Ask the SEO Guru

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 20^th 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!