Yesterday was a huge day on the Internets especially for those of us in search. Early in the morning Danny Sullivan published an article in which Google engineers stated that Bing was cheating and copying their search results. Most of the article seems to be fairly compelling and on the surface it makes Bing look bad. That is unless you know even just a little bit about how search engines work. Google framed it so the average person, who knows next to nothing about search engines, would believe that Bing is simply copying their results and putting them in Bing. This is a brilliant PR move especially when you release the results of your “test” on the day that Bing has their Search Summit. It’s brilliant when it comes to the PR, for the general public, but dishonest, childish, and downright lame to those who know a little about how search engines work. Hell, anyone who understands the scientific method knows that this “experiment” was faulty from the beginning. I’m sure Google expected to be celebrated for discovering what Bing was doing and that happened in some cases but much of the response was how childish and disingenuous Google was being. Most of the search industry felt the same way, Google was wrong and their test was joke.

Why The Test Was Faulty and Disingenuous

Almost immediately the Search Engine Land article was being shared and discussed. At first people were railing against Bing but when digging into the tide turned. See Google attempted to misinform the public about the true nature of the results. You see, Bing did not copy Google results. They simply used Bing toolbar data as a signal in their ranking algorithm. Google is well aware of this because they are doing the same exact thing with their toolbar data. It’s probably a fairly small element but Google set the test up in a way that would make the signal much more important. This made the test totally faulty and purposefully dishonest. Google engineers knew exactly what they were doing so they could reach the conclusion they already had in mind. So what they did is manually altered their results so that certain pages ranked for nonsense keywords that had little to no coverage in Google or Bing. They then went home and searched for these words in Google via the Bing toolbar in IE where they encountered the results they placed their manually. When they clicked on those results data was sent to Bing signaling that these pages might be relevant for the nonsense searches. They also “conveniently” used fairly strong domains in the fake test to ensure that other ranking signals were passed which also helped these pages rank. So in the end Bing did not copy results but used the fraudulent clickstream data passed through the Bing toolbar along with the other strong ranking signals passed by the pages in question to rank those pages. This is actually fairly smart and I would be totally shocked if Google was not doing the same thing. The funny thing is that Google really didn’t promote the fact that these so called copied results only happened in around 7-9% of their tests.

Industry Insiders Respond to the Google Lies

Bing responded to this fairly quickly, through their blog. As the day wore on more and more search people responded to Google and the overwhelming response was that Google was childish and totally dishonest. Brett Tabke was an entertaining Twitter read as were Michael Gray and others. Matt Cutts continued to offer his best Baghdad Bob impression while holding the water for Google’s latest PR offensive. In the end most who are familiar with the search industry felt that Google was dishonest in their methodology and simply doing this to cut down Bing while employing the same methods themselves. It was an interesting day and it will be fun to see how this plays out in the coming days but it has really lowered my respect for Google. They look whiny, childish, and completely dishonest. And with that I will leave you with some Twitter fun that was had in response to this “controversy”.

Google Whining

More Google Whining

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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Everyone is aware that the Internet has changed the way that people consume content. In the past the fastest news sources were radio and TV while the in depth analysis and reporting was left up to newspapers who obviously had limitations on how quickly they could disseminate their content. The Internet has turned the news and content distribution model upside down. Internet users expect news to be delivered in near real time and they have a proliferation of sources they can access for that content. We are no longer forced to depend on our local newspaper or news station for the latest news or content and that means that they are competing with a wider group of content producers for eyeballs and ultimately advertising dollars. This has obviously created financial difficulties for a wide range of traditional content producers and many traditional news publishers are dying. Instead of trying to develop creative solutions many of these publishers have taken to suing Google and other silly efforts to try to regain their monopolistic status. Some of the newer publishers are utilizing the tools and services available to drive more visitors to their sites. One interesting method is the manipulation of Google Trends which is being employed the Alex Jones network of sites.

Manipulating Google Trends is Fairly Simple

Google Hot Search Manipulation

Basically Alex Jones is asking his readers and listeners to go to Google en masse and search for a specific keyword phrase. What this does pushes the search phrase to the top of the Google hot searches list which in turn increases demand as other people conduct their own searches on the phrase after seeing it show up as a hot search. According to his bio at Infowars.com, Alex Jones is an “Internationally recognized veteran broadcaster, documentary filmmaker, and investigative journalist”. According to others he is nothing more than a conspiracy theorist. I’m not going to get into an argument about who or what Alex Jones is because I just don’t have the time to do so. Instead I want to look at the efficacy of the use of Google Trends manipulation by his team at Prison Planet and other sites. If you take a look at this search you can see the number of attempts that have been made to influence the hot searches feature at Google Trends. Here are some specific examples of stories that have been pushed to the top of Google Trends Hot Searches, there is even a Google is Evil hot search. The idea is incredibly simple in that it is nothing more than asking fans and advocates to go to Google and search for a specific keyword phrase. Since Alex Jones has multiple websites, a radio show, and a TV show he is able to send his message through a variety of sources and get thousands of users to search for the specific keyword phrase. This forces the phrase to the top of the Google Trends Hot Searches which then draws more visitors to the content after they see the phrase at the top of Google Trends. Pretty simple but is it beneficial?

What is the Impact of This Manipulation?

Without the ability to view the analytics or ad revenue it’s hard to say what the impact is. I have to believe that there is a positive benefit from this effort though. It really is low cost and low effort on the part of Alex and his teams since his fans and followers are doing all of the work. It’s actually a fairly ingenious way to utilize multiple media outlets including traditional media, publisher websites, and social media. Instead of siloing each medium he is utilizing the power of his network and then leveraging his rabid fan base to do all of the work. The traffic will probably drive some ad revenue to the sites he owns but I have to believe the real goal is to drive additional subscriptions to his sites, the radio show, his TV show, and also to sell more of his DVDs. I’m sure a good portion of people who visit his sites after seeing at the top of hot searches are interested in the type of content he is developing and therefore more likely to pay for more access to his content. I could be totally wrong but he is not dumb and if it didn’t benefit him in some way I’m sure he would try something else. The fact that he continues to use this method leads me to believe it is bringing in some additional revenue.

This is the type of thing that will help content producers survive in the current conditions. It’s not enough to rely on advertiser $$$. Ads can serve as supplemental revenue but it will take more than that to remain competitive. By utilizing a variety of media and the power of the crowd to drive visibility and new users to extremely niche content (that many acolytes will gladly pay an additional fee to access) Alex is able to do what many of the big publishers have so far been unable to do. Instead of hanging on to their old business models these publishers and content producers could learn a lot from the low cost and low effort method being used here to increase revenue. Again, I could be totally wrong and I’m really not sure that manipulating Google Trends is having a huge impact on the revenue he is bring in but it’s a unique approach to getting more visibility by using both traditional and new media and social outreach.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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My latest post about Google Instant their desire to control your thoughts and how you search is up at Searchviews.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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So I started a new site up a few weeks ago that is focused on Twitter and specifically Twitter advertising. When Twitter announced Promoted Tweets and their version of Quality Score, Resonance Score, I grabbed Myresonancescore.com and started to blog. I also set up a Twitter account, Facebook page, and a FriendFeed profile. I actively engaged these social profiles and began creating content. I figured that Google, Yahoo, and Bing would be fairly close in terms of indexing speed. Boy was I wrong.

Google was fast and Yahoo trailed behind

I was indexed in Google that night. I built the site, Tweeted about it and it ended up getting crawled and indexed. No surprise, Google is fast and obviously uses signals from Social Media for discovery. It didn’t take long for Google to begin ranking the site for relevant keywords. Google was crawling and indexing regularly now. Yahoo was slower. It took about a week or so before they started reporting the sites linking to My Resonance Space and actually started showing the links in Site Explorer before they reported indexed pages. After around a week and a half to two weeks Yahoo had more or less indexed the site and all of the pages. I am still not seeing much traffic from Yahoo but the site is indexed

WTF Bing

Bing is another story. It has been more than three weeks and Bing still has not indexed the site. When I conduct a site: search it has nothing.

Bing Still has not indexed the site

Bing has to know about the site because they are showing some of the social media profiles and other references to the site on the web.

Bing sees the sites pointing to My Resonance Space

So Bing knows about it and sees the sites referencing and linking to it but still does not show it in their index. Bing took the lead in real time search and really seems like they are trying to compete with Google in the search space. I’ll even admit I love their commercials and would really like to see Bing bring some real competition to Google. Maybe the integration with Yahoo will help them get a little better. The problem is that Yahoo is still much slower than Google and Bing is obviously light years behind Yahoo and Google when it comes to crawling and indexing speed. Users want information right away, they don’t want to wait. That’s why Bing and Google are both diving into Real Time search but Google offers a much fresher and useful traditional search engine index. Bing will never compete unless they get their shit together and get content indexed at least within the same month as Google. A week or even 2 is somewhat acceptable but almost a month is not going to cut it. Bing better fix it soon or their massive marketing push will be a huge waste of money.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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No matter how many times it happens the supposed linkbait masters always take the anti-SEO linkbait and provide the response desired. We are like Pavlov’s dogs. Any time someone, whether it is no name douchebag or a clueless tech writer, talks smack about SEO we feel the need to respond and give them the links and exposure they are seeking. I understand the desire to defend our profession but there are better ways to do it than whipping up 100′s of blog posts and spreading the negative articles across the social medias. Instead of reacting appropriately we always take the bait, which is why we are targeted over and over.

SEOs are Easy Targets

Most people in or around the SEO industry have blogs and the anti-SEO baiters know this and exploit it for links and exposure. The most recent high profile SEO baiting was Scoble’s post. So many in the SEO community were immediately in a tizzy over it and the blog posts countering it began. That lead to Scoble’s post going viral along with the reactive posts. Because SEOs reacted as expected 1,000s more people saw the original post than ever would have if it was either ignored or if the commentary was limited to his blog. Instead we helped spread the post across the Internets and sent a bunch of link love his way. Hell, the master SEO linkbaiter Shoemoney gave him props for his baiting. I can almost excuse the Scoble reaction because he has a large audience and reaches a lot of people but we respond that way whether it is a big name or someone just starting out. The only people benefitting are those who are casting the bait.

Quit Taking the Bait

If someone wants to get a bunch of links and exposure in a hurry they know that firing up the SEO world is an easy way to do it. Simply throw together a blog post discussing how SEOs are ruining the shining beacon that is the Internet. Throw out some outdated and useless techniques that most SEOs never used and you are sure to get the reaction (and links) you are looking for. Even though it occurs on a fairly regular basis SEOs seem to relish in respnding to it every single time. There is a huge uproar and lots of discussion with a shitload of traffic being sent to the anti-SEO blog post. After a while it calms down until the next SEOs are teh suck linkbait is unleashed and we do it all over again. Let’s stop it now. By all means leave reasoned responses to the author of the article or post but stop sending it across every social media platform and writing countless response posts about it. This will allow for a reasonable discussion without sending an avalanche of traffic and links to the baiters site.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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“Don’t be Evil”. It is fairly well known that Don’t be evil is Google’s informal corporate motto. It looks great and gives everyone that sees it a warm and fuzzy feeling that this huge corporation that essentially tracks everything you do online is like a friendly neighbor. Google still has a pretty good reputation as far as corporations go. Unlike Microsoft, the general public still seems to trust Google and truly believe that they are a force for good in the world. Those who have had direct experience with the Google borg, like online marketers, SEOs, AdSense, publishers, etc. have a much different view of Google than do most people. In my experience Google is no different than every other for profit corporation. They are neither good nor evil but they are solely focused on increasing their revenue and profits. That’s why they went to China and agreed to censor search results. They saw the opportunity that was available in China and felt that the free speech wasn’t as important as that extra money that the China market could add to their bottom line.

Intellectual Property Trumps Free Speech

Google happily censored their results and cashed those checks from China until they found out that their IP was compromised. Apparently the Gmail accounts of prominent Chinese human rights proponents were hacked and in the process some of Google’s IP was accessed as well. All of the sudden Google was vehemently against censoring their results in China and they became huge proponents of free speech. Blogs and news sites all across the Internet celebrated Google’s righteousness and spoke glowingly about their defense of free speech across the world. Chinese citizens even jumped on the bandwagon and began laying flowers at the Google China offices like one would do at a funeral. Lost in the celebration of Google’s refusal to censor results was the fact that they had no problem doing it until their intellectual property was compromised. It was only then that they became the “don’t be evil” defender of free speech and civil rights. I don’t hate Google, although I feel they have too much power and control, but I have a hard time heaping praise on an entity that profits from censorship and defends free speech only when they have been harmed.

Google not evil but they are not free speech heroes either

Google is just another monopoly for profit corporation. They are focused on improving their bottom line. If censoring the results in China or anywhere else adds to that they will gladly do it. Just like many other organizations they are beholden to their stockholders and they need to continue to grow and increase revenue. Google may imply that they are different but the fact is that they saw a huge opportunity in China and willingly compromised their results in order to increase their profitability. It wasn’t until their IP was compromised that they became “free speech” activists and “martyrs”. I have a feeling that many other “evil” corporations would do the same thing. So in the end Google gets to come out looking like they care about the rights of the Chinese people but the fact is they are just upset because their rights had been violated and they didn’t like it. Now maybe they know how we all feel sometimes?

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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So I got an awesome spam email this morning which read as follows.

Intriguing to the naive and terminally clueless

I have seen millions of things like this and usually pass them around to my colleagues and associates. So as we were commenting about it in the Google Waves my colleague Heman Patel found the confirmation URL that is sent after you purchase the e-book. We simply added an email address and a name and promptly received the e-book. We are currently looking at it and it seems to be mostly made up of useless crap with a few basic recommendations sprinkled throughout. All of which you can get for free pretty easily with just a few searches. That being said, if you are going to set yourself up as an expert at search marketing maybe you should not leave such a huge back door wide open.

So what did we find?

We did a little crawling (like a robots)  around and found something interesting. When we grabbed an interesting URL, which was very easy to find even if it was not in the Googles and ended up on this page. Simple enough.

We then just added an email address and a username to confirm. Once we were confirmed as paying users we were provided with the link to download the e-book.

Again, the book contained some useful, if basic, information and a lot of bad information. I could critique that but I am more interested in critiquing the spammy nature of the email and laugh at the fact that a “make money online” scam was so easy to game.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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I have a new post over at Searchviews about the new agreements between Twitter and Bing and Google. The partnerships are interesting and have potential to provide interesting and timely results if they are able to eliminate the real time spam. Read the post, Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose? at Searchviews.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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Matt Cutts recent video on why pages disallowed by Robots.txt still appear in Google’s index is the latest display of Google’s arrogance. When you break it down he is saying that Google doesn’t care what you tell them, they are going to do what they want with your site. To get them to follow your Robots.txt directives you will have to jump through some additional hoops.

Rationalizing with Technicalities

I know that he is technically correct in that Robots.txt only tells crawlers what not to crawl and Google is not actually crawling the blocked pages. Matt explains that they are not actually “crawling” the blocked pages but instead are simply indexing them without actually seeing them. This brings up another issue related to search quality but I digress. The problem is that most webmasters place pages in their Robots.txt because they don’t want them crawled or indexed. By indexing blocked pages Google is violating the webmaster’s trust and intentions for the site. Google can essentially destroy a business for violating its guidelines but they have no issues violating the guidelines set by webmasters on how robots interact with their site.

Adhering to Google’s Whims

Obviously if you want Google traffic you have to play the game. Some may be willing to go the cat and mouse blackhat route while most will simply try to follow Google’s ever changing rules and whims. That also means that you have to watch out for Google deciding to ignore how you want your site to be accessed. So if you have your Robots.txt set to block certain pages make sure you add the Robots Meta Tag and set it to Noindex so Google does not violate your wishes by indexing blocked pages. Who knows how long they will actually follow the Robots Meta Tag directives but they claim to do it now. That could change tomorrow or even be patently false right now as Mr. Cutts has been known to say one thing when the reality is completely different. And always remember, Google knows better than you and if you just do what they tell you to do everything will be OK.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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So for some reason I have been suspended from Twitter. It happened last week and I have no clue what I was suspended. I am not a bot (although Twitter seems to love bots, maybe not being is a bot is why I was suspended?), I do not pull the follow-unfollow game (although that seems to be a viable strategy as those people/bots seem to thrive), and I don’t seem to do anything that violates their vague TOS. I simply use Twitter to engage with followers and people I am following and share interesting content. I guess that is not what Twitter wants.

Time to start anew with a more Twitter compliant profile

Apparently being an engaged Twitterer who shares content with friends and followers is not what the Twitter gods want. Obviously I’m not a celebrity so I can’t become the type of Twitterer that the powers that be most want which is obviously the mundane day to day details of B-list celebrities. Since I can’t do that I need to find another Twitter approved persona. I suppose I could go with the Google Alerts spraying route and just use Twitter Feed to pollute the Twitter stream with press releases and the other garbage that shows up in Google Alerts. That would take time to sign up for thousands of Google Alerts and I don’t want that. After all that would require some effort and Twitter doesn’t seem to like anyone who puts any sort of time or effort into their Tweets. I could always go with Sponsored Tweet route and annoy all of my followers with useless schills for products and services that I never use but pay me a pittance for whoring myself out. Naahh, that would be really fucking weak. What to do?

Time for a bot?

Apparently a bot is the way to go. In fact, instead of just creating a single bot I will create 1,000′s of bots on 1,000′s of different topics and just go crazy. After all, Twitter seems to love bots and if one somehow gets suspended (not likely) I still have an army out there doing my dirty work. And I can always create new bots to infiltrate the Twittersphere.

Or Twitter could stop suspending engaged users

There has been a spate of Twitter suspensions recently. A number of engaged and interesting Twitter users have been suspended for seemingly no reason, myself included. All the while the bots, schills, and b-tarded celebrities pollute Twitter with their nonsense. Apparently it seems that this is what Twitter wants so if I want to get back into the good graces I have to become one of the chosen ones. Unless Twitter makes a change and allows engaged and meaningful Twitter users to thrive instead of the pollution they seem to love I will be forced to create a mass network of bots to remain a part of the community. Or I could just quit…  Nahh  I don’t want to do that.

Update: Jill Whalen just informed that I may have been suspended because I linked to a Google scam site. I linked to the site in an attempt to expose them for being complete asshole scammers but it may have tripped a filter for linking to a scam. I have updated my support request ticket at Twitter and will report the details when I hear back.

Update 2: This update is a lot late in coming but my Twitter account was reinstated when after I explained to the Twitter Gods that I inadvertently tripped the scam filter. Be careful with your links on Twitter because it appears they have a quick trigger on these things, which is probably not a bad idea all things considered.

©2013 piloSEO. All Rights Reserved.

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