WebConnoisseur

To better explain Wired magazine’s reference to mike siwek lawyer mi searches, I created this experimental blog post. Wired’s excellent article on Google’s algorithm links off to the search phrase: “mike siwek lawyer mi”, which sends you off to Google’s search results page for that query.

The mike siwek search phrase was used as an example of how Google is superior to Bing. Here’s what wired wrote:

The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.

The ironic part is that everyone who is reading the article gets a Google search page that is in no way superior to the Bing because the results have been flooded with coverage of the newly popular search.

Take a look at the current Top 10 Results for a “mike siwek lawyer mi” Google search:

• Mike Siwek Lawyer Mi – What’s Hot (a result from Alexa.com hot urls)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates … (a blog post)
• Mike Siwek, Lawyer from Michigan, shows how Google dominates (tweet meme for the blog post)
• Siwek, Michael E. Attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan MI (a crumby US Lawyers DB listing)
• Mike Siwek Lawyer MI – Google Search Theory Torn Apart (another blog post)
• Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine (the actual Wired Article this post is about)
• google | Tumblr (a tumblr page that links to the Wired article)
• High-Tech PR Blog >> Beyond the Hype: How Google works (a PR company blog post summary of the Wired article)
• New Michigan law mandates safer cigarettes, but smokers complain (a newspaper article that quotes the Mike Siwek, the actual Michigan lawyer this whole query is about, but no way to contact Mike)
• How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | B12 Solipsism (another blog post)

Of course, this isn’t fair to Google as the results when Steven Levy was writing the article were probably completely different. However, you would expect Mike Siwek’s site to show up shortly past the media mentions. Not so. Mike’s official law practice site didn’t show up until result 110 on page 11 of Google’s search results–a place where few searchers would dare take the time to navigate to and if they did find it, the listing description doesn’t even mention Mike Siwek, so it probably wouldn’t get clicked on:

The fact that this listing is so buried leads me to believe the search engine result that Google’s engineers were so proud of was result 4 that I list above, which is simply an address database site that is borderline spam and riddled with Google ads.

I count 28 different Google adsense ad listings if you include the next ads arrow tabbing, or 11 without the tabbing. No wonder Bing didn’t want to list this page! The only thing that is slightly impressive about this search is that Google thought to replace Mike Siwek with Michael Siwek.

I don’t mean to beat up on Google too much. I could certainly come up with many examples where Google’s algorithm is superior to Bing, but as an SEO consultant who is paid to constantly monitor the ugly flaws of search engine algorithms, I find this example of “Google’s algorithmic dominance” humorous & worry about the simple mindedness of Google’s top engineers when it comes to evaluating improvements in their algorithm.

Something recently reminded me of an event early in my web marketing and SEO career. For me, it was a very pivotal moment of my career; for you, it might be an entertaining story of a consulting douche bag and how SEO battles don’t change much.

Roll back the clock to a little over a decade ago when cell phones were bricks generally seen only in movies and Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999″ was forward-looking. I graduated from the University of Washington with a couple finance-related degrees and began working for, surprise, a financial company. After quickly proving that my abilities went beyond filling out paperwork for clients and managing portfolios, I spent my time on “special projects”, which included things like investing research, Y2K compliance, & building our web presence.

I quickly discovered the importance of search engines and was quite successful at driving leads & press to the site & company. In 2001, I had increased their assets by over $50 million, was named “Best of the Web” by Forbes three times, and was even selected by Inc Magazine as the best marketer of the year using techniques that have changed little to this day (but now have names). How was this success rewarded? They brought in a consultant.

My boss’s friend was unemployed after his start-up went belly up. I won’t name him, but will describe him. He looked very much like the Comic Guy on the Simpsons – he was large, sported a red goatee, and a greased back pony tail. His previous occupation was as a conservative radio talk show host (seriously – I’m not kidding) and as you can imagine, he was a talker. He loved buzz words, though a true understanding of them was of little importance. And now he was a consultant.

Things seemed a little backwards. If you looked at our resume’s & track records at the time, you would have guessed I was consulting for him. Considering it was my boss’s friend and upper management was wowed by the fancy words and whiteboard drawing, who was I to question the new relationship?

To this day, I can’t recall a single person I couldn’t work with–other then this guy. He was a bully and I was his young prey. His big idea was to change our various sites to a single flash site. When I warned him that search engines have trouble with Flash, his response was that “no one uses search engines to find websites.” Apparently countless web analytics reports showing all our traffic sources wasn’t enough for him, nor was an export of our client referral source records, nor the daily stories of new clients who found us via a specific search query. Facts meant little to this talk show host, unless the facts or half-truths supported his cause. After much back and forth, it was clear that it was his way or the highway.

I decided to take a very large risk (especially considering this was during the dot-com crash & a troubling time for the stock market) – I crafted an email to the President and Vice-president of the company explaining that the direction we were heading in was going to hurt us and that I was ready to leave the company if they continued to use his “services.” Clearly my boss would want to fire me for going over his head and making him look bad, but it was a risk I had to take to restore my sanity and keep the company from driving directly into the brick wall in which it was undoubtedly headed.

The story does have a happy ending. They did get rid of him and I used the existing sites to raise another $200 million (doubling the 20-year old company’s assets) before I left a couple years later to take my boss’s job at a larger company. The irony is that I am now a full-time consultant and he became an anti-consultant evangelist.

From that point on in my career, I decided I would never stay silent when I saw the company I worked for start to take a wrong turn, even if it meant losing my job because I wouldn’t want to work for a company that ignored evidence and experience anyways.

Pubcon is always a great conference and tends to attract more practitioners then some of the other major search conferences, which is something I highly value. I’ll be speaking at Pubcon next week on UGC SEO (optimizing user-generated content to drive large volumes of natural search traffic). Surprisingly, this is my first time speaking at Pubcon and I’ll get to do it with the conference founder, Brett Tabke on the final day of presentations.

Besides the conference sessions, there’s tons of great parties. This year I plan to attend DK’s Poker Tourney and the SEOMoz 3rd Annual Search Spam/Werewolf party (went to the first, but missed it last year).

The Poker Tourney isn’t a charity event this year, but the intentions are still the same. This year Purpose Inc has asked that attendees post one of their favorite charities to a blog post. I’ve decided to mention Kiva, which is a non-profit that enables you to lend money to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries to allow them to get themselves out of poverty. You get to choose who you lend to by reading their profiles and what the money will go towards, then they pay you back so you can lend to another in need.

Hoe to see you in Vegas!

Twitter search seems fairly basic, which often leads to people using 3rd party Twitter tools for searching. Most people don’t realize it, but Twitter some handy search command abilities:

Basic Twitter Search Commands (no surprises here):

• Multi-word queries: if you search multiple words, Twitter’s default search will search tweets containing both (or all words).
  Example: big doggy would find tweets that contain both “big” and “doggy”, but not necessarily the words paired together.
• Exact match queries: if you use quotes, you can limit tweet searches to exact matches.
  Example: “big doggy” would find tweets that contain the exact phrase “big doggy”.
• OR queries: if you are looking for two related or interchangable words, OR queries work well.
  Example: dog OR doggy would find tweets that contain either words.
• Hash Tag queries: Hash tags used to be one of the only methods of putting a stamp on your tweet to help those searching in Twitter, but they not as critical these days as Twitter search has improved. Regardless, people still use hash tags (#), especially when attending events or joining in on a meme
  Example: #ff would find tweets that contain #ff (which stands for Follow Friday).
• At queries: when referencing someone on Twitter, you use @ (at reply), so it makes sense you can search for people doing so.
  Example: @webconnoisseur would find tweets reference me.
• Question queries: target tweets that ask a question.
  Example: web designer ? would most likely find tweets of people looking for web designers.

Advanced Twitter Search Commands:

• Combining queries: You can combine queries to really nail down what you are looking for.
  Example: “seattle startup” OR “seattle start-up” OR “@seattle20″ combines the simple search commands listed above and would be an excellent way to find tweets related to startups in Seattle.
• From and To queries: You can actually target tweets that are specifically sent to or from someone.
  Example: “from:GregBoser” “to:Graywolf” would show me tweets Greg Boser sent to Michael Gray. If you perform a query like this, Twitter will also include a link that will allow you to see the entire conversation, if there is one.
• Exclude queries: You can specify words you don’t want to see in your query.
  Example: hello -kitty would show me hello tweets, but exclude tweets that are reffering to hello kitty or someone saying hello to their kitty on twitter (trust me, you want to stay away from these people).
• Location queries: You can actually limit tweets by location.
  Example: beer near:Seattle within:15mi would show me beer tweets written within 15 miles of Seattle
  
  Note: it isn’t entirely accurate as it appears to go off the location the person has listed in their profile, which isn’t always where they are at the time.
• Date-based queries: You can actually limit tweets by date, both before (use “since:”) or after (use “until:”).
  Example: techcrunch since:2009-09-12 until:2009-09-13 would show me tweets about TechCrunch over the weekend on September 12th or 13th
• Attitudinal queries: Some Twitter users incorporate happy or sad faces into their tweets. You can search these to find attitudes about topics.
  Example: cloudy with a chance of meatballs :) would show me people who were happy to go see or enjoyed the movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
• Source queries: probably one of the least useful queries unless you want to research a 3rd party tool’s adoption, you can do query searches by tweet software source.
  Example: LOL source:tweetdeck would show me LOL tweets that came from someone using tweedeck.
• Link filtered queries: a great way to track down referenced links, this query will limit Twitter searches to tweets that contain links.
  Example: mashable filter:links would show me people’s tweets linking to Mashable articles.
• Jumping forward in older searches if you are hunting for something via Twitter search and want to save yourself from clicking “older” over and over, you can change the page number (after your first older click) in the Twitter URL to jump forward.
  Example: http://search.twitter.com/search?max_id=3984008800&page=2&q=fight&rpp=20 is the result I get after searching fight in search.twitter.com and clicking on older once. To jump further back in time and skip a bunch of tweets, I can go up to the browser URL box and change the page=2 portion to page=35 to jump straight to page 35.

Hope you find these Twitter search commands useful. If you know of others, or would like to share your example uses, please leave a comment.

After attending SMX Advanced (or listening in), then reading Matt’s post about no-following, many SEOs, both beginning and advanced, are running around like chicken’s with their heads cut off, scrambling to decide what to do.

The more we pin Matt down on no-follow, the more confusing things become. If you were to read Matt’s post and overreact, you might remove all your no-follows including on blog comments, turning your site into an over-crawled (spiders visiting areas they shouldn’t) and over-spammed site (users dropping tons of links in comments).

Or, if you are a bit more savvy, you might start blocking comments on your blog, iframing your footer links site-wide, or dissallowing linking on all UGC.

The key with any exposed change is to wait until the dust settles and SEOs test & share their results. If you have been using no-follows appropriately, you shouldn’t have much reason to change them now. Matt says these changes have been in place for a year, but I know for some borderline abusers of pagerank sculpting, the more noticable changes took place the past couple months.

External linking is where the greatest mistakes will be made. I would recommend against assuming Matt’s advice to stop using no-follow applies to external links as he appears to be speaking mostly about internal linking practices. I’ve asked him to clarify his stance on external linking because there are a lot of reasons why Google would prefer to heed your external no-follow instructions.

What should you do? For now, I recommend sitting tight.

If you are on Facebook and haven’t had the pleasure of reading a 25 Random Things About Me note about one of your friends yet, you are missing out. Normally not a fan of chain letters or tagging memes, I will admit the 25 Things activity on Facebook is fascinating.

History of Facebook 25 Things Notes
Facebook notes were launched on August 22, 2006, but didn’t receive heavy usage until 2009 thanks to a new viral phenomenon that started off as “25 Random Things About Me.” Memes using notes on Facebook are nothing new, entire websites have been put together to catalog and inspire various memes-most as lame as the emails that have been going around for over a decade.

The Velocity of 25 Things
The earliest entries I can find via various search tools for 25 Things is mid-January. I really saw it taking off in my personal network starting in February. Using Google trends, I compared 25 Things searches to searches for an older site people might be familiar with: 43 Things.

As you can tell from the chart, 25 things searches increased rapidly, easily overshadowing 43 Things despite the fact that users won’t find Facebook notes entries doing this search, nor will they find definitive information about the origins of it.

How to Find 25 Things Notes
If you do want to find all your friends 25 things postings, I suggest you follow these steps:

1. Login to Facebook and make sure you are on the main page (click Home if you are not sure).
2. Click the drop down arrow for more feeds (blue arrow next to live feed button)
3. Choose notes.
4. Scroll down and you will likely see activity around 25 Things postings.
5. Click show more posts at the very bottom if you want to look for more postings.

Facebook 25 Things Learnings
There are things we can all learn from Facebook’s 25 Things success:

• Patience is important in business. Facebook could have easily scrapped notes long ago due to low activity.
• Never underestimate user-generated content.
• Viral successes are often luck
• Providing a platform where UGC viral successes can happen is important

I noticed a lot of people commenting on how Facebook didn’t make sense to them until they started reading other people’s 25 Things posts – this simple meme has created an amazing amount of value for Facebook and their traffic reflects it:

I wrote a guest post over and IndieGoGo, a cool fund raising and awareness tool for filmmakers, on the topic of using SEO (and SEM) to attract an audience for your film.

Here’s a teaser:

Making a film is a big enough challenge in itself, but if you are like most low-budget independent filmmakers, you’ll quickly discover that finding an audience for your film can be even more challenging.

Outside of widely known marketing methods like submitting to festivals, inviting people to special screenings, and attempting to make friends on social networks, most filmmakers fail in allowing their audience find them on their own.

Read the rest of the post: Build Your Film’s Audience Using Search Engines

Caught this today when performing a search for other engines while on Yahoo. First time I’ve seen an engine attempt to keep their users from jumping to another engine, which is very common practice as indicated by my Actual Top 10 Search Terms of 2006 post.

I was performing a search for MSN search (or “Live”) in Yahoo because I didn’t have it in my Firefox search dropdown.

Here’s what I saw:

I wasn’t paying very close attention and started typing in my search into the Yahoo shortcut search box shown above. Notice it says: “You could go to MSN. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

I can’t recall seeing this before, so I decided to see if they were doing the same thing to Google (which has got to be one of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo):

Again, notice it says: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

Seems strange to have a Yahoo shortcut for something you were already immersed in. What do you think about this? Is it right? Would Yahoo be pissed if Microsoft or Google did the same?

Finally some solid evidence showing how long the long tail of search really is! Having worked for some big high-traffic sites, I was always discouraged with the underestimation of the true length of the long tail in other public reports. Finally I did my own research and it was published on the Hitwise blog:

Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search

Here’s a sneak peak:

“After great dissatisfaction with the existing research, which I felt vastly understated the true size of the long tail, I decided to do my own research…There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Understanding the long tail and how to target it from an SEO standpoint is no simple task. I hope this article sheds some light on how important long tail traffic is.

In my experience, I’ve ranked for head terms and I’ve ranked for millions of tail terms. I’d gladly trade in the head terms for a larger piece of the tail. A few companies have learned this, including the search engines, but they’d prefer you don’t know how much of a gold mine it really is.

Being a small company in-house SEO for the past decade has made getting to conferences difficult for me, but I’ve managed to attend a lot of search conferences and still find them very valuable (not so much the sessions themselves, but the out of session/networking conversations). Here’s what I’ve got on schedule for the remainder of the year:

August: SES San Jose
This must be my 4th or 5th SES San Jose in a year. I’ve been there as an attendee, a speaker, and now will attend as press. I look forward to covering the event, but will only be attending Sunday night through Wednesday night. Hope to see you there.

October: MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Arizona

Never been to a MarketingProfs event and never been to Arizona. Looking forward to this event. You’ll find me speaking on link building tactics.

November: PubCon
Hoping to attend PubCon this year – it will be my 3rd in a row if I do attend. I’ve covered the event as press, as an attendee and hope to attend as a speaker this year (though it appears many of the speaking spots have already been assigned).

Hope to see you at one of these events! Also, let me know if there are any others I should consider attending.