Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Service

2009 New Year Fireworks

Today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced in a an open letter to businesses and marketers throughout the world - Google paid inclusion program.

The new system will allow advertisers to include their website within search results by paying Google. Quoting:

“We were in discussions with our board for quite some time and have come to a conclusion - it is time to take our search engine to the new level. The potential this program brings lies in value both to the stakeholders, advertisers and everyday search engine users, as relevant companies can serve their offerings to the search queries”

This should not come as a surprise at all. Google’s been shaking up it’s business model lately and have announced the transfer of an engineer(Matt Cutts) to a head new Google owned search engine optimization company – Performics.

The program

A Google insider who stayed anonymous told New York Times that program will be very similar to Google Adwords and will feature bid system. Advertisers will bid on search engine spots from 1 – 30, however, Google will enforce a new minimum bid which is as follows:

Pricing also depends on industry(only 5 spots revelaed):

#1 $50.000 – $100.000.000

#2 $45.000 – $50.000.000

#3 $30.000 – $45.000.000

#4 $25.000 – $40.000.000

#5 $20.000 – $35.000.000

In a question what determines minimum bid, insider stated that Google run a detailed industry analysis and determined different prices that market will bear and that is fair to the potential ROI.

He also mentioned the potential of pay per natural click(PPNC) in the future, however the board wants to observe the success of the program.

The Impact on Your Business

The move by Google largely destroyed search engine optimization business, since it is no longer a game of algorithms, but how much money you can spend on search engines. Smaller names will be slowly faded out of the online realm as corporate forces with unlimited credit accounts will dominate top rankings. If your business currently relies on search engines – it is time to look for a new way to make a living. If you are thinking about Yahoo or MSN, note that Yahoo! Was finally acquired by Microsoft today, which will most likely follow Google’s model.

All companies are invited to bid for any keywords with exception of: “Aprils Fools Day” and “April 1st”.

Microsoft announced it’s going open source with some it’s products.

“Affected product lines include Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.” - quote

In large the largest competitor to Microsoft, apart from Google is open source. Not one rival, but a community of organized developers have created software just as good as Microsoft’s at no charge to consumers or with ability to modify whatever they deem appropriate. Google teamed with Apple and other smaller companies and aimed the guns to do whatever it takes to topple or at least move MSFT.

This is also in part due to Gates departure from the board, since the move would not likely been through if Gates was still in charge. His empire was built entirely on closed-end soft and open source is an assault to the deep philosophy of domination.

The $40 billion dollar bid also indicates that MS admits it’s inability to stay competitive in online advertising market, which created the biggest rival Google.

This is a new wave in technology, as markets are moving from closed to open source and as established online presence is going to be key to the future.

“Think of this week’s opening up of Microsoft’s proprietary software alongside its effort to buy Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500). That deal is intended, I believe, as much to prod Microsoft’s culture toward a Web-centric mentality as to acquire powerful new advertising properties. Ozzie has had trouble getting the company to move as quickly toward the Web as he said it should in 2006. Spending more than $40 billion dollars signifies the company’s seriousness much more than exhortations ever could. I suspect it will work. And recent alarms raised by Google execs suggest they worry it might.”

Source

Internet is one of the most dynamic business environments in the world. Search Engine Optimization in itself requires constant testing and a good eye on community forums to spot changes in algorithms. Algorithms are calculations developed by search engines to filter through website and deliver relevant results. Algorithms are changed(adjusted) couple of times per month in different niches. It is the bread of search engines and they invest heavily in their development.

Apart from search engines, internet is skimming with other types of business models. This post is too small to grasp all of them, but hottest one on the block is “dynamic learning environment”. Let me explain.

Blogging is viewed as a money maker if you’re able to build up a dedicated audience and monetize the traffic. The most successful bloggers cashed in an astonishing $40.000 per month just from a couple of blogs. This trend was largely followed as people inspired by money threw their efforts into blogging.

As anything that works well somewhat losses its value when too many people are using it. The money making with blogs(direct) somewhat lost the value, but having a dedicated community is always beneficial.

A number of high profile bloggers, such CopyBlogger, SEOMoz, SEOBook and others have started what Brian Clark of CopyBlogger coined dynamic learning environments.

This is a new breed on the internet.

As you read SEO articles number one thing that comes up is: “new content”, “unique content”, “valuable content” and so on.

Though this is essential for successful SEO, content can have another value at a different price. If you’re passionate about something or know topic well enough to give expert opinion, you can monetize that knowledge, because some people will pay to know it.

You become a teacher to them and they pay you to be taught. Here’s how’s it works.

As an expert in your field, you have what others want – information. You start a dedicated website / blog that provides TON of value to the reader. As people visit it, they analyze the content – if it’s good enough they come back and link to it. This where social element of the web rushes in. If something good shows up eventually it’s going to get noticed.

People will start commenting(make sure that’s possible), asking questions, advice, emailing and talking about you on their blogs(if you’re good enough). As the audience grows so do your future profits.

Once the audience is big enough, you develop what is known as a dynamic learning environment. You develop more content, in more depth and more often. Since you’ve already build a profile, people trust you and will sign up to be taught in depth by you. They will sign up for your subscription($40-$60/month) because they trust you as an expert in the field.

The beautiful thing is that content development never stops(just like with a blog), but this time you’re actually charging for access.

Those are some of the earliest environments on the web:

SEOMoz

CopyBlogger (Teaching Sells)

SEOBook

All 3 have large audiences, and all 3 are monetizing it, but not with advertisements - with their own content.

We have mentioned on our other blog that Wikipedia has launched new search engine.

Wikia Search – How it Works.

Wikia Search utilizes Grub Crawler bought from LookSmart. Crawler is to be released to the open source community. Currently Wiki index is at around 35 million, pretty small, but it is still in alpha state.

“By downloading the client, Grub allows “the site owners the option of crawling their own data, with their own bandwidth. The client…is designed to connect to a central coordinating server, grab a batch of URLs, and then proceed to crawl them.” It claims 20:1 savings in bandwidth for both Wikia and the hosting website.” – Search Engine Watch.

In a sense Wikia will allow people to crawl the web for Wikia search engine from their own computer.

The jewel in the crown is the social aspect of the search, which allows all participants to edit and filter search results. When you open up an account, the keywords attached will allow you to be featured in search results. In a sense, people can see each other and connect to people with same interests.

Wikia also features FaceBook style social network, with profile pages, networks, friends list, interests and other good social stuff.

Menu bar:

Profile | Photos | Friends | Preferences | Privacy | Post a Bug

With the search bar on the top.

It will rely largely on human editing and human good will. A good comment from Search Engine Watch:

"Most of us want to search and then get over to the destinations quickly. Will that behavior change for most of us?"

Author has a point, but there are plenty of people who dedicate their free time, just for fun and the sake of it.

Wikia in the Money.

Wikia has been largely sponsored by Amazon and Netscape, of course in the hopes of becoming a prominent search player. Jimmy Whales(founder of Wikipedia) openly admits he will run ads as soon as the search gains more quality and momentum.

The Actual Search.

So far Wiki has very poor quality in its search results.

Here is my search for SEO:

With me being located in North America, I get half a page of results in foreign eastern language. Other searches resulted in poor quality as well. As a search engine, Wikia fails to live up to the name, however the address http://alpha.search.wikia.com/ implies that it is still it Alpha state.

Another aspect is the Scam. On the top of each search, Wikia features Mini Articles.

"Mini Articles" are basically stubs with links to full wiki pages. When you search for any term, above the results is a Mini Article which anyone can edit. The articles link goes to a full wiki page about the subject which again anyone can edit. I believe these Mini Articles will have tons of abuse. Jimmy said that there will be community admins who will be selected by Jimmy to keep the spam and blackhat activities out. He said payment will be unlikely which leads me to believe that it will be easy to game the system, even though Jimmy said on our call that "gaming is impossible". – Center Networks

Unfortunately I would have to agree with the author of the article, spam is something Wikipedia faced and continues to face for a long time. Having editors with no payroll can always temp them to sell some privileges, DMOZ style.

Whales stated “gaming is impossible" he is ether overly optimistic or knows something we do not.

NY Times comments as well.

“the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to ‘block them, ban them, delete their stuff,’ just as other wiki projects do.” – New York Times.

Wikia and SEO Community.

Wikipedia search made a lot of noise throughout SEO community and some of the SEO stars made their comments:

"So my reaction is pretty simple: congrats to the Wikia crew on your public launch, and welcome to the search industry! I’m glad that you’re jumping into the search space." – Matt Cutts Blog.

It seems that Matt is the only one who cheered Wikia, as the rest of community is very disappointed with what they see.

A quick recap from some forums:

"Yikes. I did a few keyword searches for my niche. The top spammer/scraper sites showed up #1 and #2 for all the searches I did. The top 3 "legit" sites in my industry were not on the first page." – WebMaster World Forums

"The results are terrible. Performed 4-5 different searches and none provided a satisfactory result. IMHO - They should have waited till they could get the basics right before launching. You can’t make a second 1st impression." - Digital Point Forums

"Not that impressed as of yet, but hoping it gets better and actually will be a competitor to Google." – Digital Point Forums

Mr. Whales seemed to be very objective and did not defend anything, but stated as it is.

"I would have liked it to be a bit more polished before hitting the public eye." Yes, us too, in a way, but that really isn’t the world we come from. "Release early, release often" is my philosophy.
Here’s something I have been telling people for a year: when I launched Wikipedia, it was empty. Not much of an encyclopedia. And in fact, my first attempt to build a freely licensed encyclopedia (Nupedia) failed completely. But one of the things Nupedia did for us as a community was give us a couple of years to talk about how to do what we wanted to do.
So, I am just following the same process here. Open source. This is how you do it. (Ever try a pre-1.0 Linux kernel? Awful!)
The difference is, of course, now everyone watches with great expectations everything I do.
Well, in a couple of weeks the noise will die down, and then we can just keep our noses to the ground trying to build this thing." – Jim Whales Whales comments

All in all – Wikia has a very long way to go, but Wikipedia team fully recognizes it. So far it isn’t a flinch close to becoming serious threat to Google’s dominance, but having a good name and a lot of dedicated support Wikia has a good shot.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to Torontanians!
Let all your goals be achieved.

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Foxit Reader 2.2 for Windows

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