12 steps one has to take to complete Google Anonymous. by Danny Sullivan:
1) Honesty: Be honest with yourself. Should my site be in the top 10? Is it really better then the other 1 million results found? Are things worse off for the searcher? He was clear to say that Google is having issues but he also was clear in presenting the honesty portion of the step.
2) Faith: Have faith in Google that Google will do what is best for the searcher.
3) Surrender: Forget SEO and go with AdWords. This was a joke of course but he also made his point well heard. His point was to do both paid and organic because of the old saying, �don�t put all your eggs in one basket.� Just like all good firms have a PR and Ad budget, the same should be applied to search engine marketing. And finally, those that pay always have a larger say in what is done.
4) Soul Searching: Start thinking about if search engine marketing as we have it today will continue to be managed the same way.
5) Integrity: Basically, you need the best possible site � you need to be the authoritative resource in your area of expertise to consistently do well in rankings.
6) Acceptance: You need to understand that search results will always change and that there is no guarantee that if you have a top 10 result today that it wont be here tomorrow. You cannot depend on free listings.
7) Humility: skipped over
8) Willingness: skipped over
9) Forgiveness: skipped over
10) Maintenance: You need to constantly maintain to keep your rankings. I used to feel that once you optimize you were basically done but with these recent changes, there is always more work to do.
11) Making Contacts: File the spam reports, file the bad search results, follow up as necessary – they will listen.
12) Services: Well this part upset me. Danny, as he normally does, leaves out the second largest SEO/SEM related forum on the Internet. He brought up the URLs of four forums that have discussion on SEO/SEM including WebmasterWorld, HighRankings, JimWorld, and BestPractices.
Stats:
Google today has about 77% of the market and MSN I believe was 17% (numbers are not a 100% accurate – this is from memory of this morning). The picture for the end of January 2004 after Yahoo! does its merging, Google + AOL 51% and Yahoo + MSN 43%. How big of an impact is that to use SEO/SEMs out there? We need to start looking at MSN and Inktomi (Yahoo!’s new search technology believed to come into play the end of January) and how to best optimize for those engines.
Invisible tabs
What SEOs will need to do is (1) understand the “tab” sources, (2) understand when the “tab” content is more visible to the searcher and (3) understand that specialty services will more likely charge for inclusion – there will be less free listings around in the future. So Danny believes Google will figure this stuff out for you, including local search
Links & Google PR
Marissa Mayer from Google was up first; let me tell you she is a confident woman – gives off the Google persona. “Links are proxies for human judgment of page value”, so the more links and the better quality of those links (I should probably reverse the order of that) determine page value (i.e. PageRank). However, PageRank is not the only factor, if it was Adobe Acrobat Reader would rank number one for the search term water buffalo (she gave a different example). Relevancy = PageRank + Hypertext Analysis (the exact formula and weights remain to be secret). Marissa explained PageRank as a function of important pages linking to that page. The more links and the more relevant those links are the better off you are in terms of PageRank. She also said that you could be downgraded for having certain links. Yes – I know, we all think that is not possible but she said that if you use “bad neighbors” or “free for all” link exchanges, your PageRank will suffer. Avoid getting links from pages that are too general and unrelated to your site as well as the FFAs. Anchor text as we know is important and do not go overboard, place links where your users find them most useful. During the Q&A she said the XML feeds can help and Google does look at the data collected by the Google toolbar for quality purposes and is not included in the ranking algo.
Eric Ward...built links for Amazon 9 years ago, yea that’s right – 9 years ago. Besides getting links from the directories, he said to get links from the Teoma Resources section, which can be found directly under the refine your search results on the bottom right. Deeper the link in your site, the less likely it will be found, the less likely it will be indexed. More information at: http://www.ericward.com/linkanalysis.html.
Teoma
Paul Gardi from Teoma/Ask Jeeves. He explained how Teoma is unique to other search engines, and it impressed me. Teoma is unique in two ways; (1) Subject Specific Popularity and (2) Communities. Teoma analyzes the local subject communities which brings the power of communities in search leading to (1) better vision, (2) expert validation (3) contextualization (4) Experience. How it works is by the “Teoma Approach”, first search the Web index then break the data down into communities (communities can be found in the refine search option on the right of the teoma results – example search on football), third it calculates local subject specific information and finally aggregates all the pertinent information for the searcher. Since Teoma’s goal is to use the power of the “expert editors” of the communities to rank sites, to rank well you need to become an authoritative expert for your area.
posted by Jen @ 9:21 AM
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