“So will you do it for me?”

That’s basically what Matt says in a recent post on ‘hidden’ links. As I read through the post I had so many strong reactions I had to keep setting down the page to allow what I was reading to sink in. How could Matt Cutts really be posting this garbage? The only voice of reason in the comments section, although perhaps in an overly aggressive tone, was that of graywolf—of course he was quickly swarmed by the die hard Matt Cutts groupies.

I like Matt—I’ve mentioned as much in past posts on this blog and I’ve even got my dad subscribed to Matt’s feed. That being said, I couldn’t believe Matt could post something as pretentious and embarrassing as this. His post is virtually equivalent to lamenting “Well, we tried… But here at Google we just can’t figure out how to do what needs to be done algorithmically, so will you guys please do it for us?”

Who are you? Microsoft? Come on, Google, I thought you guys were the best and the brightest. Are you really telling us you’ve been forced to stoop this low in order to provide quality results? Quite a slap in the face to your engineers, if you ask me.

At the outset the post appears reasonable—basically, Matt says you shouldn’t use sneaky CSS/javascript to disguise links to porn sites. Okay, I can understand that. Fair enough. I still think Google should figure it out algorithmically if they want to do things right, but at least I can appreciate the point.

Later, however, it seems that Matt’s anti-spam zeal reaches new and ridiculous heights. Specifically, he goes on to say:

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

Even now I can’t believe this truly is a quote from Matt’s blog.

This “simple litmus test,” in essence and without exaggeration, suggests that Matt believes every webpage on the internet that has a paid advertisement (Matt doesn’t even limit this to text links) including a link to the advertiser’s site (pretty much standard practice), is in violation of “search engines’ quality guidelines.” [Note the apostrophe used in “search engines’ quality guidelines”—what is this Matt, the Google version of the “royal we?”]

Matt, do you really find it appropriate for you to dictate the internet’s ‘linking legislation?’ You overstepped your boundaries here, to such an extent that even ardent Google fans would have to concede that this as an inappropriate use of a border-line monopolistic market position. You’re using Google’s dominance to redefine the internet as you see fit. What’s next? Google-compliant gHTML? You can’t possibly believe that every webmaster in the world should have to read Google’s quality guidelines and carefully redirect or rel=’nofollow’ all paid advertisements that include a link… can you? I hope not.

The bottom line is this: If Google has a problem with paid links, they need to figure out a way to algorithmically detect them, or come up with some other way of ranking sites. Proclaiming stringent “quality guidelines” that essentially ask webmasters to do the work that Google doesn’t want to is a myopic step down a dead end street. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”

It is not “to take advantage of a dominant market position by bullying / forcing webmasters to change their pages (the world’s information) so we don’t have to work as hard.”

I feel that was a little unclear, so I’ll rephrase: Google is supposed to organize the world’s information—not tell the world how that information needs to be presented.

Matt, you should be embarrassed. Or at least edit your post and retract this silly decree. We all make mistakes—I just hope you don’t stick with this one.

PS: Please don’t ban my sites. I swear, my lord, I’ll use nofollow or a robots.txt’d redirect.

  

  

For me, today is one of those days where you wake up and clearly feel that you had wayyy too much fun the night before. I feel like Frank from the movie Old School when he says “I had a great time last night!” and his buddy answers back “We know you had a great time last night. The whole town knows you had a great time last night.”

I have to admit that I do take comfort in one thing: when you start out as the SEO Loser, you can’t really fall too far. Whenever I find myself doing something stupid or embarrassing I laugh and figure “Okay, I’m living up to my title.”

Around 9:30 or so we decided to leave the Hilton bar and grab some food. On the way out we bumped into some other attendees and started talking with them. I wasn’t paying full attention but my ears perked up when I heard a lady say her name: Rae Hoffman. For those who haven’t read my blog in the past, I ripped on Rae pretty badly in my first post. Afterwards I felt guilty about it because I thought I was too harsh and a couple friends/people I respect had contacted me saying Rae was actually really nice–I must have gotten the wrong impression.

Anyway back to the story—I had to tell Rae I was the SEO Loser. I couldn’t resist. But at the same time I knew she would (rightfully) hate me. Luckily I was pretty deep already and any form of timidity was long gone.

It was the kind of awkward situation I’m prone to, but Rae was really cool about it although she was a little heated at first. I’d say more but we agreed the conversation was “off the record” (the first time in my life anyone has ever asked me to have an off the record conversation … I must be moving up). I’ll just end this topic by saying Rae was really nice.

There’s one more incident worth mentioning that happened before we made it to our restaurant. On the way out we met a couple other nice girls attending SES and my friend asked them what company they were from. They pointed at my SES man-purse–specifically to the Findology logo on the side of it. Being a little tipsy and in bad lighting, the yellow O (the first o) didn’t really stand out. So I said in the stupidest way possible, “Find – Low – Gee? You’re company is called find low gee?” It was pretty bad. She called me an idiot and said “What company would name themselves Find Low Gee?!

After grabbing a bite to eat, we felt like we’d pretty much missed the boat in terms of the party scene. Word on the street had it that Pepperjam was hosting a killer party and unfortunately we hadn’t heard about it so we were about to give up on SES-parties and just check out some NYC bars. But first, we decided we’d give the Hilton one last shot.

I’m very glad we did. At the Hilton we bumped into Daron Babbin (aka SEGuru)–a very cool guy I’d actually met before at the Ghost Bar during PubCon. We talked to him, had a few drinks and met some other SESers around the bar before migrating to a bar down the street where a big group of conference goers had congregated. On the way out I saw Neil Patel sitting on the bench. I know what you’re going to say—“do you ever learn?”—but the answer is no, I don’t, so I walked up to Neil and started talking to him. He was a really nice guy as I would have expected based on the tone of his blog that I’ve been subscribed to for several months.

There was a lady sitting next to Neil and somehow it came out that her last name was Schoemaker. Mrs. Shoemoney?! I talked with her for a bit, told her how much I loved her husband, you know—the usual. A few minutes later Shoemoney walked into the hotel.

Now one thing that’s interesting about being an SEO Loser is that you’re never sure if people are going to recognize you or not. I’ve only posted one picture of myself on this blog and it was pretty blurry. Still, sometimes I’ll get a glare or weird look and I’m always wondering if they recognized me from the blog. The same was true when Shoemoney walked in—to be honest I didn’t think he’d recognize me. But he did. “Dude the SEO Loser!!!” he yelled and came up and gave me a hug. That was pretty fun.

We let the Shoemoneys go and headed out to the bar where we bumped into Chris Hooley – now famous for his ability to get SEOs wasted :). I had met Chris at PubCon as well so it was cool to see him again and have a few drinks.

In addition to Chris, there was a whole crew of SEO / SES ‘elite’ at the bar. I talked to Todd “Oilman” Friesen, one of the actual SEO Rockstars along with a bunch of others. Andrea, Shoemoney’s sister, was at the bar as well and it was cool to finally meet her— very nice girl.

Chris Hooley drink baited me into a final shot / beer combination that ultimately did me in. I could feel myself spinning and when I saw the homeless guy making fun of me I knew it was time to go.

I’m sure there’s a lot I’m leaving out but it’s time to start another night so I have to wrap this up. Hope to see some of you out tonight! As always comment on the blog or send an e-mail if you’re at SES and want to meet up and I’ll try to get in touch. Have fun!

  

  

So I have to admit, SES New York has been very fun.  I was disappointed with the first few sessions but more than satisfied with the last.  Then, of course, comes the party scene!  We are at the Hilton still and now it’s 9:10 PM.  Word on the street has it that PepperJam is hosting a very cool party tonight.  Unfortunately, being the loser that I am, even knowing Kris Jones and being halfway in love with the guy, I don’t know where it is.  So we’re hanging out at the bar at the Hilton,  desperately hoping to hear ‘wherrrrr’s the party at.’  So if by some chance you happen to know, we’d love to join you and party here in the big apple.  I’ll be checking the comments regularly (out of desperation) in addition to e-mail, so send me a msg at kris @ seo loser.com or give me a call at 831-359-5555 and we’d love to join the party.  Hope to hear from ya!  Kris

  

  

I received an e-mail about a week ago informing me of an ‘official’ thread at Search Engine Watch with details regarding the SES-related parties. It was remarkably helpful and welcoming for the average attendee—the hospitality and warmth of the post is so overwhelming I decided I’d provide a summary here:

Monday:

• Private Party – Early bird VIP party.

Tuesday:

• Private Party – The name says it all.
• Private Party – Very Important People only. You can’t come.
• Private Party – Highly exclusive.

Wednesday:

• Private Party – Awesome.
• Private Party – Word has it this one is off the hook.
• Private Party – Open bar all night.

Thursday:

• Private Party – Don’t even try to get in.
• Private Party – Only the three (3) coolest people at SES granted entrance.
• Private Party – I’m having dinner with some friends and you can’t come

Seriously—what is the point of posting a public, not to mention “official,” list of private parties? I don’t want to pass judgment too early, but I’ve got to say this list of SEO after-parties is comically reminiscent of the PubCon scene.

If a party is private, why post it on a widely read and publicized list? The only motivation I can see for posting such a list is let others know there are parties they aren’t invited to. And that other, more ‘important’ people will be welcomed. Some people were cool enough to get an invite, and you weren’t—“you’re an SEO Loser! I’m a search engine optimization rock star…”

After all, if it’s a private party, I think it’s safe to assume the guys on the VIP list already know about it.

Because this list is so ridiculous, I’ll try to keep an up-to-date version here consisting only of parties that are actually open to all attendees.

  

  

I just boarded the plane (flying Jet Blue out of Burbank where I was spending Easter) and figured I’d post a quick update.  One little rant—and maybe someone will comment on this and explain—but why the hell don’t domestic airlines offer internet access?!  I know the technology is there as I’ve used it before on international flights.  If a certain airline offered internet access, even at a fee, I don’t think I’m the only one that would go way out of their way to book with that airline as much as possible.  Especially for coast to coast flights—this is six hours in the plane. 

Anyway, I’ll be staying in Brooklyn with an old friend from home who now lives in New York so it sounds like I’ll have a 15-20 minute train ride each morning to get into the city.  I have no experience with New York so just finding my way around will probably lead to some interesting stories. I’ve already seen a couple of Yahoo! backpacks and a PRWeb t-shirt, so I know I’m on the right flight   I’m looking forward to providing some coverage of what I hope will be a great event. 

  

  

I saved yesterday’s Shoemoney show for today, knowing that I’d be in the car for a few hours. Shoe’s guest was Scott Jangro, the founder of BumpZee – a very cool and, in my mind, promising social networking project. The guys discussed a number of topics, mainly news (I wish I’d listened live and called in as I’d loved to have heard this very knowledgeable and successful duo discuss some more ‘precise’ / applicable affiliate strategies), but toward the end of the show they discussed conferences like PubCon, Affiliate Summit, Ad Tech, and SES. Scott’s favorite was, not surprisingly as he’s a long time affiliate marketer, the Affiliate Summit. I agreed with his sentiments in that the atmosphere at the Affiliate Summit was really unique, welcoming and fun.

One of Scott’s comments reminded me of a phenomenon I’d thought of blogging about in the past but apparently forgot, and that is the incredibly “tight lipped, big paranoia fest” (borrowing Scott’s perfect description) that is so prevalent at these shows. Basically, many attendees feel there is an unwritten rule–separating the wise from the ignorant–that you don’t talk about things that make you money. If you do, the idea is that others will copy, compete and ultimately conquer you.

The fact is, however, ’secrets’ that the elite or even the losers can share about how they’re making money online—for example, which programs they use and how they are promoting affiliate offers—are not likely (with a very few exceptions) to hurt or benefit anyone to a significant extent. While talking to a few guys attending the PubCon conference outside my hotel, I remember one of them asking me “so what affiliate programs are you doing well with?” My response was something like “mortgage leads are making me a lot right now” and both of the guys looked at each other with a poorly disguised expression of victory. When I saw their reaction I immediately attained a fairly certain guess of what they were thinking: “Dude, we got him! This idiot must have had a little too much to drink and gave away a secret!”

“DEAR GOD NO! Now they know I make money off a mortgage affiliate program. I’m ruined! And they’re gonna be rich!” Reality check guys–this just isn’t how it works. Go ahead, “bring it!”

If you disagree with me that’s great, because then I can give you one piece of advice that’ll get you a ton of these ’secrets’ and you don’t even have to get anyone drunk: call your affiliate manager and ask him which programs people are making money with. Ask for conversion data, keyword lists, etc. They’ll give you stacks of spreadsheets and other information in a matter of minutes with no questions asked.
Sure, there are a (very) few cases I can think of where a person might have discovered some incredibly easy maneuver that earns big bucks. But for the most part income of that type is short-lived and usually isn’t the part of your portfolio that’s going to make you rich.

In my opinion it’s more ignorant to think you’ve tricked some ‘fool’ into giving away the bank than it is to tell someone about an affiliate program that makes you money. We’ll see how people are at SES, but I’m hoping the ‘paranoia fest’ isn’t quite so pronounced. It’s fun to talk to people about online business, particularly at these shows. But it’s not fun when people naively assume substantive discussion automatically means idiocy.

  

  

I just finished making all the flight and accommodation arrangements for Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York, 2007 so there’s no turning back now—the loser will head to New York in a week.  I fly to New York on the 9^th and back home on the 13^th.  I was thinking of sticking around for the weekend following but figured I’d be pretty partied out by Friday. 

This will be my third conference since starting the SEO Loser blog.  For those who haven’t followed the whole saga, the first event and inspiration for SEO Loser was the Las Vegas PubCon 2006, where I had a number of funny, embarrassing and unexpectedly awkward experiences. 

Affiliate Summit, on the other hand, was much different.  The atmosphere was much more relaxed and welcoming—there weren’t as many plainly visible cliques and exclusive groups.  At the upcoming SES I’m expecting something more like my first experience.  I know this show is attended by nearly all of the SEO elite, including most (if not all) of the characters from PubCon.  I’m definitely looking forward to the show and will post as much coverage as I can live from the event—both on actual search related issues and on the social side.

Anyway, If you want to meet up with an SEO Loser and have a drink or a cup of coffee or maybe even check out some parties, leave me a comment or send me an e-mail at kris [at] seoloser.com.  Either tonight or in the next few days I’ll also post a rundown of the sessions/panels I plan on attending and what my expectations and hopes are.  Hope to meet some other SEO losers out in New York—and maybe even a few Rockstars :). 

  

  

Usually I’m the last one to sign up for new services like MyBlogLog, Digg (okay—Digg’s not so new anymore), etc., so after hearing Shoemoney’s show last week where he and Kris Jones discuss BumpZee I figured I’d try to break my pattern by registering and giving it a whirl.  I just installed the BumpZee plug in for WordPress a few minutes ago so I’m still totally new to the product, but it seems pretty cool to me.

I really like the idea behind BumpZee (if I understand it correctly ;)) which seems to basically categorize blog posts based on ‘community’ (topic, in other words) and then rank them in a Digg-like fashion. 

This is convenient because unless you have an insane amount of time to spend you probably won’t subscribe to the Digg RSS even though it might have some great stuff.  I tried that subscription a while back and found myself wasting hours going through the interesting, but often unimportant posts there.  With BumpZee, however, the posts you ‘subscribe’ to are going to be much more relevant to your niche.  Furthermore, the social media ranking element helps make sure the posts you see are ones that other users, ideally interested in the same topics as you, thought were important. 

We’ll see how this develops and works out but I think it has a lot of potential.  Readers (like Google Reader of Blog Lines) are cool but the problem is bloggers, even the ones I really like, often blog about things I have no interest in or just don’t have time to go through.  Sadly, this has resulted in me unsubscribing from a lot of good blogs that post a high percentage of things I’m just not looking for.  Actually the concept is something I’d thought of doing myself with an old domain I never put into use—SEOforSEOs.com (the stuff on there is an old business idea I never followed through on)—so it’s cool to see someone else had the same idea and appears to have done a great job launching it.

  

Tags: bump, zee,, bumpzee,, scott, jangro,, jangro,, seo,, blogs

  

If I had to identify an area in the online-money-making-world that I believe is grossly neglected yet holds extensive long-term potential I would have to say “forums.”

Why?

First, because forums are so unfairly criticized (I have five and still consider this a big mistake on my part… that number should be far larger). For years I’ve been reading posts and discussions revolving around what type of site someone new (or even old) to the SEO/SEM world should create. About half the time, forums are mentioned as a possibility but are quickly dismissed as unprofitable. “Forums suck! My forum only gets an AdSense CTR of about 0.1%! Meanwhile, my niche, informational sites get a CTR of as high as 35%!” the argument usually goes.

If you’ve never run a forum, this might sound convincing. But it’s not.

Of course the CTR is miniscule. You have guys that spend their entire days on the same site, and they do develop ad blindness. Unlike many search visitors, these regulars are already at the site they want. They typed in the URL. These users load tons of pages and will rarely click any contextual advertisement. The unfortunate mistake, in my opinion, is to think that you should be earning contextual revenue from such users, because they’re already doing you a huge favor. Let’s think about what’s really going on in a forum where a user hangs out all day but never clicks an AdSense advertisement. This user, 99.9% of the time, is posting a lot! My metal forums, for example, have 120,000+ posts and I’ve barely promoted them - the users love to post and they do just that. And what is a forum post? A post, in a very simple sense, is a bunch of words. But, these words are often “expert” and cover a specific (niche) topic. These posts are discussing issues that are on people’s minds, and that they want to know more about. From this perspective, it’s fair to say that such users are creating content for you, for free. The content is often great for SEO (discusses things people search for) and it didn’t require you (the webmaster) to do any keyword research, writing, etc. “Good writing” is expensive. The lowest prices I’ve found for fluent English, and this is certainly dumbed-down borderline spammy English, is $.02 per word. This price, depending on where you look, can be as high as $.25 per word or even more (If you don’t believe me go check out some sites like elance.com). Connecting the dots here shows that although you aren’t assigning the writing to your forum users directly, or placing an order, you are still getting content of monetary value for free every time someone posts. The only costs I can think of at the moment are your bandwidth, the domain, and your time in setting up and/or moderating the forum (although this last ‘cost’ is almost always delegated to volunteers).

In addition to the free content, loyal users will often link to you from their signatures in other places: their blogs, homepages, other forums, whatever. Again, this is something that can easily be translated to monetary terms (e.g. text-link-ads.com).

Finally, creating a forum sits well with your conscience. You’re creating something “good”—not a questionable, perhaps low quality site about a topic you don’t really know a lot about. You’re creating a platform people can use and enjoy to discuss topics they’re interested in. In other words, you’re giving people exactly what they want and in many cases I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say you’re making their lives better.

To borrow a quote from Thank You for Smoking, “the job’s almost done for us!”

Building sites that are useful and that grow on their own—without your constant contribution and oversight—is a formula for success. Once you have the traffic there are lots of ways to monetize it (click here for a podcast where Shoemoney and Lee Dodd discuss the monetization of forums), so don’t let a poorly interpreted low CTR statistic impede your judgment. And it’s not too late, by any means—there’s still room for quite a few more forums :).

PS: Although I’m sure most of my readers are well aware, for completeness I have to strongly recommend vBulletin. You can be up and running in less than an hour, even with no prior experience.

  

Tags: forum,, forums,, seo,, sem,, forum, seo,, forums, seo,, vbulletin,, shoemoney,, lee, dodd,, webmaster, radio

  

After reading Kris Jones’ summary of Neil Patel’s presentation of Social Media sites like Stumble Upon and Digg at the Elite Retreat, I thought I’d share some data on my first experience with the Digg-esque Stumble Upon network that seems to be growing increasingly popular.

While I was at Affiliate Summit West (2007), I noticed one of my main sites got a burst of nearly 1,100 uniques more than usual (in one day). When I went into my analytics, I was surprised to find that this traffic was coming from Stumble Upon. I had never used Stumble Upon myself, but was vaguely acquainted with it because of some discussions on the Digital Point Forums.

Anyway, I have no ads on this site and don’t monetize it in any way at this point, so I can’t share any data on CTR or conversions, but what I have found interesting is the fact that I am still getting traffic from StumbleUpon today, two months after the big burst. It’s nothing major, but on some days it’s about 150 uniques which is pretty cool. Furthermore, I didn’t Stumble Upon my own site nor submit it in any way–it was all natural, which was also very cool (in fact I wasn’t even registered with Stumble Upon when the traffic first came).

In case anyone’s interested, here’s a graph showing my traffic from Stumble Upon alone over the last two months:

Just thought I’d share this experience so others know Stumble Upon might be worthwhile. Of course the cool part isn’t the traffic itself, but the links these visitors have added to their blogs, etc.