Ask the SEO Guru

I was more impressed with the technology of search back in 1996 than I am today.

When I first started playing around with Infoseek, Excite, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Webcrawler,(well, Ok. Webcrawler and Open Text --- not so much), and the other now rotting carcasses of failed search based ad delivery systems, I was blown away.

Millions of pieces of data organized in a somewhat logical framework. Pages were often indexed within minutes. Scalability seemed endless as each day they all grew by hundreds of thousands of documents.

You could cross reference. You could research. You could locate data that could fill the largest libraries on the planet from the comfort of your chair and without having to have a library card or pay late fees. It was amazing.

Granted it was all text based. Period, (and even back then we all knew that would change), and the algorithms were far too elementary. I mean if a guy like me could figure them out ----- weeeelllllll

As for online promotion and search marketing, I actually did fall off a log once when I was a kid and placing on Infoseek for MLM, credit cards and online poker was easier. And took about as long.

One of the first things that bothered me about search engines was the way they forced terrible conversions. Back then the index page reigned supreme and if your meta refresh tags were done properly,(what an oxy-moron), your domain name could pop up in top 10 for literally hundreds of related terms. Shoes.com could place #2 for gold shoelaces when the shoes.com/goldshoelaces.html page was three levels deep.

From a marketers viewpoint, it wasn’t all bad. I mean which is better

1000 hits with a 1% conversion

Or 100 hits with a 10% conversion?

Answer ---WHO CARES!

It wasn’t until 1998/99 that “doorway pages” started coming into fashion. Not because they didn’t make sense before, but because engines were starting to realize that humans had too many choices of where to look for data and if they did not deliver a better perception of relevancy for specific searches, the aforementioned human would simply move on to Excite, or Hot Bot or Northern Lights, (one of the first to actually invest money in an attempt to raise the bar on relevancy).  So they all got better at reading text and comparing it to a text based query and voila! A cloaked, automated doorway page CRAParama was unleashed upon the straining storage resources of all search engines, major and minor alike.

That Was Then and This Is Now

Then came Google and the world changed.

To be perfectly honest, I have always been much more impressed by Google’s marketing prowess than with the quality of their search engine based on page rank. We had noticed Alta Vista was working with link analysis before Google had even started selling ads. What Google did was actually make it work. But even back then with only 50 or so Phd’s, I kind of expected a little more.

So now Google has become the undisputed leader. Fine. And once PR was refined a little and then reverse engineered a lot by the same people who had figured out the text based stuff that came before Page Rank, and then some hick from Oklahoma started marketing links, (boy, did THAT piss off Google!), PR started working for individual interior pages based on a combination of text plus all that democratic nature of the web crap.

MORE CRAPARAMA!

Now it actually became even easier to auto-generate the kind of content we have all come to accept.

{grab a suitcase – we’re going on a side trip}

So to me, I have never been amazed by anything that has happened and called a leap forward within the search engines self promotional press releases, “leaks” or blatant blog posts as I was when I first visited Infoseek some 13 years ago.

Even taking into account all the social media hype, buying, (or rather gobbling), up a lot of tech companies, tracking and analyzing everything you do online, (and off BTW), and delivering personalized, geo targeted, demographically influenced results for every search,(Still only a glimmer in some ad salesman’s eye but coming at a blinding pace), those things are all about improving an AD DELIVERY experience and not a searching and FINDING relevant to a specific query experience.

That actually doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, it is the way it should be except for one little aspect. The proportion of profit to relevancy improvement is getting a little out of whack.

The ad buying, delivering and tracking technology seems to be progressing at an incredible rate. I am as amazed at how fast the ad delivery systems are improving as I was when I first started diddleing  Infoseek.

So, ready to have your gears shpunn?

It’s because of the focus on ad delivery that any engine attempts to improve relevancy. Why? Because you finding answers to your queries is what keeps you from looking somewhere else for the answer and you looking THERE is what offers the opportunity to display ads that they have spent much time, money and energy trying to learn which one YOU are most likely to respond to with a click of your cyber wallet.

What this means to anyone who cares to look is a huge shift in conventional wisdom thinking.

Conventional wisdom has us all trying to build pages that satisfy a search engine’s algorithm to determine relevancy. That is all based around the concept that

#1. Relevancy is all that matters to a search engine when in fact REVENUE is all that matters and that makes the machine an ad delivery system and not a relevancy delivery system

#2. That a search engine takes humans where the search engine tells them is the best place for the human to go.

The truth is:

 HUMANS tell the SEARCH ENGINES where to go

I know that is going to be VERY difficult for some to accept and that is fine. There is nothing wrong with most people trying to satisfy search engines and thinking that you can influence a search machine any easier than you can influence a water pik!

Sure you can twist some screws, add thicker wires to deliver more current, and even replace the head to make it sphinn the opposite way. But at the end of the day, it is still going to squirt water between your teeth because that is what it was built to do. If it doesn't - it's broke!

Search engines are built to deliver revenue generating advertisements to HUMANS and that is why the secret to ultimate domination of organic traffic generating placements is to remember that search engines follow HUMANS and not the other way around.

You may be thinking, so – which came first the chicken or the egg. How do I get organic search traffic if I have to get people searching for me in the first place?

It’s not as hard as you think. Influencing people is actually cheaper, faster and easier than trying to influence search engines. http://www.seobook.com/archives/001819.shtml

I’m close to finishing my next blog post called  “How To Beat the 3 Second Back Button Boogie”. In that article I’ll start showing you ways to get people to force the engines to follow them and it can start with what you do with people when they get to your site. That is one of the easiest ways to start understanding the concept that search engines follow people!

Peach Y’all

The anti-seo seo Guru

I swear daddy I don’t know what happened to your magazines that were under your tool box out in the garage