaIzing and I learn that fully half of all Americans live in the top 9 states, about one of 3 of us in the top 4 states of California 36MM, Texas 23MM, New York19MM, and Florida18MM.

This is not just statistically interesting, it’s critically important to many things like economics and elections as we saw in the bizarre 2000 election where silly butterfly ballots *in a single region* in Florida very significantly shifted the balance of power in the country and changed history forever given the dramatic difference between a Gore and a Bush administration.

Contrary to what many argue about the 2000 Florida election it’s now pretty clear, based on a study by the Miami Herald that examined virtually *every single Florida ballot*, that Bush would have won Florida even with a recount of all the ballots using the most commonly accepted historical standard of “2+ chads detached is a vote, 1 chad is not”. HOWEVER and more importantly, Gore would have won the election if the confusing Butterfly Ballots of Palm Beach county had not been thrown out. It was logically and statistically obvious that Palm Beach voters intended to vote for Gore rather than Bush (disputing this is absurdly irrational given the vote tallies and ballot examination). The Palm Beach ballot design left many confused voters voting a second time for Buchanon. These ballots were not counted. I think this explains why exit polling was predicting a Gore victory – people in Palm Beach County had thought they’d voted for Gore when in fact their vote was not counted. The ballot design was from incompetence rather than a Rebublican hit job – the elections person was a democrat.

Also contary to much commentary the courts could have used some historical precedent to allocate those Palm Beach discarded votes mathematically rather than discarding them, though I think it is unlikely the Supreme Court would have allowed that to stand and would have thrown the election to the Florida legislature (which would have given Florida’s electoral votes to Bush).

So, Florida’s population prominence gave them the say in the election, and quirky circumstances took the vote out of the control of voters. Contrary to what many seem to think it’s not really reasonable to say the election was stolen – it was won and lost “unfair and square” on technicalities from our obscenely outmoded electoral vote system combined with bureaucratic and court incompetence.

Here’s a nice CNN summary of the real story.   Note the irony in that most Republicans still seem to think it was a “fair” outcome (WRONG since voter intention was clearly not the result) where most Dems think it was the chads (WRONG – Gore’s Tally was not affected enough by chad decisions to matter) or the Supreme Court Decision to bar a recount (WRONG – Gore would have lost the recount) or some form of vote tally conspiracy (WRONG – little evidence of this).

It was just good old bureaucratic incompetence and some voter ignorance that distorted the 2000 tally with one VERY IMPORTANT caveat – the Republicans have been very aggressive with methods to bar certain people from voting.   I’m unmoved so far by muckraker Greg Palast‘s claims about this type of manipulation in 2000 and 2004 Bush victories, but I just now found this Robert Kennedy piece that is far more thoughtful about the possibility that the Ohio vote in 2004 was not properly tallied.  It is critical to keep open minded since the stakes in US presidential elections are so very, very high.    We should all be ashamed of how casually we view our responsibility to have fair and impartial elections.
Wow, that sure diverged from my intended post!? I really need to get a regular job.

Fred’s not really bankrupt. In fact he’s right on.

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I’m beginning to think the VC folks are some of the clearest thinkers out there and Fred’s latest post shows some of that practical no-nonsense thinking about two topics I’m very interested in: Blog comments and Facebook.

Fred correctly suggests to Jason Calcanis that turning off his comment section is premature. Sure Jason is busy working on lots of projects and sure he’s sick and tired of pruning stupid comments from idiots but … hey! What about MY comments dude? “Comments off” misses much of the point of blogging, which is not just to talk but to *listen* and get the conversation going.

I’m not an “A list blogger” like Jason but for me the most rewarding posts have had a lot of comments and discussion surrounding them. It’s especially neat when you become an observer rather than a participant as often happened to me when I was blogging the Kim family search in December. Sure I had trolls and a lot of administrative challenges but this is what the new big conversation is all about.

I really enjoyed the great insights over at Marc Andreesen’s blog, but when he turned off the comments I felt personally insulted. Hey, I’d left some good ones there. In fact I don’t read Marc much now even though he’s got great stuff to say. Irrational of me? I don’t think so. Blogging is one-sided enough when you can post things – even the best of comments are relegated to “second class” status on the blog.

The least a blogger can do is give others the time of day. Without comments a blog is just a ranting rag. There are lots of good rants out there but if I cannot participate in your conversation with other interested and interesting folks I don’t want to hang around anyway.

Fred’s also right about Facebook. Here is the comment I left over there because I could:

Excellent post Fred. I’d suggest that it is now up to Facebook to rise to this occasion of their great prominence and keep making it easier for other sites and aps to integrate with Facebook, and perhaps as importantly make money from doing this.

If Facebook succeeds and we can all start using Facebook as our Social networking tool without sacrificing *any functionality* on other sites then they deserve the huge rewards this would bring them

Hey, I just read Jason Calcanis ‘ reply to Fred, which is very thoughtful and I have to say does a good job of defending himself against the elitist tag I’m painting Jason with above for not allowing comments. Frankly, I love his idea where *everybody* gets a blog and then we have a bunch of pinging going on rather than commenting. This would help with the blog revolution because we’d all be reading a lot of new blogs, rather than just comments, in the course of following A list discussions.