SEO, Popularity And The Way Forward
April 17, 2009
Google’s Eric Schmidt identifies one of Google’s core problems:
…you’ve got somebody who really is very trustworthy, but they’re not as well-known and they compete against people who are better known, and they don’t “in their view” get high enough ranking. We have not come up with a way to algorithmically handle that in a coherent way
The Google algorithm is essentially a popularity contest.
Google doesn’t know what information is worthwhile and what isn’t. It looks at the signals provided by others as to decide what is and isn’t worthwhile. What people deem noteworthy may not be worthwhile, right or truthful, to you, of course.
We see this same problem in SEO punditry.
There is a wealth of SEO information published each and every day. How does anyone know if this information is right or wrong?
Typically, if someone who is well known to the SEO tribe writes an article, and the article sounds authoritative, it will be deemed by the SEO tribe to be “quality”. If you’re unknown, and write the exact same article, it is likely to get buried. SEO punditry has largely become a cult of personality.
Recently, news outlets have been arguing that because they are established news outlets, they provide “quality”. This self-serving circular argument appears to be what Google also believes, because it favors established media in the form of Google News.
But just look at the atrocious journalistic standards that some established news outlets provide:
For April Fool’s Day we posted a video of a fake mission where it appeared that we had lost our judgment and crashed a funeral. We fooled thousands of angry YouTube users into thinking it was real. The biggest fools of all were the CW 11 news team who reported on the funeral as if it actually happened. They didn’t do one bit of research or fact checking, they simply broadcast a YouTube video and reported it as fact
Right now, it’s not about quality. It’s about entrenched power structures and popularity.
On SEOBook.com, we’ve been writing a lot about the intersection between SEO with related fields such as marketing, PR, advertising and business strategy.
This is the way SEO is going. SEO is being integrated into other forms of promotion. Without undertaking such promotion, ranking will be that much harder, especially in crowded niches.
Ranking signals have traditionally been about links, however code tweaking and link begging is fast becoming a marginal activity. Ranking signals in the future will be about attention.
Those who command the most attention, win.
So let tie the concepts we’ve been discussing together into a strategy.
1. Be Popular, Or Appear To Be Popular
- Get in front of an established audience. Offer to write for someone who has authority already, and get a link from that site. Or offer to interview them. Speak at conferences. Post detailed, informative posts to forums. Post detailed, informative posts to other people’s blogs. Find out where your audience hangs out, and get in front of them any way you can. The aim is to generate awareness.
- Once you have signs of credibility and activity make them obvious. Encourage comments and actively respond to them. Have a lot of subscribers? Put a Feedburner widget with subscriber count in your sidebar. Get mentioned in the media? Add a “as seen in” section.
- Build a personal network. Figure out what you can do for people, and give forward. In future, it will be easier to get your stuff noticed if you can call in favors from friends.
- Establish a cult of personality. Have an opinion, and beat it to death. No one likes wishy-washy. Objective doesn’t sell. Subjective views, stated boldy - sell. Make your name synonymous with your brand. It is very difficult to counter a brand build on personality. Ask Incisive Media if Danny Sullivan can ever be replaced.
2. Create A Viral Message So People Spread The Word For You
- Have you given people something to talk about? Give people a message they feel compelled to repeat. If that doesn’t happen, the message is wrong. Rework it until you find an angle worth repeating.
- What incentive do people have to repeat your message? Does it make them look smart? Does it earn them money? Does it increase their status? Does it enable them to help a friend? Does it enrich them?
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How should they talk about you? Should they link to you? Should they write about you? Should they tweet you? Have you made it obvious to people what you want them to do? (By the way, if this post has proved in any way valuable to you, we would be eternally grateful to you for a link. Or a mention. Or a comment
3. Carve Out Your Niche, Focus On Quality And Building Critical Mass
It might not seem like it now, but providing quality information amidst the noise is the holy grail Google, and others, are working towards.
Ultimately, Google, or any knowledge management tool, must return sufficiently high quality information in order to survive as the aggregator of choice. “Sufficient” means “better than the other guy”. Google also piles on the value by giving away quality mail tools, stats tools, and more. In a competitive niche, popularity won’t be enough to sustain position. The popular aggegator that provides the most quality, and the most value, wins.
Quality will be the next layer of differentiation.
- Do the same thing as Google. How can you add value? What can you do that other guy is not doing? What can you give away that the other guy is selling? How can you be better that other guy? Figure out what your audience wants - ask them directly, if need be - and give it to them.
- Pick your niche and own it. Niche too competitive or too broad? Keep slicing it finer (go niche within a niche - e.g. rather than take on travel, become the biggest authority on Fiji) until you find space in which you can compete. If your aim is to make money, be careful to pick a niche that is worth slicing. How do you know if a niche is worth slicing? Look at the value of AdWords bids in that niche and the volume of searches. The Search-based keyword tool is your friend.
- Make sure anyone searching that niche knows your name. Advertise on other sites in that niche. Appear on other sites in that niche. Figure out a way to lock people into what you’re doing. It might be as simple as encouraging them comment on your blog. The aim is to get them to remember you, to interact with you, to internalize your message, then to pass it on.
4. Build Brand
Brand will be so important. What is yours?
If someone mentions your niche, do they mention your site or your name? You must be synonymous with your niche, so that if Google doesn’t rank you number one, people would think Google was deficient for omitting you. This is how BMW can break Google’s rules and get a free pass. To not find BMW would make Google look bad. To not find cool-bmw-owners-discussion-forum.com is of no concern. Can you imagine searching for the term “seo book” and not seeing this site top ten? You’d think Google was deficient.
That’s where your brand needs to be.
Hope we’ve been giving you some food for thought 
Create Something Newsworthy — Branding, Marketing, Links
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How do you get people talking about your company? Create the news. It isn’t easy to create something newsworthy, but with hard work and diligence, anyone can come up with something that will get picked up by the mainstream press or even go viral. …
Do You Track Searcharoundings?
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With advances in targeting, we often have some idea of where people are (geographically speaking), but how much time do we spend thinking about the searcher’s state of mind? Short answer: we don’t. …
The Decision-Making Funnel, Stage 3: Desire, Part 1
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The AIDA conversion funnel governs all Web conversions. We’ve examined Awareness and Interest, so now we’ll take a look at the Desire stage. …
The Best in the Link Building Business: Most Linked-To Domains & Pages on the Web
April 17, 2009
Posted by randfish
I’ve talked in the past about how much value we’ve found from studying the most linked-to content on the web, and tonight, we’ve updated that list again, showing relative rises and falls in link popularity across the web’s most popular sites & pages.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to browse the Top Domains and Top Pages list, make sure you spend a few minutes glancing through it. There are some remarkably interesting trends illustrated - some surprising and many that are intuitive. The sorting is done in order, not of raw link counts, but of linking root domains - a metric that we’ve found incredibly valuable both for identifying broad popularity (vs. sites that simply earn lots of links from a few sites with many pages) as well as filtering spam (it’s easy to get lots of pages linking to you, and even easy to get lots of subdomains linking to you, but getting a diverse set of root domains is considerably harder).
A few that interested me most:
- There was absolutely no change - 0 up or down - in the top most linked-to domains
- Twitter gained another 11 positions, to rank ahead of domains LiveJournal.com and WashingtonPost.com
- Vimeo is having a lot of success on the video platform front - they’re up 28 positions to #175
- A few of the web’s most popular blogs rose considerably - Huffingtonpost.com (+10) andTechCrunch.com (+13)
- Some social media darlings are also experiencing big growth - Ning.com (+16), Yelp.com (+22), Etsy.com (+26)
- Whitehouse.gov was a big winner again, with another 10 position jump (the new web strategy must be earning attention)
- A lot of .edu sites are falling - Ucla.edu (-22), Yale.edu (-27), Nyu.edu (-21), and many others
- Dmoz.org continued to fall (another 10 positions this round), no surprise given its increasing lack of relevance
- Top new entrants on the list include Information.com (#222), Hotlog.ru (#225), Howstuffworks.com (#267) and Webmasterplan.com (#302)
- The sites with the most disparity between Google homepage PR and ranking position include UsaToday.com, Google.co.jp and phpbb.com (all of whom are suffering from TBPR penalties, though they probably haven’t lost much else)
The Biggest Gainers (Root Domains):
- Icann.org (+71)
- Co.cc (+29)
- Vimeo.com (+28)
- Etsy.com (+26)
- Tumblr.com (+23)
- Yelp.com (+22)
- Uspto.gov (+22)
- Histats.com (+21)
- StarTribune.com (+17)
- Ning.com (+16)
The Biggest Gainers (Pages):
- http://vimeo.com/ (+149)
- http://www.facebook.com/home.php (+141)
- http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrp.htm (+103)
- http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm (+103)
- http://joomla.org/ (+74)
- http://www.statcounter.com/free_web_stats.html (+57)
- http://china.alibaba.com/member/myalibaba.htm (+55)
- http://page.china.alibaba.com/html/danai/channel_index.html (+55)
- http://www.siteground.com/ (+52)
- http://www.parallels.com/ (+52)
The Biggest Losers (Root Domains):
- Cancer.org (-96)
- Utah.edu (-84)
- Uci.edu (-67)
- Wustl.edu (-63)
- Usc.edu (-44)
- Ucsd.edu (-44)
- Freehostia.com (-36)
- Duke.edu (-29)
- Bebo.com (-28)
- Yale.edu (-27)
The Biggest Losers (Pages):
- http://www.webnews.de/ (-263)
- http://www.blinklist.com/ (-241)
- http://www.furl.net/ (-182)
- http://www.mister-wong.de/ (-162)
- http://www.cancer.org/ (-62)
- http://www.stumbleupon.com/ (-59)
- http://slashdot.org/ (-34)
- http://digg.com/ (-31)
- http://www.swsoft.com/plesk/ (-30)
- http://www.technorati.com/ (-28)
Finally, I wanted to explore some of the distribution of links from these top domains. This is fascinating:
It’s practically logarithmic - the top domains have so many more links than those further down the list. It’s little surprise that there’s no movement in the top 10, and very limited fluctuation in the top 40. Earning links from tens of thousands of unique domains is extremely hard, but earning hundreds of thousands is a massive undertaking, and one that fewer than 75 domains on the entire web have achieved.
Looking forward to the interesting data you find here, as well!
p.s. This data is all sourced from Linkscape’s latest index, which was released at the end of March.
Blogs and SEO
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My question is: How does Google know that the blog is part of my website if the address isn’t under my website address or hosted by my server?
All-Graphical Home Page
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I realize that Google picks up Alt text data (aka Alt tags), especially if the graphic acts as a link; however, I am a bit puzzled on how Google ranked a particular site.
Embedded YouTube Video Vs. Self-hosting - SEO benefits? Advanced SEO Forum Thread
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HRA Wrap-up 254 - Corie Whalen in the News!
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Stumpedia: Yet Another Human-Powered Search Engine
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Google seems to hold a lock on the search space but many of us still come up empty-handed from time to time when we search. It s enough to keep us looking for a better search engine or at least one that goes about the whole business differently. Stumpedia offers a big difference no bots no spiders no algorithms just users entering links and voting them up or down….
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