You Like SEO More Than you Think
Seth Godin is dubious about SEO. But only when you call it “SEO.” When it’s “linkbait” he’s a big fan. Godin is a very smart guy, so just imagine what typical marketers and companies think.
A prediction: the most successful SEO-driven companies are the ones that can get away with calling themselves something else.
TripAdvisor’s Bare-Knuckles Link-Building
TripAdvisor has been accused of requesting links from hotels in exchange for being linked by TripAdvisor. They’re a big enough company that they can get away with this, too; it would be very hard for Google to detect a meaningful swing in the number of reciprocal links to TripAdvisor, especially since the general pattern among small business sites is to link to big social sites where they’re getting reviewed.
Dealing With Link Decay
SEO Doctor analyzes link decay, which is exactly what it sounds like.
One question for SEOs: which sites are disproportionately likely to face link decay, and which ones aren’t? After all, if link decay is a constant across all sites, it’s not worth worrying about: it affects everyone pretty much equally, though big sites will have to run faster just to stay in place.
One easy trick for figuring out what kinds of sites tend to disappear: use archive.org to look at old front pages for big social bookmarking sites. A quick check on those sites reveals that a huge variety of sites face link decay. Big offenders: non-Internet media sites (they redesign without redirecting) and small blogs with their own hosting (the bloggers lose interest).
If you’re worried about link decay, some of the best links are the ones that are already high-quality: professional organizations, schools, and government institutions. What these groups have in common is that they’re neither going to disappear nor going to bother redoing their sites very often.
Why Yelp Gave Up on Daily Deals
Yelp halfheartedly pulled back on daily deals this week. They shifted some daily deals salespeople around (Yelp already has a sales-heavy organization, so that’s not too difficult). Yipit has the rest of the story: their daily deal revenue cratered last month.
However, it’s unclear whether Yelp pulled back in early August or late August. If late August, then they gave up fast because the numbers dropped precipitously. But if they gave up in early August, the worst numbers are a symptom, and what Yelp walked away from was mediocre, not disastrous.
“Maybe There Really Will Only Be Five Computers…”
John Battelle makes an excessively clever point: Thomas J. Watson’s much mocked quote that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” is increasingly coming true. The demand for dumb terminals hooked up to those five computers might be infinite, but we’re actually reaching the point where someone could start a startup without ever saving anything to a hard drive they controlled. At that point, there’s not a really strong case for owning computers versus devices that can access them—aside from Photoshop and the current generation of first-person shooters, basically everything could move online. And apps are creatures of the hardware they can run on; if gaming machines are so marginalized and specialized that they can’t be mass-produced like other PCs, the PC app business will go in two directions: towards pushing PCs that look like game consoles, and towards pushing games that look like something Zynga would do.
Low Ranking = High Ad Clicks
Chitika has released another in their long line of vaguely contradictory SEO reports. This time, they’ve discovered that low-ranking pages get more ad clicks. There are plenty of reasons that this should be true:
- Low-ranking pages should have lower-quality content. Since the ads are all being served by Google anyway, ad quality won’t vary as much. So in relative terms, the ads will be more popular.
- Low-ranking pages should get more random clicks.
- Low-ranking pages should get clicks from more frustrated users.
The click-through rate multiplied by ad click rate still implies that better rankings increase revenue, but less sharply than it might appear. That, however, ignores the fact that better sites may be able to get better advertisers. The same click rate would give them much higher revenue.
Google’s Confused Subdomain Policy
Google has been using subdomains to segregate different kinds of content—so a site with forums.example.com won’t see a content quality-based penalty applied to phd-dissertations.example.com. They recently endorsed subdomains as a way to deal with content quality questions. So it’s very surprising that they’re now treating subdomain links as internal links. This is only for reporting purposes so far, but Google’s best reason to report information is that they expect people to act on it.
LinkedIn’s Linkbait Campaign Continues
LinkedIn has released a new set of well-formated data. Any social network driven by some particular purpose (e.g. a careers site, a review site, a dating site) can get lots of mileage out of this; not only are users endlessly introspective, but they’re happy to learn how to use the site better. Unlike lots of people who get bad numbers when they study startups: “LinkedIn excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, as well as LLCs.”
Unfortunately, this information looks reliable mostly because it doesn’t say anything new. Want to start a company? Graduate from Stanford or Harvard, work for Yahoo or SGI, and be friends with lots of VCs.
Pricing and PR: Google’s App Engine Snafu
Google has lots of products, but very few monetization strategies. That’s why their standard price points are either “Free,” “Just enough to cover the cost of support,” or “At the optimal profit-maximizing point.” When a product makes the jump, it’s going to be jarring. That’s what happened with App Engine, which recently (and for some readers, massively) raised prices.
App Engine looks like a strategic asset for Google, not the kind of thing they would want to monetize right away. App Engine gives them a peak at lots of successful startups when they’re still in the side-project phase, and builds goodwill among the developers Google needs to hire or acquire anyway. This might be a sign that Google will try to more aggressively acquire full-price, large-scale customers for App Engine. Otherwise, it just doesn’t make sense given how Google makes money and how they maintain their position.
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