Tag Archives: SES

SES Site Clinics

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SES Site Clinics
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

A good team including Dave Naylor, Greg Boser, Dani Horowitz —- on stage is evaluating some websites that have volunteered to be reviewed:

http://www.LangAntiques.com

Hmm – not sure on the advice here but they are suggesting Lang avoid full URLs to make server handling more efficient, and avoid putting unrelated content at the site (use a different domain) to be more competitive in that specific niche. ie Generalizing can be helpful in some cases but make it harder to rank for very competitive terms.

http://www.GoldCoastInformation.com.au

s-l-o-w is a problem.

www.teleflora.com

Greg: Narrow title tags to be more focused. Focus on a small number of key phrases or words you want to rank well for rather than several.

Dave: Does not like the navigation on home page – thinks it is weak and will possible get site downranked. Title tags suck all the way through. Cross linking is important. Cannot be excessive, but can be used e.g. to link blog and websites advantageously.

Smarthome.com

Debby and Greg: Tables are bad. Use CSS. Separate content from layout. Greg – improve titles. Debby – make title tags *backwards* from the breadcrumbs – ie from most specific to the generic. [e.g. diamond studded shock collars, dog collars, dogs]

Blog advice: One of the most powerful tools you have. Check templates. Avoid the template sponsor links at footers? Edit the post URL to exclude date.

AllergyAsthmaTech.com
Ranking well for Asthma products but no good conversions. Greg – avoid images for important terms – use words or layer image on top of text which is “awesome” according to Dave and Greg. Caveat – be careful overdoing this.

default.asp as home page – avoid multiple home pages.

Question to audience – how many companies use blogs with the site? (very few raise hands). Greg and Dave: Get a blog! Google ranks blogs over product pages.

JustAnswer.com keep bots out of the https. site:JustAnswer.com

Greg – use subdomains but keep in mind search engines are sensitive to host name spam.

Domain name auction at SES San Jose

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I’ve heard of these auctions but never attended on before. The idea is to have a live event that is also online, so anybody who has registered can participate from anywhere.

I’ve got hundreds of names aquired over the years so it’ll be interesting to see how much these names fetch here at auction.

Monte, Moniker’s top guy, is introducing the event now.

Hey, I just won a $200 credit for having signed up online. (didn’t use it – few name I’d want in this batch)

Reverselinesofcredirt.co and earlybirdiscounts.com just sold for 200 each…

seoproduct.com $300

Wow, shoppingservices.com just fetched 30,000 from room bidding.

They closed ctr.com , not going to allow bigs under 50k . Realestatedirect.com closed at 100k! Seems very, very high to me.

Ad.com: Wow, this just went for $350,000 after an online bid for 300k.

Update – this did NOT sell and I’m not understanding what happened. The process is frantic and I think designed more to get people in the frenzy of bidding than anything.

I’m wondering how you regulate the ease with which you could boost prices with fake bids (I do NOT think they are doing that since the credibility hit would ruin them forever, but it’s odd seeing bids come in from the internet, invisible).

OK, so the auction went way over time, then to add an insult to the deal when I got to the Vivid party thrown by Moniker and Webmaster Radio at 9pm the place was way too loud to talk, the “open bar” was not open, the plentiful food was not there, and there was some VIP thing going for … the special people?

Not impressed at all.

Black Hat / White Hat SEO Session at SES San Jose

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Black Hat SEO Session at SES San Jose
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

The SEO session here at SES San Jose is packed as everybody struggles to get competitive advantage, though I’m concerned that even some fairly advanced SEO folks simply don’t understand how seriously they may damage their clients or sites with a number of techniques that are no longer tolerated by Google.

Jill’s making an excellent point about “incompetent SEO” who, in her words…suck. I think she’s right that there are a lot of very bad folks doing SEO – I’d suggest about 90% or more.

Boser – the sites that rank are the ones that put in the effort. He says that you could generally replace the top sites with any others wihout bothering users.

Boser: buying links remains a key tactic for competive markets.

Naylor: Common mistakes are from within the organization where their link buying goes over the thresholds. Good black hats “know the threshholds” at which the search engine will identify link buying problems.

Disagreement (hey, cool) Jill’s Whalen suggesting good SEO is simply common sense, Todd Friesen suggesting it’s not. Jill says it’s not about tricking the engines.

Boser: Must compete now, so using paid links to get the clients going is both acceptable and needed.


Widget marketing – ?

SEO Champion question: He’s angry but not clear why – some conflict with Greg Boser over SEO stuff.

Boser: Links are about blending in to your niche. Hotels dominated by aggressive search spam for years – a tough industry. Hard in those space to follow the rules and compete.

Bruce Clay: Doing things that are way out of bounds is much riskier for established sites. You can’t afford to burn your own house so consider these risks.

BMW: Burned themselves buying links for short time. Greg – less consequence for the big players. WordPress also got a hand slap for link abuses. [ yes, but if we use a “user quality” metric we’d expect big players to have fewer consequence rather than severe punishment].

Matt Cutts from Google (audience). We take action on a lot of big sites. Some panel argument with Matt here about how fairly Google applies the rules. Boser: Forbes is spamming – why no action?

Naylor: Legal site in UK. Restoration involved identifying the paid links that a company representative had purchased. Google found them in 4 months and banned the site.

Audience question: What about the user – isn’t their interest the best definition of white vs black hat? Todd may not understand what she means here, he’s noting that outright deception is out. But I think her question is more nuanced and the answer is generally yes. Naylor’s correctly noting that users may not care much if they get site A or site B, and that is often true.

Made for Adsense sites: Boser – it’s crap, and includes a lot of blogging content. [This topic is so complicated – I’m always amazed how everybody thinks that they know crappy from good content. I think you need to ask communities about what they want, and trust their judgement. I think Google is moving in that direction and it’s a good thing.  What if somebody has a fabulous site, better than competition, that is made for adsense?   Where is the line?]  Answer – community judgement.

SES Session Description:

Searcher Track
Black Hat, White Hat: Playing Dirty with SEO
Some say that “black hat” search marketers will do anything to gain a top ranking and others argue that even “white hat” marketers who embrace ethical search engine optimization practices are ultimately trying to game the search ranking system. Are white hats being naive? Are black hats failing to see the long-term picture? This session will include an exploration of the latest black and white issues, with lots of time for dialog and discussion.

Moderator:
Matthew Bailey, President, SiteLogic

Speakers:
Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC

SES San Jose – Lee Siegel Keynote

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Lee Siegel is about to speak here at SES San Jose. He’s the author of “Against the Machine” and a senior editor at The New Republic, and a noted critic of the new media, primarily because he feels anonymity is a threat to intelligent, enlightened conversation.

Although I’m sympathetic to Lee’s points about how abusive the online world can be, and how foolish it is to consider as sacred the hate speech and the junk banter that passes as conversation, he’s missing two key features of the new conversational media that effectively sweep away much of the significance of his legitimate concerns.

First, the high tolerance for abusive and threatening language has become something of a new standard, especially for younger commenters. I don’t like it either, but for many writers this does not reflect the type of threat it would under other circumstances. It is not appropriate to apply old interpretations of this language to the modern usage.

Second is that focusing on the defects of blogging and new media distracts us from the profound and positive changes in communication – changes that represent the early stages of truly democratic and massively participatory conversations.

I don’t think Siegel is so much *wrong* as he is making fairly insignificant points about the new media. I’d certainly agree that there is a danger whenever people are stifled. For me the outrageous online treatment of Kathy Sierra, a noted blogger,is the exception that proves the rule. These cases are very few, and in a broad sense are eclipsed by the thousands of new voices coming online *every day*.

So, is there value in paying attention to these problems? Sure. Should this drive our understanding and appreciation of the most profound transformation in human communication history?

Nope.

SES San Jose 2008 sets attendance record

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SES San Jose is reporting record attendance at this year’s conference.    I’m hoping to track down the numbers which are not listed in the press release, and here at day 1 there don’t seem to be as many folks as last year.  However I think the format changes may have changed the traffic flow such that we’ll see the big numbers tomorrow and Wednesday.

SES offers free admission to exhibits for those who pre-register.  This does not give people access to session content but it’s still an OK introduction to the big show, and perhaps most importantly gets you a ticket to the Google Dance, which many see as the highlight of the year in search and internet marketing.

SES San Jose Blog Coverage

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Although it’s fun to attend conferences like SES you can learn an enormous amount reading the many folks who are live blogging the sessions here in San Jose. If you read this and I haven’t added your blog please do so in the comment section.

Search Engine Watch (official blog for SES)

Top Rank Blog

Yahoo

SEO Roundtable

Shoemoney

Aim Clear – Charlene

SEM News

Tech Macro News

Applied SEO

David Dalka

Natural Search

Google Dance at the GooglePlex. Search Engine Strategies Event

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Google Dance at the GooglePlex

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Last year they had “Candy Bars” where you could fill a bag with all sorts of great candy. I brought one home for my daughter who now dreams of going to a Google party.

The Google Dance has been going on for several years as part of the SES Conference series. Held at the Googleplex the party features a huge buffet, food, wine, and beer stations all over the Google commons. For those who can’t separate work from leisure (which would be most tech folks), there are demonstrations of new technologies from Google and a “meet the engineers” face to face talk that is always very enjoyable.

SES San Jose

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I’ll be covering the big Search Engine Strategy Conference in San Jose – SES San Jose – again this year. SES San Jose is August 18-22 and is always a fire hose of interesting information, though the highlight is often the enormous party at the Googleplex with a buffet dinner and “meet the engineers” session.

This is the world’s top Search Engine Conference started many years ago under the guidance of Danny Sullivan who is now working his own search conference series, SMX.

SES San Jose official website

Google’s Constitutional Amendment: The Right to Rank as you see fit

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Some of the most lively debate and controversy at search conferences surrounds the issue of Google ranking rights.   At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose the most interesting (and confrontational) session involved Michael Gray taking Matt Cutts to task on Google’s aggressive stand on commercially driven linking.    

The stakes of the “right to rank” question may become even higher in the context of a recent Microsoft v Google case, where MS is suggesting in their court brief against the Google Doubleclick merger that the merger will create something like monopoly conditions in the online advertising space because (according to Microsoft’s sources) Google+Doubleclick serve more than half the world’s online advertising.  

Although I don’t think MS is attacking Google ranking methods directly here it’ll be interesting to see if Google claims that since their algorithm does not rank the free “organic” listings on a commercial basis the suit has less merit than it would if they *did* favor sites in the organic listings.   

This would, of course, beg the key point that Google’s ranking power is now so high that it can make or break companies – offline as well as online – depending on how they rank in the organic “free” listings.   This confers on Google an obligation that IMHO they still do not take seriously enough – the obligation to minimize the collateral damage and maximize the correct rankings using, if necessary, more human intervention.     In short I’m saying that until the results are *so good* that only highly subjective opinions are coming into play Google needs to do *more* than is currently done, based on the principle that “with great wealth comes great responsibility”.    Ironically I think Google’s success has to a large extent insulated them from the growing criticism in the webmaster community.   Some of that criticism is self serving, e.g. spammers who are unhappy their tactics now fail, but much of the criticism is coming from users and newly minted webmasters or mom and pops who are frustrated because they can’t seem to get ranked properly for even the most obvious queries.   Google blames the spammers for this, but it’s a dynamic process and more transparency from Google – perhaps with stronger forms of site and webmaster ID for “official” or clearly white hat sites – could go a long way to solving the transparency problems.

Over at Matt Cutts’ blog he makes this point about a recent ASK court case decision in favor of a search engine’s right to rank as they see fit.  This point lies at the heart of the right to rank debate:

 Again, it makes sense that search engines get to decide how to rank/remove content in their own index…

I replied over there:

Matt …hmmm….wouldn’t you agree that this has some clear limits?   What would you call crossing the line on this freedom to rank however you see fit?
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If Google pulled what Yahoo did some time ago and essentially forced sites to pay for inclusion or be excluded would that fall within the sensical realm?  
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MSN is claiming (somewhat ironically and hypocritically, but correctly) that Google’s ad power is becoming close enough to a monopoly that remedies are in order.  Historically there has been trouble when a single company or country controlled more than half a resource – why no problem here?      

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