15 Jul 09 Automation follow up…

Ok, in my last post, I wrote about how I was looking to automate some aspects of SEO, which led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about how I was falling into a black hat trap.  Of course I disagreed with him, because he was wrong, however on closer consideration, I think that he might possibly have had a point.

There is a lot of criticism about black hat techniques from many people within the SEO community, and with good reason. The traditional definition of black hat is the use of dodgy techniques such as cloaking and low quality link building, or going against the spirit of the search engine guidelines to achieve high rankings.

Bollocks.

Black hat is doing anything that your competitors haven’t thought of, and doing it well.  Some of the things that people like Eli at Blue Hat SEO do simply defy belief when compared to the white hat techniques that are seen day to day on a client campaign.  I’m a big fan of the black hat in the same way as I’m a big fan of Derren Brown.  I love understanding the techniques, but I don’t necessarily practice them.

Anyway, back to the discussion I had.  My colleague maintained that as automation was a big element of many black hat techniques, the automation of an SEO report was also black hat. In a manner of speaking.

I’m still working on the automation, and I certainly don’t accept an accusation that it is unethical - especially with the uses I have in mind.  This is 2009, and there is more to SEO than link building and recommending a small change to the meta tags of a page.  There is a whole social world that underpins the structure of the modern WWW, and the more time one is able to spend leveraging that, the better the results achieved will ultimately be.

Tags: search engine optimisation, seo

03 Jun 09 Why I’m almost Searching with Twitter

Over the past couple of years, a number of companies have launched human edited search engines (Mahalo, Wikia, Google SearchWiki to name but 3), and all of them have pretty much fallen flat on their shiny web 2.0 bottoms.  No real surprise there…

There is no denying that Human Edited Search is important.  By getting the results of the algorithm reviewed by real people, the quality should improve - and although Google don’t explicitly say that their results are massively influenced by the interaction of users, they collect plenty of information including relative CTR by position, bounce rate, and even engagement mapping / conversion tracking where sites have a Google Analytics implementation.

The problem with these various attempts at user edited search results is trust.  How can I trust an editor at Mahalo, or one of the mysterious and anonymous Wikia contributors to provide me with the results I want?  The simple asnwer is I can’t.  I have no idea what their agenda is, or whether their tastes are in any way in line with mine.  I simply don’t know them.

This brings me on to Twitter.  I follow people on twitter who I share interests with, whether those interests are work related (#seo), entertainment related (@jimmycarr), as well as family and friends.  These are people who I rely on to keep me up to date with things that are important to me in some way.  When I asked a question about Family Guy people responded and told me that it would be “this fall”.  They even provided me with links to pages about it, and one helpful chap gave me a link to a torrent file so I could download it - I haven’t.  This all happened in the space of around two minutes - not quite as quick as Google I’ll admit, but pretty good nonetheless.

This is all pretty cool, my twitter “friends” to give me information relatively quickly, and accurately, but the most important factor is that I can trust the information I get.  I wasn’t spammed with irrelevant websites as I would be in some search engines I could mention and I got what I was looking for.

Of course, the key word here is relatively quickly.  In a world where instant access to information is essential, relatively quick simply isn’t good enough.  Sure for now, I’m using Twitter to search because it works for me, but this won’t do for most people.

What I really need is some kind of better search.twitter.com that brings in the best of Wolfram Alpha - the ability to slice information from millions of users up into useful categorised chunks so that instead of just asking my limited number of followers for recommendations, I can instead outsource my questions to the 19 million or so Twitterers and take advantage of all the information that they have provided.

Tags: crowdsourcing, search, twitter

18 May 09 Compare the Results

Well done to the guys at VCCP for putting together the Compare the Meerkat viral campaign.  Its good to see a big brand who are willing to take the plunge into a fairly daring campaign with no guaranteed return on investment in the middle of a recession.  So, full marks for implementation, and full marks for content, however the integration of the Meerkat activity into the main search campaigns has been pretty woeful - and it provides a fairly intersting case study into being a victim of your own success.

Patrick Altoft at Blog Storm has already picked up on part of the story here, the fact that Compare the Market haven’t been clever enough to bid on their own story via PPC, which means that their competitors were nicking a shed load of traffic from CTM on the term “Compare the Meerkat” - they’ve started to bid on this today however, so at least they’re making a start at putting things right, however GoCompare have been there for weeks as the only advertiser:

as I said above though, this campaign has not just been a bit of a fail due to the lack of PPC activity to protect traffic, its also been a victim of its own success, and that is partly due to Google adding Suggest to the .co.uk search page on April 1st.

Essentially, Google Suggest appears to add results to its list based on a freshness algorithm combined with the popularity of terms in the number of searches that they attract.  I’ve done a bit of research into this, and the volume of searches that the ten terms Google offers follows the following profile:

Here, the number one and number 4 results get the most searches - this may be due to the number 4 result being a popular alternative subject.  The upshot is though that Google are providing insight into the ongoing popularity of a particular term and promoting it to users.  When you start typing compare into the search box on the Google home page, you get the following:

So successful has the campaign been that the Meerkat is now the top suggestion offered by Google, which indicates that it is getting more search volume and therefore interest than the brand that spawned it.  Of course, CTM will have got a shed load of natural links from the campaign, and it has undoubtedly pushed them up the Google Rankings for their key term “car insurance”, but it is also hurting them in a way because the main Compare the Market website does not rank in the top 10 results for the “compare the Meerkat” term.

To my mind, this is a hideous missed opportunity, and one that CTM should sort out immediately.  I’d recommend them at least putting some Meerkat related content on their website so that they can get a page into the top 10 for the term, because the way I see it, at the moment they aren’t taking fulll advantage of what is available to them.

Overall, its a lesson in integration - integration of social media into a holistic search strategy, and integration of a particular campaign into the overall brand activity that is being carried out.  There is no point in pushing out the most daring viral campaign in the world and getting huge success from it if you don’t fully exploit the results that you have achieved…

Simples

Tags: compare the Meerkat, Link Bait, seo, Social Media