I was honored this past week when I was asked for an interview by Eric
Enge www.stonetemple.com/blog/.
I did my best to try add value to
Eric’s site and good name as a token of my appreciation and I certainly wouldn’t
want to do anything to steal his thunder. However I realize that his readers
aren’t necessarily my readers and there was one question in particular that I wanted
to make sure and share with my readers.
So I hope I’m not breaking any kind of secret blogger’s code of etiquette
by posting one out of the 10 questions I answered for Eric. If I am I do
apologize.
Question for the Week of May 20th, 2008
You have been doing online traffic
development and link building for a long time guru. How has this evolved
over the years?
Yes, I have been doing it a long
time and I’m grateful.
I don't see traffic generation as having evolved that much since I first
started focusing on driving customers to my stores in the 70's. Of course
technology has offered alternative means to an end, but traffic generation then
and now has always been about:
Getting an idea for, or finding a need or desire for, a product or service.
Doing the research to determine
market size, demand, cost, revenue potential and competition.
Setting an objective and developing
a strategy based on competitive analysis, SWOTs, (strengths, weaknesses,
opportunity and threats), and available capital.
Execute the strategy and watch the
numbers.
Link building is a horse of a different color.
Back in the late part of the 20th century, links
were strictly, only, exclusively for directing traffic to places you thought
your visitors would think was cool. Everybody linked out all the time with no
ulterior motive other than helping people find stuff the webmaster thought was
cool. Of course one reason people linked out so freely is because search
engines pretty much sucked and was a long way from being scalable. Links were
the dominate web and not search engines.
That's not to say there was no link
spam. Anyone else old enough to remember guest books? I can even remember a
time when a basic website offering had to include a questbook script as the 5
or 6 prerequisite pages.
As those started going up, here came
the viagra ads. Oh wait, there was no such thing as viagra back then. Men with
ED were left to rely on the miracles of penis pumps and attaching bungee cords
with weights on one end to their minuscule members. So I've heard.
But the point is, there was no
shortage of guestbook posts telling visitors about urls for home loans, backup
software, web hosting, etc, etc, etc. Your garden variety pre-viagra, pre-page
rank link spam.
Even so, these drive-by fruitings
still had only to do with stealing direct traffic and had nothing to do with
trying to influence any search engine.
Those type of links, (or any other
links for that matter), had no effect on search engines because no search
engine at the time was using anything other than on-site algorithms to
determine relevancy and placement. It was wonderful in a never going to cut it
kind of way.
With all the majors at the time,
Infoseek, Excite, Alta Vista, Lycos, Hot Bot, Web Crawler, and the like, it
took little more than 45 minutes and a meta refresh tag to secure top 10
placements. A blind, deaf monkey with one arm could do it. Did I mention it was
wonderful?
Well, we all knew this couldn't last
forever. Especially the search engines and me.
Then in the early days of the 21st
century, (after we all realized that the world would not end due to Y2K), I
began noticing some strange things happening with the top search engine du
jour, Alta Vista. Contrary to popular misconception, Google was not the first
to incorporate links into the algorithm, they were just much better at setting
up hardware to handle load balancing, (and of course public relations), than
CMGI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista.
But it was obvious that everyone had
accepted on site optimization alone was not an indication of quality or
relevance controllable with automated programs and that inbound links was going
to be the next step in the search for a scalable solution.
Then came Google and the toolbar and
their exceptional promotional skills. All of a sudden direct traffic became a
secondary consideration behind Google SERP placement. Then came the SearchKing
vs Google thing and the paid link industry was born. The following day Google's
war on the paid links industry was born.
Then we went through the "a PR
7 beat a PR 6". That ship has sailed.
Then we went through the "if 1
link is good, then 3 million must be better, blog, comment spamming" era.
That ship is still visible on the horizon, but it is fading fast. Good
riddance!
Then we come to "trust
rank". PR is just about as useful as a third handlebar on a Harley
nowadays and a link that makes sense, sitting on a pr 1 will move a target site
faster than a PR 7 page as a list of 300 "resources" <
extreme sarcastic tone implied by italics<
Now we are seeing a new wind
beginning to blow and I believe it will be the next step in the evolution of
the search for the perfect algorithm. Personalization.
I believe we are seeing the
acceptance, (not the same thing as admission), of the fact that using links to
determine relevance and placement is better than on site alone but it is far
from flaw free. Bottom line, it doesn't work.
Now I believe the future is in tracking
who you are, what you think and how you act in response to online experiences to
determine trust in YOU in regards to a specific topic or even query is going to
replace PR as the determining factor for who goes on top for what search query.
Personality management I believe is
going to start getting big fast. If you ever get the chance, speak to John Andrews, http://www.johnon.com and Fantomaster, http://www.fantomaster.com about this topic. They'll REALLY spin your gears.
This shift in search engines accepting the
limitations of page rank, coupled with blended, personalized results, will have a huge impact
on the evolution of not only SEO but of online marketing in general over the
next 5 years or so.
But I
could be wrong.
Peace Y’all
G
If you don’t
quit pickin at that thang it’s NEVER gonna heal!