Can we talk SEO? In one SEO lexicon?

by Michael Martinez on March 9, 2010

In A Modest Proposal For SEO Standards I suggest that search engine optimization specialists (firms and consultants) include an SEO lexicon on their Websites.

There are many SEO glossaries around the Web already, but they rarely agree on their terminology. This lack of agreement has created a bizarre and humiliatingly divergent conversation between SEOs, their clients, the search engines, the academic community, and the media.

In short, none of us is talking the same language as anyone else. This failure to communicate reveals itself in numerous online publications both within and without the SEO community. For example, a recent academic paper titled The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Search Rankings pretty much butchers the jargon of the SEO world.

Here is the surprising thing about that paper. One of its authors, Ron Berman, worked for a venture capital firm that specialized in tech industries and Web startups. He is no stranger to the Internet, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The paper’s co-author, Zsolt Katona, has a strong technical and science background but no apparent Web marketing experience.

Neither author seems to have any experience with search engine optimization and their paper — which proposes a method built upon Game Theory for evaluating the value of search engine optimization to Publishers, Searchers, and Indexers — reveals their naivete.

Their theory reaches some right conclusions albeit in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. That is, their axioms are flawed because they are based in an inappropriate mythology.

We all have mythologies — we use mythologies to explain our environment to ourselves and to each other. Every SEO specialist in the world has constructed an SEO mythology that is at best only poorly and partially articulated to others.

It is precisely because of this almost inaudible articulation from the SEO industry that no one else seems able to get it right. The academic community has seriously missed the mark in every attempt to document what search engine optimization is and how or why it is employed (that I have read — and all I can say in defense of my criticism is that I have read many dozens of academic papers that attempt to discuss search engine optimization).

I don’t blame students like Ron Berman for not knowing how to define common expressions like “white hat” and “black hat”. The Berman-Katona paper seems to view “white hat” SEO as dealing with on-page factors and “black hat” SEO as dealing with off-page factors. They also use the words “link” and “links” to refer to listings in search results.

The theoretical concepts they propose seek to measure the economic benefit of search engine optimization. The problem with their work is that it is not relevant to actual search engine optimization. There is far more going on in the paper than a mere misuse of terminology. It creates a symbolic world in which search engine optimization is distinguished from the creation of content, an idea that stands outside reality.

Although you can create unoptimized (even unoptimizable) content, you cannot optimize without content. On-page optimization, off-page optimization — it all has to revolve around promoting some form of content (even if it consists of nothing more than a domain name or non-existent document name) toward the top of search results.

SEO does not exist outside of or in spite of content. SEO is all about the content, just as search is all about the content. Neither search nor search engine optimization have any use or function without or in spite of content.

This lack of comprehension of what is actually happening in search among academics is a serious problem for the SEO industry because their papers, books, and presentations all go into the academic continuum where they will be ingested and digested by future marketers, decision-makers, search engineers, and journalists.

In 5-10 years we will be dealing with a large number of outsiders who think they have an idea of what search engine optimization is all about, when in fact they are only relating to a fantasy application that cannot function on the real Web or in the constantly evolving marketplace.

It’s not enough, really, that everyone publish a Website about their SEO expertise and services which includes an SEO glossary. We MUST acknowledge that other glossaries exist and ideally we should seek to come together on some kind of consensus.

Even here at Visible Technologies (which has almost 100 employees) I hear people casually drop SEO terminology into conversations that makes absolutely no sense. I can’t train everyone and I cannot prevent them from finding loosely jargonized expressions on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and Web forums.

The problem exceeds epidemic proportions in that it has not only clouded communications within our industry, it has divided them into multiple conversations that essentially talk past each other.

People in the SEO industry assume they are speaking to an informed audience but we are not. We are largely speaking to an UNinformed audience — and that’s just when we speak to each other. We all have our own ideas of what constitute link farms, blog farms, link circles, good content, site structure, Web spam, and more.

This lack of congruence in how we describe our activities, the activities of other people in the field, and everyone else exacerbates itself by an order of magnitude each year because we are continually developing new ideas, testing new expressions. Our conceptualization rolls out new buzz terms faster than any one person can document them.

What’s worse, we have no way of coordinating the discussion. Attempts to document the SEO jargon through social resources like Wikipedia have proven to be only partially effective and in some cases absolutely disastrous.

You can get a quick idea of how bad the problem has become by browsing the AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval) site. Their various papers look at Web spam from a search engineer’s perspective. The papers (and many others like them that you can find through Google’s Scholar search) often use terms that either don’t enjoy much frequency in the SEO field or which are often used in other ways.

We have ourselves to blame, of course, but the academics seem to do a very poor job of searching out the best quality resources. Their ideas are insular and barely resemble what is actually happening on the Web.

Web spam itself is a curious notion. The name implies that any spammy process entails excessive repetition, but while some Web spam may rely on repetition, other Web spam may rely on deception.

Although I don’t think many people would agree in detail on what constitutes white hat or black hat search optimization, it seems to me that black hat SEO is universally deemed to be unethical and usually entails deception and/or excessive replication (of links and/or content).

White hat SEO is really very difficult to nail down. Some people say it seeks to comply with all search engine guidelines. But what about practices that search engines neither endorse nor oppose? Are these to be relegated to so-called “grey hat” SEO?

If we ourselves cannot draw clear distinctions between the Good, the Bad, and the Sort-of-Good-but-may-be-Bad then how can we expect anyone else (especially people in academia, Web search, or the media) to get it right?

There is no right or wrong when it comes to how you talk about search engine optimization. That’s just wrong, and you know I’m right.

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Essentials of Off Site SEO

by Michael Martinez on February 26, 2010

“Essentials of Off Site SEO” is an article I could have written, except I did not write it — I only wrote the original article on which “Essentials of Off Site SEO” was patterned.

It appears that a company in India, offering SEO services, has rewritten one or more SEO Theory articles and distributed them through services like Article Depot, embedding links back to their Web site (DimensioniSEO.com).

I won’t say bad things about that company. After all, if they are reading SEO Theory and following the principles I teach, I should feel flattered, correct?

And, technically, there is no copyright violation if you simply rewrite an article in your own words.

But there are other intellectual property issues which, perhaps, have not yet found a presence in either domestic (U.S.) or international law. For example, who owns the genesis of a concept? History teaches us that Alexander Graham Bell “invented” the telephone — but in a footnote you’ll occasionally stumble across Elisha Gray, who is mentioned as the man who failed to get his patent application for the telephone into the office before Bell.

That is, the idea of telephonic communication did not necessarily originate with Bell. We don’t need to revisit all that history to understand that there have been incidents in the past when people “co-invented” or discovered ideas. George Harrison claimed he had never heard the song “He’s So Fine”, but a court ruled he had violated copyright anyway by incorporating its melody into “My Sweet Lord” (personally, I never felt the two songs sounded that much alike — but I digress).

The presentation of a discovery or theoretical concept as one’s own work is considered unethical at best and fraudulent at worst. Some scientists have lost their standing, sacrificed their careers, by failing to disclose sources for their work. It’s okay to incorporate other people’s ideas into your own research, but to rewrite a serious theoretical concept and not disclose where you got that concept from — that’s a serious breach of ethics.

It gives your field a bad name. It implies that people cannot trust you or your colleagues to be honest. Honesty and integrity may be perceived in different ways based on cultures and value systems but somehow I feel that if a leading scientist in India were to claim to be the author of one of Steven Hawking’s papers, the Indian science community would disown that person (or, in the worst-case scenario, the community would become divided over what might seem like a plausibly alleged claim).

I’m not Steven Hawking but I think it’s safe to say that I am well enough known in the SEO community that few people in our industry would mistake one of the theorems or formulas I’ve put forth for the work of some unknown entity halfway around the world.

Not that everyone has heard of me, but if you search on “SEO Theory” you’ll find this blog listed first in the major search engines (despite numerous attempts to dislodge it). It’s not my machinations that have ensured this blog’s dominance in that query but the recognition it has been awarded from around the world (literally).

So while it might seem clever to lift an article from SEO Theory and rewrite it as Essentials of Off Site SEO without advising your readers where you got your inspiration from, you’re still taking a big risk of being detected.

That particular article (whose right name was “Fundamental Principles of Off Site SEO”) proposes a number of principles such as the Principle of Search Engagement and the Principle of Message Engagement. These are not terms that have caught on within the SEO community. Most SEO technicians couldn’t care less if someone has made a conjecture about how or why things work — they just want to know how to deliver good search referral traffic.

I’m not the only guy to coin a principle in SEO. Mike Grehan, so far as I know, explained the Filthy Linking Rich Principle. There are probably hundreds of principles that have been articulated either formally or informally in various search marketing blogs and newsletters. People do try to lay out their ideas in some sort of structured process.

But those terms were, so far as I know, first used here on SEO Theory. I don’t think it’s asking too much for an SEO firm to give credit where credit is due when adopting the theses put forth by other people. I have tried to do that much here and elsewhere when I have referred to other people’s ideas.

Here’s another fundamental principle of off-site SEO for people to think about: The Principle of Not Getting Caught. Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything better at the time I coined that term.

I doubt many people will search on “essentials of off site SEO”. Maybe after reading this article a few people will check out the query. Maybe not.

Hopefully, somewhere down the line this article will appear in the search results for essentials of off site SEO (although, technically, it is the original article “Fundamental Principles of Off Site SEO” that deserves to be there). In fact, I’ve updated the original article to include the appropriate language.

But I cannot do that every time someone decides to steal my thunder. Nor can you do it every time someone decides to steal your thunder.

I have to admit that I gave serious consideration this week to writing an article proposing some standards for the SEO community. It’s a good thing I decided not to because it would not have occurred to me to include giving credit where credit is due. But I think that would be a good one.

If you want to reuse other people’s ideas, do that. We all learn from each other. But don’t fool yourself into believing you can fool everyone else into thinking you came up with the ideas. I seriously doubt the author of the rewritten article could explain SEO theory as well as I can.

Long-time readers of this blog may (or may not) remember my story about how I wrote a computer program to read paper tape in the 1980s. Because of the tension between client and vendors over that project I graciously invited another programmer to take credit for my work.

The next day he found himself sitting in a room full of people with broken code on his hands. Boy did we both get into trouble over that deal!

You know, I learned my lesson that day. If you’re going to break the rules or cross the lines, you need to take responsibility for what you do. Many people on the Internet have not yet learned the value of that wisdom. More importantly, if you’re going to use an idea that you did not develop yourself, you should give credit where credit is due.

Call that the Principle of Not Getting Caught.

And by the way, it really IS one of the fundamental principles of off site SEO. Think about that.

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Good-bye Yahoo! Search

by Michael Martinez on February 18, 2010

News organizations around the world are reporting that both the European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice have approved the Microsoft-Yahoo! search-advertising deal.

That will most likely prove to be the undoing of the Yahoo! search brand. History teaches us that when search brands lose their uniqueness people abandon them quickly.

Yahoo!’s worst business decision ever was to install Carol Bartz as CEO. Since she took the helm of the troubled search company, she has closed down or sold off many of Yahoo!’s non-search assets. The clear signal here is that Yahoo! leadership has no intention of being involved in search except as a secondary player like AOL or other “content providers” that add someone else’s search index and algorithms as an after-thought.

Sure, AOL adjusts the Google search results and actually does a better job of filtering mature content from those results than Google, but the fact of the matter is that AOL just doesn’t appeal to the general market as a search engine. According to some media reports, most of AOL’s search users come from its dying ISP business customer base.

Previous attempts by former search brands to become “content portals” have failed miserably. Previous companies that sacrificed their search brands for other priorities lost search users quickly.

Search engine market share is still wrongly measured by the obsolete metric of PageViews (number of queries performed). This metric has absolutely nothing to do with how much search traffic the search engines are sending to other Websites. The inflated PageView counts that are attributed to Google are not reflected in all measures of search referral traffic. Some sites actually report more referral traffic from Google than the PageView-based metrics suggest, and some sites report less referral traffic from Google.

But the false justification that Microsoft offered for this deal in the first place — that competition will somehow be increased by eliminating a competitor from the field — is the most disturbing part of this arrangement. Anyone who has participated in a pay-per-click advertising network knows intuitively that when you drive more advertisers into fewer networks the bidding wars drive the price of traffic acquisition up.

The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice are saying that increasing the cost of acquisition for small businesses will be good for them. Someone needs to explain that to me. I really just don’t get it.

You see, the only way an advertiser benefits from advertising is if the advertising drives sales. Putting brand-related advertising aside, anyone who is trying to generate sales through PPC search needs to sell enough inventory or services to make a profit. When you increase the cost of traffic acquisition for a business of any size that business MUST pass on the cost to its customers.

Hence, ultimately it is the consumer who will pay for the increased competition between advertisers.

As advertisers will now have 1 less choice in search advertising to work into their strategies, they will go with the lesser of two expenses. If they were dealing with manufacturers economic theory suggests that the manufacturer with the higher costs would be compelled to find new ways to lower its own costs and thus become more competitive. The only way an auction system becomes competitive, however, is to drive down the price of the bidding. Google and Microhoo can do that in only one way: lose advertisers.

The advertising market will equalize itself in the way possible: it will disburse the money that is planned for advertising across fewer high-cost resources and look for new, low-cost resources. Those new, low-cost resources are more likely going to come from social media than from search, whose advertising paradigms have been mired in stone for years. Don’t look for Microsoft to innovate in the search advertising technology — Microsoft has almost never innovated anything in its existence.

Consumers lose out in another way: they are losing a search algorithm that provides them with a unique point of view. One of the reasons why Google gets so many queries is that people increasingly have trouble finding the content they are looking for on Google. That is not the only reason for the growth in Google’s PageView counts, but it is an important one. When searchers cannot find what they are looking for they dig deeper into query results or, more often, they either change their query or change their search engine. All three (now two) major search engines share most of their searchers between each other.

As people realize they are seeing Bing results on Yahoo!, they’ll naturally gravitate toward Bing search. That is what happened with most of the users who once frequented Altavista, a search engine that Yahoo! now owns. There is virtually no brand value left in Altavista, except as a memory of what once was.

Last July when Microsoft and Yahoo! announced this insane deal I filed a Clayton Act Complaint with the U.S. DOJ. Not being a European citizen I found no recourse for complaining to the E.U. regulators. When the DOJ people interviewed me they asked some pretty blunt questions. Nonetheless, I sensed the skepticism in their voices at times. At one point in the conversation they asked, “What if your peers in your industry disagree with you?”

“They may indeed,” I conceded. I wasn’t pretending to speak for anyone but myself. At the end of the conversation they asked me to provide them with names of other people in the industry whom I thought would be good to talk with. I finally gave the DOJ contact information for four people. I don’t know how many SEOs they finally talked with. I don’t know how many SEOs agreed with the proposed arrangement.

I only found out afterward (like everyone else) how Todd Friesen felt about the deal. His position is very close to my own. His exasperation seemed very much like my own, as well.

The DOJ people are very smart, very professional — and yet, they just don’t get it. The odds of Yahoo! coming out of this deal with anything other than a revenue disaster on its hands are extremely low. Soon Carol Bartz will have nothing left to sell. She won’t be able to disguise Yahoo!’s dwindling revenue base with income from asset sales. The yard sale is about over, in my opinion, and the house may be looking might clean to some people but it looks very empty to me.

With fewer assets to leverage visitors into using Yahoo! search, Yahoo! has weakened itself in the search marketplace. You can see some indication of this in the dwindling PageView counts that third-party metrics services estimate for Yahoo!. Now, it’s possible those guys are wrong. Unlike me, the DOJ and EU had the authority to ask Yahoo! and Microsoft to report their real visitor traffic and search referral activity. Maybe they did ask for that data. Maybe they were satisfied that the trends reported by third-party agencies were inaccurate.

All I know is that I increasingly see signs that Bing is going to surpass Yahoo! in PageViews. At the end of the day, Yahoo! won’t generate as much revenue from search advertising as it would have had it taken measures to hold on to those PageViews.

Of course, any SEO who tries to measure success for a client on the basis of PageViews is running behind the times. The bar we’re expected to match is conversions — at least if you talk with most of the leading voices in our field, that seems to be the consensus. And it’s a consensus I agree with.

A few people like Danny Sullivan continue to support the obsolete metric of using PageViews to measure market share for reasons that, frankly, I find incomprehensible. But the diversity of opinion in our industry may be one of the reasons why the DOJ investigators concluded that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal won’t hurt consumers.

I am sure they received many complaints concerning the proposed deal. In fact, I read about some of those complaints in the news media — who promptly forgot about those stories and have been writing as if everyone wanted the deal to go through.

To my knowledge, the closest anyone in the search-related industries came to supporting the deal was a joint letter by four major advertising agencies, including WPP (which is an investor in Visible Technologies). The joint letter argued that this deal would be good for business and consumers.

Sir Martin Sorrell, I respectfully suggest your letter neglected to mention that those WPP properties that manage PPC accounts for clients can expect to see increased revenues from the higher cost of acquisition. Visible Technologies, I am happy to say, exited the PPC campaign management business some time ago. But in case anyone has any doubts, I am only expressing my own opinion and I do not speak for Visible Technologies or any of its investors on this matter. So far as I am aware, Visible Technologies as a company has not formed or express an opinion on the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

In the words of my boss, whenever there is any change in the search market, I should just “deal with it”. And I will deal with it. As Yahoo! continues to become less important to searchers it will become less important to my clients. Que sera sera.

What irks me is that it didn’t have to be. But one could philosophically argue that the failure of Yahoo! as a search brand became inevitable the day Carl Icahn decided to destroy Jerry Yang’s power and influence at the company. Icahn’s greed ultimately cost him and his investors millions of dollars because he doesn’t understand that Yahoo! built its brand on search. Bartz’s ill-founded selloffs of non-search assets are rooted in her lack of understanding about how search brands need visibility just like other brands.

Many bad choices and decisions have gone into the debacle that will ultimately render Yahoo! a small Internet content provider competing with many larger content providers. Yahoo! has been publishing content for years but that hasn’t been the brand value that Yahoo! presented to consumers. Even though consumers read Yahoo! news stories and shop in Yahoo! stores and discuss their favorite topics in Yahoo! groups, everyone but Yahoo! has been going along thinking that Yahoo! was in the search business.

I’m done with Yahoo!. I’ll monitor their search results as long as clients want me to but as a user of search I’m not going to invest any more effort in using their services.

I’ll just get my search referrals from Bing. That’s what I do with AOL/Google. I have no personal need or desire to optimize for AOL as Google sends me many, many times more traffic than AOL.

If a client asks me to optimize for Yahoo!, I’ll do it. But I have the freedom to say to them, “Why? What’s the point?” Believe me, I’ll be saying that a lot in the years to come. Now you might as well optimize for Altavista. It will become about as effective.

Good-bye, Yahoo! Search. You were good while you believed in yourself.

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