Search Theory Archives

At SEO Refugee, Skitzzo talks about how the SEO blogosphere is starting to shift drastically and people are giving their opinions as fact. Instead of using jargon like "in my experience" or "as far as I can tell," they think that their specific experiences mean that these statements hold true in all circumstances when in fact most of these experiences are circumstantial and they may not entirely hold true in all instances.

The discussion moves over to Sphinn, where Jill Whalen kicks things off by saying that 90% of what she's reading nowadays is BS. But Chris Boggs, who contests the post entirely, takes a different approach: we're not expected to find the secret recipe of SEO in blog posts nor are we supposed to find them in forum discussion.

It seems, though, that people are starting to take these theories as truth. For example, DazzlinDonna says that she learned of a new SEO firm that will be charging considerable amounts of money for "advanced SEO tactics." What, exactly? Using the meta tag. Apparently, he heard it from some SEO and now he's ready to start monetizing off of. This is something that people are starting to take for granted, and it's absolutely dangerous.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Hitwise post digs into the behavior of searchers and sees whether they prefer searching in the singular or plural. Using the term "laptop" versus "laptops," it is clear that "laptops" is the winner in search. When investigating nine other terms, the following was discovered:

...[W]hile the results are not conclusive, it does seem that plural terms are better at sending traffic to retailers than singular terms. Two thirds of the products tested performed better as plurals, with technology products in particular skewing in favour of an added ‘s’.

Of course, as one member on Sphinn notices, this is specific to traffic, not necessarily conversions. However, it's a good first stop. Now can someone compile a report on the conversions? ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Let's say you're ranking really well for a specific keyword. You also have a PPC campaign and your paid listings are on top. Is it too much? Should you curb your spending and focus on your organic links, since in the end, it is free?

In many cases, the answer is no. They complement each other. Awhile ago, I covered a webcast where link expert Eric Ward says the same thing: an appropriate mix is critical. Bill Hartzer says the same thing on Search Engine Guide. This still holds true. Reinforcement is always helpful, and if your results appear on both the organic and paid side, your users might be inclined to click on those links and increase your revenue.

Some very valid thoughts are voiced by member J. Clark:

1. I want the conversion no matter how we get it (as long as it is profitable)
2. If my company isn't visible in those sponsored spots, our competitors will gladly take the real estate.

If it costs more to rank in both areas, do it. Just keep tweaking to find the solution that converts best for you with the least amount of spend if budgeting is your concern.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

This post was composed on October 2nd and was scheduled for publication on October 5th.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is such an exciting field, in my opinion, because it constantly changes. What works today may not work in six months or even three weeks. Practitioners of full time SEO can attest to the fact that they have to constantly keep up with algorithm changes as well as the way Internet sites are structured. This makes it very difficult for someone to rightfully claim to be an expert unless they have already accepted the fact that their world is one of constant education and re-education.

A thread at Cre8asite “calls out” so-called SEO experts, but does it in a manner that is slightly more abrasive than constructive. The poster claims that the only people that should be considered SEO experts are those that work within the actual engines. By that argument that would mean that the only expert airline pilots are the engineers that design airplanes.

For an interesting read, including one of the longest responses to a forum thread that I have seen in a while, check out Cre8asite’s discussion on “SEO Expertise.” (By the way I still cringe when someone introduces me as an SEO expert – because I know that I still have plenty to learn. Perhaps I am an expert in relation to some shady SEOs out there claiming to be experts, but I truly feel that only 5-10 people in the industry really deserve this title.)

Search engine optimization experts have for a long time equated user experience with SEO friendliness. As the search engines’ algorithms have evolved, one thing has remained fairly constant: sites that have useful content and links from relevant sites rank better for particular subject keyword phrases than sites that don’t. It really is that simple: better sites outrank worse ones, for the most part. Of course people could likely list in the comments below dozens of examples where various search engines have it wrong.

For anyone that has kids, they may know of Thomas the Tank Engine and the other trains on the island of Sodor. The main purpose of those engines is to be “useful,” and their feelings are hurt when they fail to satisfy that requirement. I personally feel that website owners should keep this to heart – either make a “useful” site or you are not helping the Internet become a better place. Apparently I am not alone…

Why should Website owners “care” about their visitors’ educational leads, asked a new member of the Cre8asite Forums recently. Kim covered the post briefly last week when she stated (facetiously) “I'm an SEO and I Don't Give a Flying Cow What Your Site Visitors Want.” As quoted, Ammon Johns took a particularly hard stance against “spammers” which cloud the Internet with worthless content.

This discussion seems to have died down a little, but really drives to the heart of the matter when trying to define the difference between optimizing a site for search engines versus optimizing a site for humans in a manner that search engines appreciate. As one administrator suggested, the thread elevates the importance of considering “why” when adding content to a page, and should be featured as a part of the SEO Primer for beginners.

Add your thoughts to the discussion at Cre8asite forums.

SEO's from the early days eventually learned that no matter how often they submitted URL's to search engines, the rewards were questionable, if any existed at all. There are still some search engine marketing company rip-offs selling site submission services to "hundreds of search engines", promising rank (in them all?) and doing it for dirt cheap.

When someone asked about such a scam, he also wondered that if a search engine like Google follows links to find new web sites, why is there a URL submit form?

It's kinda like a Dentist insisting that you get fluoride treatments, even though you buy toothpaste that has it in there and many towns put it in the water and some research says it's bad for you.

Do you submit to search engines on a "just in case" basis or is there some worth to this practice that remains?

If you're curious, read How Many SE's Do You Submit To? at Cre8asiteforums.

A forums member wants to know who the boss is. In your work as an SEO, are you optimizing pages for the site owner, search engines or web site visitors?

The writer asks,

"Now wouldn't we all be out of a job if we did whatever is best for the people viewing the site? We do what is best for our customers. The people paying us to make their websites....Of course, we need to provide something for the viewers out there to 'view'. But really, isn't this secondary to delivering a product to them?"

Ammon Johns responds:

"All the searching on major search engines happened in the early phases - the pure research phases. By the time they were holding their credit card, they were using another means to find the best price, such as a price comparison site.

The SEM uses this knowledge to change the way he markets to this small but growing portion of the market. He makes sure he provides material for those early 'scouting' type searches. He provides impressive information to make a good experience for the user. He builds a brand.

Because later, when that person is shopping for prices, if his site is any one of the options, he's got that sale on the trust he built, and the positive experiences given.

That is why it is all about giving an excellent, remarkable, memorable user-experience to every visitor."

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Why Is The Answer In Seo Always "Think About Your Audience"

In the old days of the Pay Per Click management days, you used to hear the phrase - "set it and forget it." Meaning, you set up your pay per click campaign in Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and others. Then you watch it for a couple weeks, make some tweaks and when things are running smoothly, you just walk away and let it run itself.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if the "set it and forget it" practice still works? With Google AdWords changing their algorithms every 6 months or so. With Yahoo! recently upgrading to a new algorithm in Panama. With adCenter launching with more features to shake a stick at... Does the "set it and forget it" methodology still apply?

It appears not.

Everyone in the thread seems to agree that for the most part, that concept is long gone. You at least have to check in weekly for even the smallest campaigns. I like netmeg's response:

I have one client who has set a rather small (in my opinion, TOO small, considering the breadth of his product line) daily budget for what he wants to spend on AdWords, and he hired me a couple years ago to fix his existing AdWords account and kind of oversee it. I added as many phrases as I felt I could within the strictures of his low budget, and then I turned the Budget Optimizer on most of his campaigns, and just let it run. He absolutely will not raise the budget, so there was a limit to what I could do with it. Once a week I go in to see if anything looks weird, and anything that has gone inactive I might have to move off to a separate campaign (that's not on Budget Optimizer) in order to raise the CPC, but that's about it. It means a lot of his positions are down in the 5-8 range, or even lower - but it probably gets him more overall clicks for the money, and all I can do is hope that when people click on the ads, if they don't buy what they're clicking on, they'll see something else they're interested in. In any case, we do get conversions, and the client seems to be fairly satisfied with it. It's not the way I prefer to do it, but it's what I could do with what was handed me.

That's the closest to auto-pilot that I can get.

Would love to hear more on this from others.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Ready for a laugh? A WebmasterWorld thread has someone asking if he is crazy that he is using Google's PageRank score as one of the factors in picking a business school for him to attend.

I am in the process of searching for a business school to take a masters program. I was looking around at various rankings, trying to work out where to go. Randomly, I wondered whether I should check the PageRank of the schools I'm interested in. Most of them are 9's, a couple are 8's. I'm thinking I should not go to a school with a PR of only 8... I should stick with the PR9's...

Is that crazy? Or is PR a good indication of brand/quality? How about Alexa rank?

Yea, that is a bit crazy, in my opinion.

One member says "Hmmm... guess that leaves out Wharton, probably one of the best business university's around." Wharton one of the top, if not the top, business schools in the world, has a toolbar PageRank score of 8.

Just to be clear, he posted again that he is not insane.

I am not going to make this decision based ONLY on the alexa/google rank of these pages, but certainly I would want to go to a school that is "top 10" by all rankings, including the google/alexa ranking. I think Google PR and Alexa rank are actually fairly good measures of how high profile the program is.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Two days ago Loren Baker wrote Does Digg.com Belong in Google Results? He basically summarized two points of view, the first by Allen Stern who says that Digg adds no value to the story and should not be indexed (hence duplicate content). The second point was by William Burn, who argues that Digg's pages do provide value and give pages that may have never been read a chance. Skizzo adds that he doesn't like when commentators copy and paste the original content from the main site in the comments of the Digg post.

OK, having read all that. I also would like to see the original article found first in the Google results. I do believe that the Digg article should be indexed and found. Typically, a Digg title may differ from the original article's title and thus has doubled its chances of coming up in the results. If you are worried about article hi-jacking, then that is a different story - but I would say, just go with the flow.

As an SEM, I can understand why you don't want to be outranked by a commentary to your article. But often, commentary to one's article does provide greater value. Often, but not always - I must add. If the Digg article does add value and that value is greater then the original source, then it should outrank the source article.

Either way, people are reading your thoughts and you got a nice link from Digg. The value of the link from Digg, is discussed here.

Forum discussion at SEO Refugee & DigitalPoint Forums.

Search Engines are in the business of providing relevant results, whether paid or organic. In order to do this in a timely fashion, many major engines will ignore what are commonly known as “stop words,” such as “the,” “if,” “for,” “what,” etc… Thus if someone enters a search phrase such as “what are better mousetraps,” the “what are” is omitted from the search of the index, often yielding most of the same results as a search for “better mousetraps,” in this example. This can actually pose to be an interesting dilemma for search engine optimization managers.

A recent thread at Search Engine Watch forums posed a question about the handling within MSN Live of search queries with and without stop words included. An interesting discussion sprouted, with member fulton savage asking “How many users know of/use search query operators?” This lead Ian McAnerin to state

That's really the problem... The vast majority of users don't use quotes or operators. Therefore the default behaviour of a search engine is a very important issue. It doesn't matter how they act when operators are used (they should all work the same), it matters how they act when explicit operators are not used. At this point, the search engine needs to go into "handholding" mode, basically trying to guess at the best methodology for the words typed in. Generally up until recently, this meant assuming the AND operator.

Please share your thoughts or opinions at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

As a side note: In the above example, in my results, “bettermousetraps.com” disappears from the top 5 when the words “what” and “are” are included. What makes this happen? The supposedly ignored words have affected the rankings slightly in this case, and it is likely the other “ignored” words would do the same. It is possible that "what" and "are" are included in more in-link anchor texts than some of the others that appear without that in the search, and it is also possible that "bettermousetraps.com” has over-optimized for the term "better mousetraps," getting trapped in a filter that does not pick up the flag when "what" and "are" are included...would love to hear more opinions on this idea in the comments.

Barry recently covered the NY Times Google Bombing article discussion, highlighting a campaign tactic of influencing rankings based on buzz phrases or even politician names. For the politicos that are scrambling to find SEO’s for next year’s election, we have found a little Halloween story told by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Digital Point Forums points to an article at the Financial Times from earlier in October in which Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying that within five years, search engines such as Google will help the public decide who to vote for. Mr. Schmidt claims that search will allow people to evaluate the potential truth of statements uttered during the campaign season by candidates for office. A quote directly from the article explains:

He forecast that, within five years, “truth predictor” software would “hold politicians to account”. Voters would be able to check the probability that apparently factual statements by politicians were actually correct, using programs that automatically compared claims with historic data.

Pretty cool, and it’s highly likely that people with advanced search skills are already performing this type of research, if they care to. I am sure that Gary Price could help find all kinds of voting records and transcripts to support the decision-making process. Politicians better realize that as the power of search grows, so does the power of the voter. When in a hot zone, Marines are always reminded to “keep an eye out for CNN.” Politicians are used to looking for microphones, but Internet databases may be a little harder to avoid.

The short discussion can be found at Digital Point Forums.

Search engines use automated crawlers, also known as robots or spiders, to scour the Internet's content and add it to their indices. Once pages of a website are in an index that is used to provide search results, sites are revisited on a regular basis to determine if any new content has been added, or if there has been significant updates to currently indexed content. Since there is so much information available on the Internet, sites generally get re-crawled based on a variety of factors, including the frequency of content updates or even the command in a page's code that asks the spider to return every "X" days. However, except on occasion, spiders will not re-crawl the entire website.

A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums starts with a member asking "How do they do that?" He describes that he on occasion examines his log files to find varying degrees of robot activity, and asks how they determine how deep to dig. An initial answer by Moderator softplus offers some good ideas, and finishes with the thought that:

In the end, the main element I have seen for crawl frequency is page "value"; a page with good value is crawled more frequently than a page with little value... Even a static high-value page is crawled frequently, it doesn't make that much sense to me, but there must be reasoning behind it. Perhaps the frequency would be even higher if the content were to change frequently?

The member that asks the original question then poses the theory that the Google toolbar could be involved, with the crawl somehow directed towards pages with higher time spent by a visitor. The thread then diverges slightly into an interesting conversation about how Google Sitemaps works to help get pages crawled and indexed (now Google Webmaster Tools). Do you think you know why some pages are crawled and others not? Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Bill Slawski has an excellent post at Cre8asite Forums he named It's all about the signals, What the Search Engines Look For. You can tell by this thread that he was really inspired by the SES San Jose event just a couple weeks ago. What is Bill telling us?

I do think that search engines still place a lot of reliance on links, but am convinced that understanding user queries - like seen in our thread on the AOL data, is playing a larger and more important role in determining relevance. There have been a number of mentions in recent white papers and patents which mention search engines collecting information from ISPs about user behavior.

Bill explains what he believes is the tracking and understanding the search engines grasp from a users click pattern and "traffic flow." It "shows how some sites are more popular than others and are attracting traffic in response to searches and other methods of getting people to a site."

In discussion forum class, Bill ends his post prompting more discussion. He asks,

What signals do you think are becoming more important, and how are you taking advantage of being within an information stream?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Yesterday, Barry covered that Yahoo was "doctorin' up" the results for a search at Yahoo! for the term "google.com." There is a thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums covering the topic.

Well Andy the engineer at AA|RF and I were chatting, and he came up with a possible response by Google, within a Google search result for "good search engine." (The following image is a joke and was not taken from actual results!)

Search Engine Optimization often involves creating relevant content and adding it to your site on a regular basis. If the site is properly coded and spiders can get around easily - or even if you use Google Sitemaps properly - you should be able to count on the number of pages of your websites in the Google index increasing. So what happens if Google comes to town and your server has crashed? Will they immediately drop a bunch of your pages from the index? All of them? Obviously the answer to the last question is no, but could they hit your total pages indexed for this?

A recent thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums has a member asking if a server crash could be responsible for a dramatic dip in the number of pages indexed when he checked the next day. He says:

the number of indexed pages drastically dropped to 100+ (from 2000+) and for certain sub domains started appearing supplemental results. Even after 3 weeks, Google doesn't seem to pick these pages again.

Now this post was written about 3 weeks ago, so it is time for an update, but a couple of good answers followed the question.

Vayapues, a newer member who is very active and seems quite knowledgeable, immediately brings a calmer tone to the topic when he says:

Google understands that your server goes down from time to time, and will not penalize you for it, unless it is down for a few crawls in a row.

Then another member Fathom hints that this could have had something to do with Big Daddy, saying:

As many websites lost many pages recently you quite possibly suffered the same fate, and the crash merely occurring in and around the same time provided a convenient camouflage.

I have asked DinSurf for an update...hopefully the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums will pick back up...

I know I have (so has the world) been picking on Google issues recently, but Yahoo! has their share of problems. A WebmasterWorld thread named Spamming Blogs for Top Yahoo Rankings shows that certain spam tactics are working fairly well on Yahoo! also.

Honestly, right now, there is not one engine that I am particularly in love with.

I always had a fall back. For example, Google is going through an update but Yahoo! recently did an update and the results look nice, I would use Yahoo!. Or Yahoo! stunk but Google was solid. MSN, well, that is MSN. Ask.com is just always a bit too slow to update but they do have features that encouraged me to make them my home page. But now what? Google, Yahoo and MSN all pretty much are not doing too well. Sad...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Suppose you are creating multiple websites based on particular countries and languages. Should you choose a .com and use subdomains to classify the variations? Use different sites completely? Use Top level Domains tied to the country you are targeting? Not much credible research has been posted on this topic, and as is often the case, it seems that Matt Cutts is speaking most clearly about this subject.

Highly respected (and deservedly-so) Search Engine Watch member Robert Charlton recently posted a couple of excellent comments in response to a thread about TLD's, their ability to affect ranking in foreign searches, and possible issues with duplicate content. Robert carefully explains the concept of mirror sites and localized markets, linking to some other topical threads. He then prescribes a good dose of 301 redirect. In a follow up post he points to the Mike Grehan interview of Matt Cutts, during which Matt suggested that keeping to the country TLD is very helpful for ranking within that country, although you can rank if your .com is hosted locally.

Robert also points to his practice of using country and language specific links in helping to rank sites in International versions of Google (and I assume other search engines when applicable). In any case, even if you don't comment, the thread is worth the read in order to get an understanding of this important topic, as well as for some good links to other related threads that tie it all together.

See the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Should search engines introduce a tag of some sort that enables you to tell the spider not to index and not to use the content for ranking or relevancy purposes? Similar to the nofollow attribute for not counting links, and similar to AdSense Section Targeting, that enables you to specific which content is the relevant content for the AdSense spider to serve up relevant ads.

So why not a tag to tell the Web search spider what content is the content that should be indexed?

Well, right away, you can see how people may abuse it. But besides for that, there may be a way for search engines to deploy it safely.

Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo! had plans on introducing such a tag. But for some reason, has yet to do so. I believe they had plans on introducing something like it about a year ago.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

One practice used by search engine optimization companies that has remained relatively below the radar is the purchase of expired domains with good inbound links that are still active. The general theory is that the Google PageRank is still "alive," meaning that it is not only visible through the toolbar representation but actually still counting in the Google ranking algorithm results of that particular URL. Of course, with Google becoming an approved Domain Registrar (see recent discussion here), who's to say they can't set up a system where domains lose PageRank upon expiration?

The topic comes up occasionally in forums, and yesterday at Cre8asite, someone asked if buying domains can help for link building. Some good discussion so far, including Administrator Bill Slawski (bragadocchio) who points to a recent patent which actually supports the Registrar theory above and says:

I'm not sure how much value there will be to doing something like this in the future, but I wouldn't rely upon it for much for too long.

It would seem that this method may work for now, but all signs are pointing towards the SE's tackling this "loophole" head-on. Please ad your thoughts to the discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Forums and blogs have become a very important part of the Internet landscape. I personally have learned almost as much about Internet marketing by diligently reading as I have from actual hands-on experience. With every positive experience, however, I have seen people trying to abuse the system. Forum and blog spammers, as Barry pointed out a couple weeks ago, can make the whole community experience a little less satisfying.

A couple of threads recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums has the same member asking about "Using Forums for SEO" and "Can I use someone else's blog to link to my site? " A few weeks ago, another poster detailed what he seemed to think was a new idea, saying "I was wondering if forums spam is something illegal with regarding to SEs?" he went on to describe his plan, but was a little worried about the Search Engines.

In my opinion, what they should really worry about is their status/reputation within their industry. In order to effectively do such a task and hope to get any SEO value from the links, they would have to be spamming a forum or blog somewhat relevant to their own industry. Imagine being known as "the guy/gal that's a spammer." Trust me, as a moderator at SEW, I have seen the reputation of seemingly very nice people go down the drain because of obvious link drops.

Not to mention many links that are placed within forums signatures and blog comments are blocked from being spidered by the site owner, and there ends up being no return on the time invested in spamming. Please give your thoughts or share your spamming success stories at any of the threads linked-to above.

I also dug up an older thread at Cre8asite Forums that has some good thoughts on this subject.

A Cre8asite Forum thread named Will SERPS be pointless in the future?, Will SERPS be pointless in the future? really gets folks thinking again about the future of search. Most people look at Google's 4 product announcement as Google moving away from search and focusing on non search related items. Heck, I even made that comment here yesterday. But then you take a step back and look at what companies like Google, Yahoo (specifically) and Ask.com are doing. They are all expanding.

Let's take a look at Google specifically, and limit it to those four new products. Google Trends, ok that doesn't tell us that much, but it does show Google keeps data over time and breaks it down by demographic criteria (we all knew this). Google Gadgets with Google Desktop, well duh, they are on your desktop, serving you real time information on what you are interested in. Google Notebook, well we don't know that much about it yet, but it will supposedly allow friends to share content and notes - um, again, content, private, details about registered users. Finally we have Google Coop where I can change the SERPs that you, yes you, see on your Google results page, simply if you subscribe. Now that is in your face.

Personalized search, trusted sites, trusted sources, tracking user preferences, always signed in registered users and then tailored search results. Is SEO the same today then it was yesterday. No, it has already changed. What will happen in a year? Wow, I can't even imagine how far this will be taken. But, seriously, step back, look around you at this present time, see what the SERPs look like.

Now, go discuss over at Cre8asite Forums. :)

Interesting thread on DigitalPoint where people are posting there SearchBot ROI's. This stems from my blog post on the subject:

Each time a bot spiders your page it costs you money. It may be a small amount but it does cost you money. I did some number crunching on one of my larger websites. Kind of a ROI on the bots if you will. Basically what kind of return hits am I getting for each time my page is spidered ?

People are reporting some pretty neat results.

Personally my results were as follows:

#1 GoogleBot .78 Search referals per spider.
#2 Yahoo Slurp! .14 Search referals per spider.
#3 MSN .01 Search referals per spider.
#4 Ask.com 0.00 Search referals per spider.

Will be interesting to see how many people take part in this thread over the next few days.

Recently, there has been a lot of popular concern over search technologies and terrorism. Danny just blogged last week on Terrorists & Extremists Worry About Their Search Privacy and there is a Cre8asite Forum thread named Google Earth Suspected to Have Helped Terrorists from this weekend. Basically, people are now exploring that these technologies are out there and available.

With Google Earth, you can get satellite images of remote locations, even of your home. Well, Google Earth just made it popular to the end users, but there were many services out there, prior to Google Earth that enabled the same thing. And trust me, terrorists knew about them prior to Google Earth.

Times have changed, tools are more easily accessible, these tools are both useful and powerful. Do we worry? Do we stop using them? Do we fight them? I don't have the energy to go into a post on my thoughts on this. Here is one comment from the Cre8asite Forum thread;

Next thing you know the terrorists will have used email or cell phones...

Let's take it to the forums; forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

I started a thread last week at our forums named Answer --> Question Search Engine :: Jeopardy. In that thread, I asked, wouldn't it be cool to have a search engine that worked backwards? For example, you submit an answer, instead of a question, and the returned results would be questions. Kind of like how the game Jeopardy works.

I would love your thoughts, I don't see how useful it is, on a day to day basis. But I am sure SEOs can figure it out.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

There has been a discussion going on for well over a year about "Google Bowling." This is a theory that discusses the potential to negatively impact competitor search engine rankings by creating "unsavory" links to said competitor's pages. Google publicly denies this is possible, yet many in the industry feel that it is very possible. I have always been in the camp that feels that there is nothing that a competitor could do to affect my rankings negatively. Yet recently I have had to think seriously about this, because of the undeniably bad effects experienced by many websites that have been linked-to from so called "bad neighborhoods" ("PPC's"-Pills, Porn, and Casino sites being the unfortunate majority in this Internet community).

A thread started at Search Engine Roundtable Forums on March 16 leads to an interesting case study presented by an anonymous competitor in a recent SEO Contest. He feels that he was inadvertently "Google bowled" because his site solicited links in order to win the contest, and promised the winnings would be donated to a charity. Thus:

LOTS of people thought that donating the prize money to a good cause was a great thing, and so added links on their web sites to mine ... and in several situations, site-wide links.

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I don't feel that sitewides can hurt, but that they could be discounted. The case study goes on to support a few more interesting theories, in my opinion, including:

What is new/unique about Google Bowling is the concept of negative weighting. If Google detects unnatural linking patterns, instead of devaluing or discarding that link weight, it may count against you…

I personally still don't buy this. One question I would have about the case study is the behavior of the rest of the top 10/15. Where they still the same or did he drop with a bunch of others?

The current discussion is at the Rountable Forum as well as Cre8asite

Rand actually started a discussion about this topic last November that Barry covered. Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl listed it as one of his top twenty contradictions earlier in the year at SEW Forum (before he was saving all his good stuff for his blog :). (**Added: I wanted to mention that I found another recently published and interesting viewpoint on this topic at ISEDB by Tinu Abayomi-Paul)

One more thing: at first I was a bit apprehensive about posting about this, thinking it may tip off even more tricksters. However, if this is an issue, perhaps it should be more in the open so that maybe a new subject line for Google's SPAM complaint center and for the Cuttlets (just added to my spellchecker) could be "I've been bowled." A site owner could identify specifically which links he felt were hurting him and G could come back with a vague answer.

Danny Sullivan started a thread named Who Cares If Google's A Portal. In that thread he posts five consecutive times, so demonstrate the conversation he had with a reader. The posts include a dialog between himself and a reader, who is upset with Danny's tone on his podcast, The Daily SearchCast. Specifically, how Danny was being a tad sarcastic about Google's play on Google Finance and being a portal and not a search engine.

The deal is, Google has for such a long time, repeated that they are not a portal. The word portal, in Google's eyes, seems to be taboo. Danny, as do many in the industry, feel that this is just downright funny. Either say you are a portal or don't do portal like things... Or is it not that simple?

Danny's thread goes deeper into this long standing conceptual debate.

You can read it over at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Many SEO's, when just starting to analyze a site for search engine friendliness, will look for Frames as one of the first things that could signal a problem. Often, the immediate diagnosis is "search engines cannot index content within frames." The two aspirin perscribed are site rebuild and a dose of SEO.

In many cases, this is the most simple of problems and the rebuild will "fix things." A thread over at High Rankings Forum starts with a member asking about their framed site, and how it could actually be ranking at Yahoo, MSN, and even Google?

Some good discussion is following at High Rankings Forum.

Another discussion on this topic has been going on at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I had a meeting with a non-prospect this Friday. That means, a family member asked if I meet with a friend of hers and offer advice on his Web strategy. So I did that, as a favor, but it turned out to help me better understand, what I think, is the difference between Search Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. Let me explain...

After sitting with this individual, discussing how his new, non-profit organization is looking for fund-raisers, it hit me. Before I get to that, let me guide you through some of the conversation. I go over many of the basics of SEO. I tell him he doesn't want to rank number one for the keyword term "philanthropy" or the like and I explain why. Basically, as we all know, he is looking for the donors that are sensitive to what his organization caters to. I explain that someone looking to give a sizable donation to an organization will not type into Google, "philanthropy". Instead, they may type in "support [cause] in [location]" or "supporting poverty in America" as one example. There are tons of these examples and the person I was meeting with immediately understood, which was nice. Then I go through how to optimize for those types of keywords on each page.

Finally, I explain that he won't realize top rankings in Google right away. I explain what the "sandbox" is, without using the term "sandbox" in the explanation. And trust me, he understood and excepted the reasoning for some new sites not ranking well. He understood that he is a new kid to the block and will have to earn some respect, respect from his patrons, respect from his industry, respect from the world and respect from Google. He totally got it, and I was really enjoying this meeting.

But then he hit me, he asked. "Is RustyBrick overkill for his needs?" Meaning, should he go with a low cost design shop and ensure that they comply with the basic SEO tactics and save a bundle. I said, at this point, yes. He asked me why.

The reason was "Search Marketing" versus "Search Engine Marketing". It has been what Mike Grehan has been saying in his articles, attacking the sandbox theory for what it is.

The bottom line with this individual that I was meeting with was that he did not have enough money to add a "wow factor" to his organization. I explained that we need to think up of an idea that makes you better then the rest. You need some type of marketing strategy, be it online or offline, that makes you worthy in the eyes of everyone, that your organization is simply WOW.

I explained that you can hire a room full of marketing people to sit there and think up unique ideas. It is done all the time with large companies. But if you can not afford that and most companies cannot, then you need to come up with the idea yourself. And guess what, he got it.

Marketing is discovering the Wow Factor. Search Marketing is utilizing the Wow Factor in the search world. Search Engine Marketing is implementing your SEO tactics off of that wow factor.

I told the individual, to come back to me, when he realizes his wow factor.

Sunday morning rant, hope it makes sense.

A new thread stated by Ian (mcanerin), an SEW Moderator, may be the thread of the coming week. He titled the thread SERP Overflow and Butterfly SEO where he describes what he calls "butterfly SEO."

Basically he says for many of the competitive terms (and the number of competitive terms grows daily), the top 30, 50 etc. results are pretty much equally relevant for their keyword phrase. Meaning, Result number five can be flip flopped with result number twenty-five and the end user would be just as satisfied with that result. Based on this theory, Ian is concerned that the search engines will have the "good-enough" approach and give up. But he also understands that engineers are not the type to leave "good-enough" alone. :)

So how does Ian define the butterfly SEO?

This could result in what I'll call "Butterfly SEO", where, once you get to a certain level of optimization, the things that affect your rankings are things that are less and less obvious, and more and more technical. I know for a fact that in certain SERPs you can see this effect, where something that traditionally isn't an problem, suddenly makes or breaks your rankings.

Legendary Bob Massa pulls out Ian's outstanding thread and some up Ian's concerns into one line.

How do I optimize for YOU when you go to Google?

Because that is what is going to set apart the "overflow" of the top fifty results. You and me, our personal preferences. And as an SEO, you need to start thinking about, how to optimize for the individual searching at Google and not for the keyword searching at Google.

Don't these types of threads make you just tingle. :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Nacho has started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums that deserves some more respect. He named it Reasons Why Search is Not Perfect Today and asks;

Mention at least 1 reason why search technology in general or search engines in general is not perfect today. Not that it will ever be perfect, but you know.

Currently, the answers we have are few;

• Because of Spammers
• Programming Limitations
• and They'll be in the bar at SES NY.

Does that cover it all?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Barry Welford started a Cre8asite Forum thread where he asks, Does the Internet level the playing field? Barry W. believes that "The Internet has levelled the competitive playing field." But has it really? DianeV said that "First, the Internet made it more level. Then, SEO made it more level."

kensplace tries to break down the pros and cons:

The big boys with money have a few advantages over the little guy.

They can advertise more
They can devote more resources to a problem
They can devote resources to support
They can (and this is a biggy) just purchase a little guys hard work outright.
They have more money for better hardware.

The little guys have a couple of advantages.
They are more flexible.
They are usually more inventive and produce better quality work/ideas.

Nadir rightly points out that the "big guys can buy the little guys." Which Ammon Johns answers that it was that which resulted in "the first web bubble." Ammon continues to explain that the big guys are now being smarter, they are hiring employees and consultants that have this expertise.

What I have noticed reading this thread is that it is the same story. The big guy versus the little guy. Be it Internet marketing, be it generic marketing, be it a war (David vs. Goliath). The little guys are more flexible and they can be smarter - but brut force can over power the little guy in due time. Egol summed it up nicely; "1) Being the first mover in your field and getting the jump on them. In a showdown the fastest draw wins if you can hit your challenger. 2) A person working on a "passion" will generally defeat someone working on a "profit"."

As Ammon closes;

There are still niches that either are not profitable enough for the big companies to develop, or that the big companies haven't seen yet. That too will always be true. That is where the little guys of today can become the big guys of tomorrow.

Welcome to the basics of marketing.

Eat it up while it lasts and hope you catch the wave. Keep finding those niches!

But in my opinion, I do not think the little guys are on the same level as the big guys.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Danny broke up a thread to create a new one named Bad Reasons To Want A Top Ranking on the 3rd of this month. Mikkel posted that a client of his wanted to increase the value of a company before it is sold, and one way to do that was to increase the client's ranking. Although the thread did not list many other bad reasons to want top rankings, it did discuss this one reason.

Ammon Johns tells a story of one of his clients looking to buy a company based on rank. To make a long story short, that company they were looking to buy was ranking well due to a single seo tactic. A few months later, that company's rankings dropped. Good thing they did not buy them. Ammon continues to explain that you should not look at rankings alone, but rather the traffic over time of a site.

Interesting thread, check it out at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a nice new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named SEO Top 5 money investments. The member asks, "which you consider the top five SEO techniques for money investment?"

The first few responses accurately reply that it is almost impossible to say on a generic level, without seeing the site in hand. But if you had to give a general answer, what would you say?

Chris Boggs suggests that you should invest in the following five areas; (1) site structure, (2) content, (3) link building, (4) usability and finally (5) longevity. Well said. RCJordan (a SEM forum legend) writes that he always spends his time and money with "content management" (he can mean the framework or the content development or both). He then recommends buying some "near-bleeding-edge hardware" (trying to decode him), which may mean some black art magic. And finally he recommends, that folks spend money on traveling and attending search conferences.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Two days ago dazzlindonna over at SEO Scoop wrote Update to Kooky Theory a year later where she explains a new theory she has. The theory basically stats that seasonal popularity is a factor in search rankings at Google and the other engines. She explains;

I have a handful of seasonal sites. These sites are ones that people generally don't go to unless the time is right - and of course the searches are seasonal too. The odd thing I've noticed is that when the season hits, and I start getting traffic to them (say, from yahoo and msn), my google rankings for those sites go up too. As soon as the season is over, the google rankings fall to barely nothing. The backlinks don't change appreciably during the season (maybe a handful more than usual). And yahoo and msn rankings don't fluctuate the same way. Only google. It almost feels like Google is using alexa traffic ranks in its algo. If a lot of people are going to a site, then let's rank it better. If no one is going to a site, then let's drop it. Now, I realize this is a kooky theory, and I'm sure it could be shot down in any number of ways, but for the last 3 holidays, I've seen this exact same pattern with Google. Of course, my non-holiday sites don't have such big spikes during the year, so I can't evaluate them the same way. Anyway, just thought I'd throw out the kooky theory for the day for everyone to poke holes in.

Now, she has seen this exact pattern happen again for this Christmas season. She uses a WebmasterWorld post (message # 138) has support. Seems like a nice theory to me.

Forum discussion at a new forum named SEO Refugee

To keep the momentum of John Battelle's Searchblog 2006 Search Predictions going, Danny started a new SEW thread. The thread is named, ummm, 2006 Search Predictions, where Danny asks the members, "What do you predict will happen in search in 2006?"

Some cute responses so far. Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A fun thread recently sprung up at Search Engine Watch Forums, which Danny Sullivan renamed Should Search Engines Get To Set Standards? The member who started the thread writes;

By emailing websites telling people they are banned because they do not cow-tow to Googles standards (and basicly the whole idea of the Communications Initiative), Google has made a statement: We are no longer interested in accuratly indexing the web, we are only interested in indexing those parts of the web that we agree with. We shall now only provide you with biased and censored results.

I don't really think there is much sinister about Google, its just getting fat and lazy. I.e. instead of using their renowned research and software engineering to overcome problems, its easier to just play the heavy and hope those problems go away.

In one way they are fat and lazy. But if you speak to any programmer, they will tell you that they are lazy (not necessarily fat). What does a programmer mean when they say they are lazy? Quite the contrary to what the member above wrote. They mean that they rather write a line or two of code that efficiently handles the issue then to manually tackle the solution each time. That is the complete opposite of the explanation given above. Google is known to try to tackle spam issues through automated, programatic solutions. Just because Google is now emailing warnings to Webmasters, it doesn't mean that Google is getting lazy. I can see Google automating the email process shortly.

Danny responds to the quote above with;

Search engines indeed do try to find technological ways to find the best pages. Link analysis is one example of that. But over time, technologies become dated, especially as people reverse engineer ways to beat the system. That can be either an aggressive black hat SEO person who finds an effective hole or just a group of bloggers who decide to embark on a linking campaign to help a site rank well for a term in response to a political action, rather than whether the site is "relevant" for that term or not. The search engines, as long as they remain effectively open systems taking content from anyone, have to keep refining their own technology.

Oh, yes, search engines are fat.

Stuntdubl does it again, with a clever thread topic that is now featured at Search Engine Watch Forums named, Top 20 SEO Contradictions. He starts off explaining that these are the arguments he hears in the SEO world almost on a daily basis. I'll quote them here, but make sure to check out the thread for others.

1. All links work vs. Contextual links work 2. Buy links for click through (or don’t buy them) vs. Buy links for search rankings 3. There’s nothing a competitor can do to hurt your site vs. Googlebowling 4. SEO is dead vs. Long live SEO 5. Directory links are important vs. Google hates directory links 6. All penalties are algorithmic vs. Lots of hand edits 7. Sandbox vs. There is no sandbox 8. Filters vs. Penalties 9. The blue pill vs. There is no spoon 10. Pagerank is dead vs. Buy links based on Pagerank (okay this one is just plain WRONG) 11. Content remix vs. Scraper sites 12. Blogs rank too well vs. SE’s don’t like blogs 13. Real simple syndication vs. Real simple stealing 14. Lots of links vs. Quality links 15. Google knows all vs. Google is dumb 16. Lots of directories vs. Good directories 17. Automated vs. Manual 18. Linking in vs. Linking Out 19. Global vs. Local 20. Google is good vs. Google is evil

What I think would be cool, is to come up with a list of "SEO Oxymoron." What I mean by that is terminology used that is contradictory to the fact. Like the term "modern orthodox" in some religions. Modern means to be ever changing and orthodox means to be never changing. :)

Google's stock has been falling, Yahoo! is now bigger, and Yahoo! wins relevancy challenge over Google. If that wasn't enough, let me show you, what I would call a cheap shot, on Google.

Remember my Big Blue Pineapple Chair entry? Also, do you remember when I gave Yahoo! a hard time about them not ranking the correct page for the term? Yahoo! fixed that. But for some reason I did an other search at the four engines on that term. Guess what? Google listed my homepage and not the specific landing page.

- http://www.google.com/search?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair - listed seroundtable.com -
- http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +
- http://web.ask.com/web?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +
- http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=big+blue+pineapple+chair entry page +

You know, I have been wondering, as Google's stock sinks, when Yahoo! releases announcements that make Google cringe, as Google plays hard ball with the press; where will all this lead? If the searcher sees weakness in Google. Weakness through the stock market, weakness through index size, weakness through shutting down the press and weakness within the SEM community... will the Google brand sink as well?

Kleenex = Tissues, but I buy different brands. Xerox = copier but... Googling = Search but...

I guess you can tell I am tired...

We are a bit shy from the 10,000 mark of rated search at The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge (a.k.a. RustySearch), but since I am off to the conference tomorrow, I thought I conclude this phase of the test.

Here is a snapshot in time for you with 9,981 rated searches completed to date. Total searches placed at RustySearch is 14,000+, of which, 9,981 were rated.

The graphs and charts below are the most recent results pulled from The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, RustySearch search engine. I'll explain each graph and chart below.

The "Search Engine Relevancy Dials" below show how each search engine scored on average in terms of relevancy on a one through five scale at this point in time. The search engine with the highest score is considered the most relevant search engine voted by you.

Search Engine Relevancy Dials

Yahoo! 3.4071	Google 3.3681
Ask Jeeves 3.2144	MSN Search 3.1239

This link graph groups search engines by rating. The reason we plotted it on a graph like this is to show you that there is this U shaped curve that is consistent between all search engines when rated. In our opinion, it means that most people either feel the results are relevant or not relevant. Very few people feel that a search engine can be "somewhat" relevant.

Finally, here is a raw summary count of data that we placed on a simple chart view for you. This data is real time and will continue to update as people rate. The averages from top-down are the average rating count by search engine. The averages from left-right are the average rating count by rating group. The value at the far bottom-right corner is the total rated search results obtain at this point in time at RustySearch.

Raw Summary Data
Search Engine	1	2	3	4	5	Average
Ask Jeeves	713	243	255	264	964	487.80
Google	657	219	249	367	1051	508.60
MSN Search	755	271	234	271	906	487.40
Yahoo!	677	207	226	300	1152	512.40
Total	2,802	940	964	1,202	4,073	9,981

Complete data, hashing out the IP Address, can be downloaded as a ZIP XLS file here. The live RustySearch Results page is now public to everyone.

C|Net has published a review of nine search engines. At RustySearch, we only asked you to rate four engines, GYMA, (which I have 8,922 rated search, almost there, please rate more).

InsideGoogle has a nice recap of the review posted at C|Net named Searching beyond Google and Yahoo: nine online search engines compared.

Also, they have a very comprehensive feature comparison chart.

I gave up on getting 20,000 rated searches, but can we at least get 10,000 rated searches before I give out the raw data, minus IP addresses?

Please help out and make RustySearch your default search engine for the next week.

Thank you.

Here is an other update for you with 8,000 rated searches completed to date. Total searches placed at RustySearch is 11,000+, of which, 8,000 were rated. I still want to reach the 20,000 mark before publishing the actual data. Please help me make this happen.

The graphs and charts below are the most recent results pulled from The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, RustySearch search engine. I'll explain each graph and chart below.

The "Search Engine Relevancy Dials" below show how each search engine scored on average in terms of relevancy on a one through five scale at this point in time. The search engine with the highest score is considered the most relevant search engine voted by you.

Search Engine Relevancy Dials

Yahoo! 3.4146	Google 3.3723
Ask Jeeves 3.2010	MSN Search 3.1195

This link graph groups search engines by rating. The reason we plotted it on a graph like this is to show you that there is this U shaped curve that is consistent between all search engines when rated. In our opinion, it means that most people either feel the results are relevant or not relevant. Very few people feel that a search engine can be "somewhat" relevant.

Finally, here is a raw summary count of data that we placed on a simple chart view for you. This data is real time and will continue to update as people rate. The averages from top-down are the average rating count by search engine. The averages from left-right are the average rating count by rating group. The value at the far bottom-right corner is the total rated search results obtain at this point in time at RustySearch.

Raw Summary Data
Search Engine	1	2	3	4	5	Average
Ask Jeeves	579	198	192	205	771	389.00
Google	520	181	194	290	843	405.60
MSN Search	637	200	189	218	747	398.20
Yahoo!	543	160	171	237	927	407.60
Total	2,279	739	746	950	3,288	8,002

I would like to thank you for Helping to Promote RustySearch and the Search Engine Relevancy Challenge. We have surpassed 10,000 searches of which 5,000 searches were rated. Please continue to promote it, so we can hit 20,000 rated searches. The graphs and charts below are current as of 5/12/2005 at 3:30PM (EST) pulled from The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, RustySearch search engine. I'll explain each graph and chart below.

The "Search Engine Relevancy Dials" below show how each search engine scored on average in terms of relevancy on a one through five scale at this point in time. The search engine with the highest score is considered the most relevant search engine voted by you.

Search Engine Relevancy Dials

Yahoo! 3.4287	Google 3.3668
Ask Jeeves 3.2602	MSN Search 3.0855

This link graph groups search engines by rating. The reason we plotted it on a graph like this is to show you that there is this U shaped curve that is consistent between all search engines when rated. In our opinion, it means that most people either feel the results are relevant or not relevant. Very few people feel that a search engine can be "somewhat" relevant.

Finally, here is a raw summary count of data that we placed on a simple chart view for you. This data is real time and will continue to update as people rate. The averages from top-down are the average rating count by search engine. The averages from left-right are the average rating count by rating group. The value at the far bottom-right corner is the total rated search results obtain at this point in time at RustySearch.

Raw Summary Data
Search Engine	1	2	3	4	5	Average
Ask Jeeves	369	121	112	110	537	249.80
Google	332	103	126	177	527	253.00
MSN Search	422	111	105	120	470	245.60
Yahoo!	344	104	100	139	603	258.00
Total	1,467	439	443	546	2,137	5,032

We almost have a total of 5,000 rated searches at RustySearch, when we hit the 5k mark, I will publish revised stats, including new types of reports. But I really want to get a wider and more representative sampling. I know larger news sites are reading this, please help out this small search engine industry, by driving people to RustySearch: The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge.

The four major search engines have went beyond the call of duty to help us gather this data. I promise to provide detailed raw data to the public, but I will be excluding IP addresses to protect user privacy. However, I will be converting the IP address into a unique number, so you can use that unique number to see the number of unique searchers.

If you have more ideas on how to get the word out and do not want to leave a comment here, please contact me directly at barry AT rustybrick DOT com.

Sample of Text Ads:

Try The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge, by making RustySearch your default search engine for two weeks.

Which Search Engine is the Most Relevant? You Decide at The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge.

Sample of Banner Ads:

There has been some discussion on the topic of The Future of Results Pages? at Cre8asite forums. Yesterday, Gary Price posted a blog entry at SEW Blog named Software Design Legend and Guru Heads to Yahoo. This got me thinking. I know Yahoo! has tons of Internet properties that can use a top notch design legend but what if one of the tasks given to Yahoo!'s new VP of User Experience and Design Group was to reinvent the user interface (UI) of the search results page?

The possibilities...

In yesterday's session named The Search Engine Landscape, I reported Jay McCarthy from WebSiteStory as saying:

Search engine referral and direct navigation have similar trends. Internet links and search referral have crossed over, no longer do people get to sites with links, but now they use search, its not a web anymore.

I wanted to expand on this concept. Basically what it means is that people are getting to Web sites differently then in the past. For example; a year or so ago, more people visited Web pages by visiting page A, and clicking on a link on page A to page B. Then they clicked from page B to page C via a Web link. This past year, Jay McCarthy reported that the hyperlink style of navigating the Web has been surpassed by individuals using the search engines. Basically, if I find a concept on page A and I want more information about it, I might highlight the phrase and copy/paste them into Google.

I was thinking about this data during my 8 hour drive back to New York. Let's think about how search engines rank Web sites. One of the main components that factor if page A should rank above page B is the linkage data. Simply because, that was the way the World Wide Web worked. Page A links to Page B so the reader of Page A can find out more about a particular topic.

If people are now less likely to navigate the Web via hyperlinks and are more likely to navigate via search engines, we have the potential to lose one of the core factors in ranking criteria, linkage data. This of course is not an issue now, the if you saw the chart posted at the conference, the line graph was pretty shocking, in my opinion. User navigation via hyperlinks were declining at the rate user navigation via Web search. If this trend continues, less and less linkage data will be available for search engines to rank Web sites.

I thought to myself, can this happen, is it happening? Are people not linking to Web sites anymore and relying on the user to use Web search? First memory that popped into my head was that I have noticed that many new pages are linking to search results. For example, I commonly notice a sentence like, "If you want more information about widget, search Google." where the link to Google would contain the search phrase. Not convinced yet? Well, my new OS (Apple Tiger) came with a new search feature named "Spotlight" which has revolutionized the OS. Everything I right click on, any word, any file, pretty much anything in any program has an added two options. (1) Search in Spotlight and (2) Search in Google. How hard is it for someone to now right click on a search phrase or word and click on "Search in Google". Am I saying people will stop linking to pages? I doubt that; look at the number of times I linked to other pages in this entry. But think about the possibility of such a future.

So which search engine is most relevant after 3,244 rated search results? Here are some charts I put together for a quick preview of what is going on with The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge. Have your friends, family and the person working with you use it, so we can get a more representative sample. We are testing relevancy, not if my site ranks number one in this engine or not.



This pie chart shows the "most relevant" search engine by averaging the scores of all the ratings. The search engine listed at the top, is the most relevant engine. The number to the right of the name in the legend is the average rating for that seach engine. We then plotted that data in the pie chart.







This link graph groups search engines by rating. The reason we plotted it on a graph like this is to show you that there is this U shaped curve that is consistent between all search engines when rated. In our opinion, it means that most people either feel the results are relevant or not relevant. Very few people feel that a search engine can be "somewhat" relevant.







Finally, here is a raw summary count of data that we placed on a simple chart view for you. This data is real time and will continue to update as people rate. The averages from top-down are the average rating count by search engine. The averages from left-right are the average rating count by rating group. The value at the far bottom-right corner is the total rated search results obtain at this point in time at RustySearch.

Raw Summary Data
Search Engine	1	2	3	4	5	Average
Ask Jeeves	248	73	77	61	329	157.60
Google	244	50	73	105	345	163.40
MSN Search	291	66	56	76	314	160.60
Yahoo!	234	68	70	76	388	167.20
Average	254.25	64.25	69.00	79.50	344.00	3,244

In the WebProNews article titled What Constitutes Search Engine Relevancy?, Chris Richardson asks "The question is how do you define relevancy? More importantly, how do search engines define relevancy?"

After a great conversation with Dr. E. Garcia, he pointed me to his latest paper Fractals, L-Systems and Semantics and more specifically to this:

"... users and search engines may not agree in the way they see, read or interpret documents. Essentially,

• users assess document relevancy by visually interpreting -not necessarily in a linear fashion- information displayed.


• search engines assess document relevancy by interpreting -tag by tag and in a linear fashion- information coded."

The entire point that he is trying to make is that both users and marketers think of relevancy based on perception while search engines see relevancy as a scoring function.

He also mentioned that this has to do with "the ability to discriminate terms that have different meanings in different context" otherwise known as "term disambiguation". To read more on this subject I recommend you read an outstanding paper called "Disambiguation for Text Mining on the Web" by Einat Amitay and her colleagues at IBM. I believe this paragraph is a good summary:

"The Web today contains a treasure trove of information about subjects such as people, companies, organizations, products, etc. that may be of wide interest. A first step toward any Web-based text mining effort would be to collect a significant number of Web mentions of a subject. However, due to the infamous ambiguity of natural language, many subjects have several meanings. This is particularly true for brand names, which often derive their name from the real word. Thus, the challenge becomes not only to find all the subject occurrences, but also to filter out just those that have the desired meaning."

Ultimately, the user does have the last word on what he or she determines to be the right listing to click on. Therefore, I believe that Barry's [Schwartz] project called RustySearch will be an excellent form of sampling measurement of web search relevancy. Hopefully many webmasters, marketers, business owners, journalists, academics, students and of course users will take the test and by contributing to this experiment will help determine the competitiveness of relevancy between the mayor 4 search engines based on perception.

Barry has already posted the Early Results from RustySearch.

A few weeks ago, I proposed the idea of The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge: Pepsi vs. Coke. In this challenge, I proposed building a "white labeled" search engine, that randomly selected results from one of the top four engines and asked you to rate the search engine results, individually, from one to five. Well, we have built the white label search engine.

Officially, this is being released tomorrow, but I wanted you guys to get to it first. There is more information at the official, The Search Engine Relevancy Challenge. I named the white labeled engine RustySearch and it works as follows:

1. Go to RustySearch (will open in new window)
2. Enter a search phrase and click search
3. Click on the title, the URL or the "rate this result" link. The site will open up in a framed window, so do not open the result in a new window.
4. At the top, there is a frame that says, "Rate the relevancy of this Web page for 'search phrase here'". Rate the result from one to five, one meaning a very poor relevancy and five meaning an excellent relevancy.
5. After you click a radio option, it should read, "Thanks for your input! Your vote (and many others) will decide who, really, is the search engine king!"
6. Then click on the button to take you back to the results
7. Continue on by rating the next result on that page, or search on a different result.
8. Repeat...

It is close to impossible to make everyone happy with a study on relevancy. Please try not to search on terms you are looking to rank well for. Search on terms when you have a information search need, outside of rank checking. This way, you can really test the relevancy as an end user and not an SEO.

I am off to Toronto SES, speak to you all tomorrow!

Jason Dowdell pinged me this morning about an entry he wrote at his blog named Comparing Search Engine Results - My Experiment, where Jason does a detailed non-statistically sound (but good) review of comparing search engine results. Something I am considering doing myself, but in a more objective fashion, if that is possible when testing relevancy.

Here is a snippet of the detailed entry to entice you to click over:

On the "big picture" side of things, it's a bit concerning that Google had the least amount of unique results when compared to the other search engines. I'm guessing this is because the other engines do indeed crawl Google's index to seed their own from time to time and to conduct qualitative checks of their own.

Wish I had more time to comment, looks like good stuff.

As a follow up to my entry named Google Relevancy Poor Based on Generalization, I have started a new thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge for Search Engines.

I understand that relevancy is extremely subjective, however, search engines all want to achieve the most optimal level of relevancy possible. The engines all want their results to be the most relevant for each individual searcher, no matter who it is. Based on that, I figured it would be cool to set up a Coke versus Pepsi challenge, but for the search engines. Basically, the concept would be to create a "white labeled" search engine page, allow users to query the search engine and return results from one of the big four (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves). Then the user would mark which results are relevant on some sort of scale. Collect this data over time and then show the results.

Currently, many search engine users accept that Google or Yahoo! or the engine of their choice is relevant. So if I am a Google user, I will compare those results to Yahoo! and say, wow Yahoo!'s results are far less relevant to me then Google. Relevancy, as mentioned above, is extremely subjective. And with subjective concepts, comes bias. Search engines spend a lot on branding, to influence user bias. If we take branding out of the equation, I strongly wonder what the user would consider relevant and what the user will consider irrelevant. Even more so, I wonder which of the four engines would win the contest.

I am strongly considering building a white labeled search engine to do this. Since Google and Yahoo! both have APIs and MSN has an RSS feed, I can make it work. In addition, I think Ask Jeeves would be happy to provide some sort of feed. If you are interested in building out this white labeled search engine to collect subjective relevancy data, feel free to let me know. This can be fun!

The ultimate vote for a page is if someone bookmarks that page for later use. Well, maybe it is not the ultimate vote, since I have tons of orphaned bookmarks that I never visit. But if search engines can capture one's bookmarks with date stamps including frequency of use and date added, that can be a valuable measurement used in determining page importance.

A thread at Search Engine Watch forums, and I am sure discussed at many other forums (it has been a busy week), members discuss this as a possibility. In fact, in the recent patent released by Google, it discusses more then sandboxing concepts, it discusses monitoring "data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites,"." Nacho pulled an excerpt for that portion, in the thread;

"According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, user maintained or generated data may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with a document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites," or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favored by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine 125 may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser). Search engine 125 may then analyze over time a number of bookmarks/favorites to which a document is associated to determine the importance of the document.

[0115] Search engine 125 may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (or more specifically, a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists. If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc. Search engine 125 may then score the documents accordingly."

So the thread asks, will you soon see more Web site asking you to "bookmark this page"? Or better yet, will they run scripts that automatically bookmark the page for you, without your knowledge?

Eric Scheske from Crux Magazine, a normal Internet searcher, wrote up an entry complaining about a particular search experience. Basically he searched on the question (Ask answers questions) What's the name of the famous black transvestite? and arrived at the "Your search is likely to return adult content" page. It looks something like:

View Large Image

Eric selected the last option "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." and then when the results came up, he clicked on the first link. This is his word by word description of what happened next:

Criminy! I was pounded with homosexual porn. I quickly clicked the "Back Button," and my screen was filled with more porn. I tried to close the whole internet application, and another screen of porn popped up---with about a half dozen pop up ads for porn. As my mouse flew around the screen clicking those upper-righthand X boxes, more would pop up. As it intensified, I felt like I was playing a video game�all the while afraid that one of the secretaries would walk in my office, see my screen filled with that stuff, screech in fright, and throw up her hands, thus launching a bundle of files against the wall. After thirty flurried seconds, I finally had all the porn boxes and sub-boxes closed.

At first, I felt the user was upset that such a site can get be displayed at Ask Jeeves when he selected the "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." One would expect the word "limit" would not allow for the first result to be so offensive to the user. And Jeeves received some bad press about serving porn to school kids. But the searcher was more upset with the actual pop ups and how it over took his computer. Maybe more of a reason for this user to download and use firefox. It goes to show you, that maybe, just maybe, users are blaming themselves for the bad results that show up in a search engine and not blaming the search engines.

Danny Sullivan created a new thread named Can Tagging Help Search? based on his recent blog entry at SEW blog named Tagging Not Likely The Killer Solution For Search. Google, Yahoo! and others have created this nofollow attribute which is not really part of the issue that Danny has. But in the Indexing Summit at SES NYC Tim Mayer from Yahoo! has brought up a possibility of allowing Webmasters to tag up their pages, to let the search engines know what are the various layout elements that construct the page.

This is all fine and good if people respect tagging. Maybe respect isn't the proper word, more like, if people do not abuse the tag. Most people are not of the opinion that tagging can make it back to determining relevancy, some feel it will have a limited affect. Either way, Danny is no supporter of this initiative. If it comes back, it won't last long, in my opinion.

There is a thread over at Search Engine Watch forums named SE Relevancy vs. SE Optimization - Round 1 where a member named "relevancy" (yea i know), wanted to pin "Optimization" versus "Relevancy."

As you can imagine, many other members had an issue as to "why these need to be mutually exclusive?" Grumpus, well known from Cre8asite, offers this advice:

Rather than building a relevant site, how about trying this: Make sure your SEO Efforts are Relevant to Your Site and It's Mission. From there, everything will just sort of fall into place (and you won't create any gramatical paradoxes that threaten the very fabric of our existence).

The thread then moves into a direction of defining terms such as SEO, SEM, SEF, Usability, Internet Makreting and so on.

Phil Craven was in one of those moods today, and posted a thread named If a tree falls in the forest.... He got all philosophical and it kind of made me teary eyed (just kidding). The reason I point this thread out, is not to talk about irrelevant philosophical debates but to talk about Robert Charlton's clever reply. He replied to Phil saying;

Phil - I thought you were going to ask whether, if a phrase ranks on Google, but no one searches for it, does it really rank?

I never heard it phrased like that. Of course, the point Robert is making was the same point I was making in my Big Blue Pineapple Chair entry. I can rank #1 for Big Blue Pineapple Chair, which I don't rank number 1 for in Google, but I do in Yahoo! now.

So if a phrase ranks on Google, but no one searches for it, does it really rank?

Nacho over at the Search Engine Watch forums named What is the Value in Links - OLD vs. NEW? In this thread lots of members discuss the topic. This is a popular subject over at SEW, there were a few threads on the topic of the value of links in the past, including a Temporal Link Analysis thread. The thread is worth looking at.

In my opinion, links should be treated differently. That is the major challenge facing many of the engines today. Many proposals are being developed to come up with a universal form of methods to mark a page for link popularity purposes. In my opinion, and very quickly, links should be looked at based on the several factors. Time value of the link based on what page is linking to you. A hub link should be treated highly and more highly if its older. An authority link should be treated differently based on the age of the link (buzz news links versus solid authoritative links).

Within the major Google update thread taking place at Search Engine Watch forums, Danny Sullivan posted a gem. Basically, he defends the argument that searchers are always happy with the results and the only ones to be bitter are SEOs.

Danny continues to explain by saying that most average searchers who are unhappy do not know of a forum to go to and express their dissatisfaction. And often, Danny explains, that the searcher "blame themselves" for searching wrong, when in fact, it is not necessarily the searcher's fault.

He goes on to explain that often the best people to find faults and weaknesses in the results are (1) Librarians and (2) SEOs. "Librarians, because they are often experts in areas, use search regularly and understand if something seems wrong." and SEOs because most know what it takes to get in the top results (when they keep emotions off the radar).

Google, Yahoo, MSN, & Teoma have compiled a huge link graph of all the sites on the Web that are accessible by their spiders. I can barely fathom the depth of such a link map. I tried to build something that really does a job of uncovering the link structure around a specific domain name, I named this free tool Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool. But it is limited, it only looks at the Google link command and then branches out from there. The limitation is annoying, it doesn't let me get the complete picture of the linkage data around a particular domain.

I would love for Yahoo to open an API, which I can use to make it possible to really get a picture of the true linkage structure of a site. I probably would want to combine Yahoo, Google, MSN, & Teoma - but the likelihood of anyone outside of Google opening a free API is small (within 2005). Now, would I pay? I think I would, but I know many would not even talk to me about licensing such data. But I would strongly consider paying a per 1,000 query limit fee to get at such data. Others at WebmasterWorld are discussing this topic.

Its a question that was brought up at HighRankings Forum, "If most of the sites competing to be in the top 20 google listings for my keyword are directories, do I need bigger guns than if they were not directories?" The thread gets into PageRank, link building and normal optimization. But let's really think about it.

A directory is a "hub". Hubs are important, and search engines know that - and rank them well. Authorities are possibly more important then hubs and tend to rank above hubs, on many occasions. For this individual to rank above a hub (directory) for a search term that is very hub centric, he would have to become an authority. Becoming an authority can happen a dozen of ways, right now links are fairly important.

I question the search term this individual is trying to rank well for. If the first 20 results are all directories, maybe he is trying to rank well for the wrong keyword phrase. Just a hunch, without knowing the specific keyword or site in question.

This morning I was thinking about how kids are always told to finish the food on their plates. So of course, that leads me to think of how that relates to search. The search engines normally give us a 1,000 results when conducting a query. Most people do not go beyond the first page, and for sure not past the third page.

What type of manners are we teaching our children by leaving over 990 to 970 search results. These search results are free, donated by our friendly engines, and we just take a quick peak at the first 10 - 30 results and dump the rest in the trash?

We live in a life of extreme convenience. Cell phones, email, Web browsers, GPS, home delivery of anything, and search. This entry is a bit of an exaggeration, however, think about it. Will this attitude of having 990 leftovers roll into a more social issue for humanity. :)

As mentioned earlier, Barry Welford has posted a concept of "Originality Factor" or the "OR Scale". His idea is nobel, to have those who write content at blogs, label the content on a scale from 1 to 10. An OR=10 would represent that the content is 100% unique and original, and that would be very rare. So this entry would probably get a OR=2 for summarizing the content within a post at Cre8asite Forums. Of course everyone would be on the honor system, and I am sure the scales would differ greatly in terms of the subjectivity persuasion.

There are comments in the thread on using search technology to determine the originality of a blog entry. However, you and I know that linkage data can be very skewed when it comes to "originality". Let's take a typical scenario, and to confirm this, ask other bloggers like Andy or whomever. We find interesting news, occurrences, or ideas through internal resources, day dreaming, forums, conversation and other avenues. Then we collect our thoughts in a blog entry for those to read. Often, other bloggers in the circle pick up on the content and comment on it. If the idea is good enough to hit the mainstream, it might get slashdotted. Slashdot often links to the original source, however, if it is really mainstream news, it will get picked up by C|Net or similar content sites. They rarely ever give credit to the main source, for whatever reasons. More people read the information, as if it was originally posted for the first time at C|Net, more bloggers link to the C|Net article. Then when you look at the linkage data, the majority of it points to the C|Net version, so thus, the C|Net version is the original.

Did I just get side tracked? Anyway, I like the OR factor more on the honor system, then on a linkage system. :)

An entry by Jeremy Zawondy named The Living Room Battle is about Search? sprung a need for a thread at Search Engine Watch named Is Search a Commodity?. The thread just started, so not much detail there as of yet - in addition there is a poll, but the question got me thinking...

First, it is always good to refresh yourself on the Dictionary Definition of "Commodity":

(1) Something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage: �Left-handed, power-hitting third basemen are a rare commodity in the big leagues� (Steve Guiremand).
(2) An article of trade or commerce, especially an agricultural or mining product that can be processed and resold.
(3) Advantage; benefit.
(4) Obsolete. A quantity of goods.

When I think of commodities, I think bottles of water, notebooks, entry level hosting; anything that there is a huge quantity of and low cost.

In the search business we have Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are many meta search engines and many Web directories but there are really 4 main players. Those players work hard to innovate, improve relevancy and build brand. I do not consider those types of search engines a commodity at all. Personally, I use each search engine differently (well not the current MSN). Since I use them differently and for different types of searches, they are all unique in a sense. Would I compare that to water that has a taste of lemon? No, because there are dozens of companies that sell water with a taste of lemon. There is only one Google, one Yahoo and one Ask Jeeves (Teoma). Of course, MSN will be different when it launches.

At some point, will all search engines reach a peak where they can not go beyond understanding the searcher to improve relevancy? I highly doubt it. Even if they do, I still see different engines appealing differently to different users. Not only because of brand, but because of the actual search results.

Search as a commodity, never.

I just like to note, that Doug Cutting (the old time senior engineer at Excite), in the Search Memories San Jose SES Session said:

Doug started talking about his Nutch [an open source search technology], an open source Google. People find it useful to build and search niche search engines. He said its hard to know where it will go. Its open source, good enough quality and major commercial search engines will use. That is, [Doug] predicated on that search technology is becoming a commodity and is not getting much better.

Steve doesn't like to predict in the future, but if an other Stamford student comes to him, he will listen.

Who am I to disagree, but I do.

A thread titled World Without Search Engines, Amen started by forum admin at Cre8asite Forums, Bill Slawski, might just be the SEO thread of the month. If not the thread of the month, for sure the thread of the week. Ok, so what is this thread about?

It is about a passage from the Google Information for Webmasters that reads; "Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'"

That prompted Bill to ask several questions - to start a very interesting and thoughtful thread. Here is the first post by Bill:

I've sort of looked at that statement with some derision in the past. Search Engines do exist, and advice like that isn't going to change that fact. But, I've been thinking lately that it might not be such a bad idea to take the question more seriously.

What would you do if search engines didn't exist?

Imagine that the search engines all shut down. How would people find your web site?

What efforts might you make offline?

What would you do online?

Would you be considering exchanging links with anyone in particular?

How would you tell that a particular site was a good candidate to exchange links with?

How might television, magazines, newsletters, blogs, RSS, syndicated articles, forums, and so on, play into your post-search engine plans?

There is an individual writing a novel that he describes as "some hacker tries to use crawlers to inoculate viri into servers." The thread can be found at Search Engine Watch forums and is named Some help for a Novel?.

This thread has been very interesting to read. :)

How often do you find different search theories being discussed at the forums or at conferences? If I knew better, I would have made a category at this site just for search theories. A post by Mikkel deMib Svendsen in a thread discussing the Florida theories, Mikkel writes "It kind of reminds me of the way people used to look at our universe back in the middle ages - with the earth as the center."

I never thought about these search theories from that perspective. In fact, as we learn more and find more clues from research and studies - we can better understand which theories were right and wrong. I thought I would share my own analogy, because I always found the whole Sea Monster theory in the old ages interesting. It is always funny looking at the theories now and saying, how could they have thought something so crazy?

That picture was taken from the book named The Book of Sea Monsters. People once thought that the fish and creatures in the sea were monsters. I can see how people thought that, but as we research and conduct studies to those fish, we learned the truth.

Anyway, I just never thought of the SEO theories in this way.

More reading on Sea Monsters at The Shadow Lands and MSNBC.

A thread over at WebmasterWorld named Could Google Be Having a Revolution?, discussed the possibility that Google might be using some sort of clustering technology to provide relevant results. Can they be? I would think on some level, behind the scenes they are. But will they go as far as Clusty or even Teoma in terms of refining results? I doubt it.

As search grows and more features like clustering, personalization, local and the like continue to spring up, do you think the simple Google box will go away? I don't think anyone does. This thread is interesting and worthwhile reading, IMO. What if Google did deploy a high level of clustering to its algorithm?

This article is for all those valiant souls out their still optimizing sites for clients. It's obviously getting tougher each day. I recently got a call the other day from a gentleman that was in need of some SEO services, yet was literally fed up with the search engines, SEO, and the amount of horrible sites in the results. He sounded like he wanted to hold a group of SEO's hostage and demand that they give him top rankings, threaten them with hidden text, cloaking, and popups. If they didn't do what he said he would turn to the black art of search engine spamming! Oh the horror! In his mind spam worked better than anything that a current day SEO could provide for him, and gave him instant results and traffic. I reasoned with him a bit and tried to explain WHY spamming a search engine was not a good idea.
In any case if you feel like you would like to hold a group of us SEO's hostage. Please don't. We are in the same boat as you most of time, except we have more than one website to look after.

There is an excellent thread started at Highrankings, detailing how one particular member was "utterly disillusioned with SEO", many felt his pain.
He and some of my biggest concerns are the following:

1. Poor sites did well in the search engines.
2. Terrible site design and architecture. No usability considerations.
3. Markets which are terribly over-optimized
4. Little control over the process of submitting to a directory
5. Pay For Inclusion as a gamble then, and in its altered form now still a gamble (SiteMatch ?).
6. Feedback and responsiveness from the search engines

It most cases it hard to decipher what in the world is going on. I believe it has a lot to do with human nature, and that accepting search engines are perfect informational creatures is a pipe dream. It's like living in New York City, you eventually get acquainted to all the advertising and large lights, and learn to find quality among a sea of concrete. Which as "BungleBob" related to that search would center around hubs of "quality". It sounds like some biology terms I use in the field, "natural selection" among search results and sites.

I do believe like many in the below thread that search results and the nuisances that come with them will get better with time. Which as history has shown, new innovations will get replaced by even better new innovations. I also believe that SEO's are part to blame for some of the trouble people feel and part of it may be indirect mistakes committed during the optimization. When it comes down it to it though, there is a lot of responsibility associated with working with the search engines. Its your responsibility to know for example that an offensive and poor design will result in a poor website. Usability is a responsibility that you will need to learn. Learning to build link popularity is something that you are responsible for learning to rank effectively in the search engines. All this information is the responsibility of the SEO or webmaster, and even the search engines to know this. So with that being said, it kinda looks like search engine results are really one big test bed of people all trying to be responsible for their websites either correctly or incorrectly. What happens is that since we can't know all the information we need, we get varied results. Hence the junk, quality hubs, great or poor content sites, and sites that can't sell anything.

Check out the thread over at Highrankings: Utterly Disillusioned with SEO

RSS is revolutionizing the industry, Jeremy Zawodny discusses the difference between Feed Search vs. Web Search. In this entry, Jeremy discusses the challenges the Web search engines have with (1) Structured vs. Unstructured Data, (2) Frequent Updates & (3) Real-Time Pings. He ends his entry with the words "The model of "search and find" or "browse and read" will turn into "search, find, and subscribe"."

I find myself slowly switching to this model myself. I use RSS and Web Search very differently. Subscribing to a search phrase is a lot different conceptually then searching for something on the Web. A Web search normally is done, not to find information on topics that are "news related" or of daily interest to yourself. I use Web search to research topics in the past, find product information, locate company information and find specific information on a need to basis.

My RSS feeds (by the way, I use Yahoo as my RSS aggregator) is a place I go a few times throughout the day, to learn about what is new in my topics of interest. I subscribe to Jeremy's blog, I also subscribe to VersionTrack - but the "real kicker" is that I subscribe to the search phrase "search engine". Anything found that matches "search engine" in the RSS networks are found. Expanding this feature of structured data, with frequent updates will be critical.

My thoughts are that Web and Feed Search are different. They are used for different reasons and both are good on their own.

I have had the honor of exchanging several emails with Mike Grehan about some of the theories spreading around the forums and found in many articles at SEO sites. One such theory we discussed was the concept of "themed sites" and how you need a site within a specific theme to stay within that theme in order to rank above your competitors (keeping every other variable as equal). So people were taking the extreme action of buying a new domain name for each theme. Then only having information about that theme on that new domain.

Now Mike is about to release his 3rd edition of his search engine book and he has been researching some of these concepts in great detail. With his permission, I will try to convey what his thoughts are on this topic, but not take away the deepness of the "why" found in his book.

Mike asked Daniel Dulitz from Google this question on 'theming' (is that a new word?). ""Utility" and "depth" really should be measured by a
site's users." What I understand this to mean, based on the examples given by Daniel, is that a site will not hurt in rankings if it contains pages off topic to the real essence of the site.

Example; I have a site on the Smurfs (why did I pick the smurfs, I have no idea) but on that site, I have a page or two on how I block spam with spamassassin, will that hurt my site for ranking well with Smurfs? Not at all, according to Daniel.

Now, will a site with detailed information on spamassassin rank better then the page found at the Smurfs site? Of course, at least that is the goal of the search engines.

So when people discuss themed sites and how they are the only way to rank well, it is believed that some are misunderstanding the concept of what a "theme" is. The search engines think of it as the "utility" and the "depth" of the site (in pages and content).

Disclaimer: I hope I did justice to what Mike has graciously communicated to me. Also, I do not have a page on smurfs, nor do I have a page on spamassasin.

I posted this over at Search Engine Watch as well.

Cre8asite Forums constantly is producing top notch forum threads that hit the SEM industry problems on the head. A recent post by Adrian (mod at cre8asite) named SES slammed by designers links to a two blog entries by two hard core designers, one at Eric Meyer's blog named Silly Expert Opinions which links to the blog entry that started this heated debate at compooter.org.

In summary, compooter was at the conference and attended the Advanced Design Issues: CSS, Javascript & Frames session moderated by Chris Sherman, with speakers named Matthew Bailey, Dan Stone, and Shari Thurow. I personally did not attend this session, so I can not offer my opinion on it. As you can imagine, this session talks about how search engines dislike JavaScript, Flash, Frames and the like. The speakers most probably spoke on how to cope with this technologies if you want your pages to rank well. I can understand why designers are frustrated with the engines, but this compooter blogger went over the line. Check out the various links above for more information, you will see that the bridge is being built between the SEM community and the design community.

Also, I have deep respect to Danny Sullivan for going all out here. He has several comments at the links above. He has a true and deep affection for the SEM industry. Danny is doing everything in his power, IMO, to help the industries reputation and he should be commended.

Nothing like a forum thread on white hats versus black hats to stir up hot debate. Instead, why don't you just joke around about it and set up a poll. That is what one member did at Search Engine Watch. So far 57% answered the hat color question as "Who cares? It's all just posturing anyways...." What about you?

Yea, that is right, you read the title correctly. Support services for the free, natural, organic results. Not that many search engines have strong support for natural search, but if they did, what would you like to see improved. That is the question Danny Sullivan is asking in his thread named What Organic Search Support Services Would You Want?.

Danny Sullivan said, any "other ideas on support services you'd like to see? I have a series of search engine visits next week, so I'd like to float a bunch of ideas." Some of the ideas already covered include:

• Notification as to when algorithms change
  
• Inform the Webmaster of what the search engine do not use in the ranking algorithm
  
• "Express Spam Report"
  

Other ideas?

Several days ago, Kim Krause wrote here on the topic of Is SEO a "Black Art"? where she links to a blog entry by guru marketer Seth Godin. Since then a lot of discussion has been taking place in the SEO/SEM forums. Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch shot off an email to Seth Godin.

After receiving Seth Godin's response, Danny's reaction was "Personally, I'm rather tired of the entire SEM industry being tarred with the same brush. I'm giving a lot of thought to what I'll say about this in my keynote for the next SES show. My feeling is that something needs to happen to clean our image up. We can reopen the whole "ethical/white hat" debate, but I don't see that as the solution."

Danny has been discussing this topic at Cre8asite Forum and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Seth Godin in his The problem with search engine optimization could not, in good faith, recommend an SEO.

"Because it's a black art, it's really hard to tell who's good and who's not. Andrew Goodman is good, there are people who are less reputable... no matter what, it's hard to guarantee you'll get your money's worth."

Ouch!

Cre8asiteForums discusses, in Seth Godin interrogates SEO

Is he right in his assessment of search engine optimization?

A thread over at the Search Engine Watch Forums named The word I hate the most is..., got me thinking. The word is organic. Organic search results or natural search results.

Some really good responses in that thread on the meaning and feelings of the words.

I personally take the stand that organic and natural words are something that we might have to worry about. It is amazing how an algorithm can be considered organic or natural. An algorithm is a mathematical representation of a human response. In our case of search, humans programmed this algorithm to present search results that us as humans would have selected manually as a good representation of sites on the Web that related to the search query specified. Of course a human can not bring up hundreds or thousands of relevant results from across the world wide web in under a second. That is where the algorithm comes in.

To name the results that are not pay for placement driven as organic or natural, in reality are not 100% organic or natural. They are a mathematical representation of organic and natural results. In my post at this thread, I mentioned AI (artificial intelligence) as something that scares me a bit. I compared naming organic results (a stretch of course) similar to the Terminator movie. In this movie, man builds super computers based on AI that ultimately take over the world (in the most part). They build them so well that they are more human then us humans.

By naming the search results organic or natural, we are getting to be one more step towards the terminator movie. I know it is extreme but I thought I let this fly. Does it really worry me? No. But it makes me think.

This new article came out and was posted at WebmasterWorld by Brett Tabke that said "But 60% of Google users said they would switch search engines if a better service were introduced." Currently, of that study, 48% use Google as their main engine, so for 60% of those people to say they would drop Google if something better came along is huge.

People can compare Google to AltaVista back in the day. Where is AltaVista now? Yahoo bought them and they are cannibalizing its technology to make the new and improved Yahoo! Search. But AltaVista never had the brand name and the reach Google has today. Google is synonymous with the word Web search, just like Kleenex is synonymous with tissues. That is something really hard to change. "I'll Google that word and get you the answer boss." "My home page is Google." "Where would I be without Google?" These are all statements I hear now and then by average Web users.

Ok, so you buy other brands of tissue paper. You buy the generic brand even though Kleenex is synonymous with tissues. But would 60% switch if a new engine came out that was better then Google? Well what is "better"? Less spam? More relevancy? Google isnt bad with either of the two. Plus relevancy is in the eyes of the beholder. I know many people in the education industry use Teoma because Teoma's results and tools are more focused on research. But Google is more focused on the public.

Take Apple computers for example, I know I can buy a more powerful Windows machine but I am a die hard Apple fan. I take the brand, the look, the design and the power of my PowerBook into consideration. I am proud to be an Apple computer user. Are you proud to be a Google user? That is the question.

Pick up the discussion at the SearchEngineWatch Forums.

Jeremy Zawodny really seemed to be angered by Andy Beal's post. I'll start off by stating that I respect both blog authors. Here is the quote from Andy's blog posting:

Not a smart move on Yahoo's part, they are advertising on Google. Why isn't it smart. Let's see, could it be because they are giving their biggest competitor a thumbs-up just before Google intends to raise umpteen-billion dollars?

Jeremy, and rightfully so (being a Yahoo! employee), backs up his company by stating two arguments. (1) The way Google AdWords works is that if an ad is under performing, it will be removed from the Google AdWords listing for that keyword. So since its still up, the ad must be doing well. (2) Yahoo! owns a piece of that IPO, so they would like to see Google do well in the near future. But he doubts that Yahoo purchasing ad space at Google would impact their IPO.

All good points. I would like to take this one step further. I read an article last week on Microsoft's real motives when it comes to Sun. I spent about 10 minutes looking for the article but I can not find it. The basic premise was why does Microsoft keep Sun around? Why did they settle legal cases offering to pay them millions or billions of dollars when they probably could have won? The answer, according to this article, Microsoft needs Sun around. Without them, M$ would be a legal monopoly which the US Government would take down. Microsoft does not want to become a utility company, they want competition, just not serious competition. By keeping Sun around, they have that security blanket, a blanket that Bill Gates makes him comfortable.

Is it possible that Yahoo doesn't want to see the complete incineration of Google? I think so. Yahoo has a long way to go before being in Microsoft's position but it is something to think about.

I found a very interesting thread at HighRankings named The Q-factor where a new member said "I recently got a reply from a search engine, after having submitted my page. Amongst other info it stated a Q of 5 for my site."

Now what the heck is a "Q factor"? No one in the forum seems to know. I do not know. Some guesses were made, such as "More than likely the SE that reported a Q Factor was refering to their *quality rating* and terming it the *Q Factor*."

But this makes no sense to most. Does the search engine optimization industry have a new phrase? "Q Factor" sounds like something cool to tell a client.

Anyone know?

This particular thread hit home this week. One of the forum members asks whether or not its part of the SEO's responsiblities to just obtain high rankings or help clients improve their business. One my favorite parts of being an SEO is the different hats ( and I don't mean colored ones) that we can wear to allow us to have a diversity of skills and knowledge to assist in the clients business growth, whatever needs they may be. Are you concerned with success of the business after the optimization? After talking with several clients and multiple friends this week I tried to explain that high rankings don't always mean high profits for their websites. I explained to them ways they need to change the layout or structure in order to accomodate the visitors behaviors better, obtain a great web analytic tool, and some visitor feedback. Because just sticking a website up and directing traffic to it, doesn't mean its not always going to convert! I have found affiliate sites in particular are quite good at converting visitors, and likely so they usually have to be experts in the area to capitalize on all the free traffic (while it lasts). If you find yourself with loads of free search engine traffic, but are not pulling more than a couple of sales today or none. It might be worth it to check out this thread at High Rankings.

Forum coverage on Rankings Vs Conversions, The real debate

Most professional search engine optimizers know how to obtain high rankings in Google using tricks that break Googles inclusion guidelines. Testing methods is important and �throwaway� domains are often used for testing purposes. If a professional search engine optimizer does not know how far he/she can go before occurring a penalty, they are not going to be able to optimize a website to the maximum possible. There are terms like �black hat seo� that you see being referred to on various forums and articles which describe search engine spamming methodology. It is not however a clear black and white (hat) issue and I personally don�t like the term black or white hat as to often the definitions are no where near clear cut or even agreed upon amongst the SEO community.

There are many legitimate uses for much of the SEO methodology listed as �no-nos� on the Google guidelines.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
This is probably why Google calls them guidelines and not conditions for inclusion.

There are many so called gray methods of optimization which many webmasters, having read the Google guidelines, automatically discount trying for fear of penalization. Of course, most bending and out-and-out breaking of the Google guidelines are carried out with the sole purpose to manipulate Google, often in a crass manner such as literally thousands of doorway pages that automatically redirect or hiding text through one of the many different methods.

There are some forms of cloaking (providing the Google spider with different highly optimized content than a human with a browser would see) that Google would & do encourage (if it wasn�t so open to abuse). Other methods involve manipulation of HTML tags with css, javascript redirection, url rewriting, creating near identical pages, using css layers etc.
I have used most of the above on MY OWN website and do not fear penalization. Why am I not worried I might be penalized by Google? The reason is because my content is exactly the same for a human visitor as it would be for a search engine spider and no attempt to dupe Google through hidden content or redirection takes place. Also, there may be a legitimate design reason for example. I actually HELP Google by providing new pages for indexation and make my own (and clients) sites much more spiderable/indexable.

One search engines optimizers 'advanced techniques', is another's spam. There is unlikely to ever be a full consensus on what is or is not an acceptable search engine optimization technique. What you need to do is simply to ask yourself, am I trying to dupe Google here? If a competitor reported my page for spamming could I sleep at night in the knowledge that the sit would not be penalized? The important part is intent. Are you helping the search engines or manipulating them?

Below are some examples which would make some webmasters cringe, yet are at least in my opinion and research, perfectly acceptable.

1. Removing session Id�s from online shops / forums (in my own case) and other dynamic websites. This could be considered a form of cloaking as it often involves a referrer check (user_agent/IP). If it is Googlebot, drop the session id. If it is a human with a browser, generate a session id. Session ids are a definite way to make your site invisible on the search engine results pages. Word still hasn�t got round yet to some major corporation webmasters about the real damage session ids can do to a ranking. �We need to know the full click paths of our visitors� is a common statement. �You aren�t going to get many visitors if you don�t do something about the session ids� is my usual reply. A little programming could solve the majority of problems online shops for example have at getting deep crawled and indexed. Google has officially said it regards the removal of session ids as valid search engine optimization.

2. URL rewriting through php/asp programming can also be used in the removal of session ids or flattening urls (removing multiple parameters form a url �?�, �&� etc.). With php you can rewrite the url to hide a session id. This you could say provides Google with a url which is not the real one. They will be happy though if you have a quality site which now makes it possible or their spider to crawl and index it!

3. Re-definition of heading tags (H1 etc) through the use of CSS.
The H1-H3 tags are commonly either too big or just do not fit in with your design or look and feel. It is perfectly acceptable to redefine the size of these tags from their default through CSS. It is known that heading tags (h1-h3) can help strengthen a pages relevance in the eyes of a search engine and therefore help its ranking. Not as much as a few months ago arguably, but still a good thing to have. An h1 tag in its default state is an eye-sore. With css you can make it fit your sites look and feel and resize it, colour it, underline it etc. What you most definitely do not want to do is make it invisible, use it where you wouldn�t normally use a heading or make it tiny for example. An example code for a redefined H1 tag may look something like�

H1 {
FONT-WEIGHT: FONT-SIZE: medium; COLOR: #990000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
}

4. There are also legitimate uses for JavaScript redirection. One example is calling framesets for framed pages that end up being a landing page due to a click on a search engine result. Without the framesets they often lack navigation and are of course not seen as they should be in the context of other frames. A simple JavaScript redirection can solve the problem of framed pages becoming landing pages without a frameset. An example of a very basic redirection script which solves this problem is:

<SCRIPT language=Javascript>

<!--

if(top.frames.length <= 0)

top.location = "http://www.your-frameset-page.com";

//-->

</SCRIPT>

The above code on all framed pages solves the problem of pages being loaded without their framesets. The above is the quick and dirty way to do it. Of course the best solution is to drop framesets altogether but that�s not for this article. There are several ways to skin this particular cat though. Netmechanic.com has some good info on more advanced ways to do the above.

5. Sometimes for technical reasons, or more commonly, a webmaster lacks the programming know how, dynamic pages can not be spidered by search engine robots and therefore there needs to be a way to get these dynamic content pages spidered and indexed. Multiple doorway pages that automatically redirect is a way many would go about solving this problem. Many a website has flown out of Google because of just this practice! Do not be tempted.

So what can you do that provides a legitimate reason to create static indexable content that is very similar to your dynamic (non-indexable) pages? How about creating a �printer version� of your pages? Some dynamic forums such as vBulletin do this automatically through archiving threads. There is also software that can create static html pages from dynamic ones, but it can be costly. One way is simply to save your most important pages using save-as in your browser (not the whole website, just the page.) Make the page printer friendly by say removing colourful backgrounds and changing to printer friendly fonts and graphics. There should be no issues of content duplication as of course the dynamic pages for whatever reason couldn�t be indexed. This method is clearly open to abuse and you should never have automatic redirection and should be used only if your dynamic pages are completely unable to be spidered or indexed. It goes without saying that the content should be the same as the dynamic page.

6. The use of the apache mod_rewrite module, or for Windows servers, ISAPI filters to cut down the number of parameters on dynamic urls (Google has problems over 3 parameters and deepcrawling with long urls full of parameters (�?� and �&�) is not cloaking and is perfectly acceptable. I mention this as many think flattening out urls through server side technology must be some form of spam. I use it on my own forum and it works very well. The user sees the same url as a search engine spider and therefore it is not a form of cloaking. All I am doing is helping Google index my pages.

7. Text links in the footer area (at the bottom of visible page) as alternative navigation to a traditional top left or top horizontal navigation not only can help spiders find internal pages, but it is also an excellent workaround for main navigation which uses say imagemaps, java or javascript menus, the links of which would not otherwise for the most part be able to be followed. It is also good design practice to have navigation below as well as above the �fold�. Don�t feel you are spamming just because you add additional text links at the footer of your page.

The above represents seven forms of legitimate optimization which works and does not involve spamming the search engines. They should be used in moderation and whatever you are going to do, do not hide content, attempt to dupe the search engines through redirection where there exists no valid reason to do so. Some of the above methods can also be used to spam search engines.
Believe me, it is not worth the risk. If you overdo any of the above and your site gets removed do not point the finger at this article or myself. I use the above to help the search engines, not to abuse them!

If you are unsure if what you are doing is over the top or not, the likelihood is it is. Always err on the side of caution but also don�t be afraid to use the tips above in moderation. Common sense is really is really the best way to evaluate whether or not you are abusing or helping a search engine.

Alan Webb
ABAKUS Internet Marketing

If one is ranking in the number one spot organically, should one also conduct PPC campaigns for that same keyword?

If the ROI is positive, then YES!

I was extremely surprised by some of the answers to this question over at HighRankings forum. Forum member, thebean, asks Worth Bidding If #1 "naturally"?

lizzielu said accurately:

There was a study at the NYC Conference that showed web sites with a natural listing and a paid listing on the same page had 3 times higher click through rates. Also, people look on the left side of Google first before looking on the right side, so they're likely to click on your natural link first. If they miss it, your paid ad will be there as a back up. Also, it's good for branding. I would advise you buy the ad on that page.

I am surprised by some of the answers because I know that those people know better.

Anyway, this thread makes for some good reading.

Interesting thread over at HighRankings named A Hypothetical Question, What would you do with a 10K Budget?.

Ian, a moderator there responded with

1-2k for a website usability touchup (and possibly content added)
2-3k for optimisation
2k for paid inclusion in top directories and sites
3k for PPC, spread over 3 months

But others pitched in as well. Check out the thread.

What would I do? Really hard to say, depends on the site and requirements.

I admit, I provoked the question but I thought it would be interesting.

Some of the SEO's before they were known as SEO's talk about the Search Engine Industry and Community back before Google.

Check out the thread by clicking here.

When people talk about rumors of a future Microsoft search engine, often times it crops up discussion about how if such a search engine was integrated within the operating system, end users would take that convenience over relevancy (Google).

Anyway, I ran across a thread on a non-search engine related forum about rumors of Apple replacing the Google search box in their Safari browser with a Yahoo search box.

And after skimming the thread, it makes me think that end users actually do care about "taking away their Google".

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=61782

Danny Sullivan wrote a famous article back about three months ago on Searching With Invisible Tabs. This article details the problem that is slowly happening to the Google search engine, where Google keeps adding tabs for users to specify if they are searching for web, images, products, news and other types of searches. Danny predicts that if Google keeps going at this rate you can expect to see dozens of tabs that turn the simple search engine query box into a complicated set of tabs.

I visited Yahoo's search homepage which I just noticed had this "Add or Remove Tabs" link on the left bottom portion of the last tab. So I clicked on it to find the ability to add a total of 9 tabs!

Yahoo! does this with class, they don't require you to have tabs but they give you the option of adding tabs if you desire. They must figure that more advanced users will opt for the tabs and there is no loss on anyones part.

Did Yahoo! miss Danny's point of "invisible tabs", the ability for a search engine to predict which tab the user wants based solely on what query is entered into the search box? Or is this just an intermediate stage until search technology can supply meaningful and accurate results based on the 'style' of how a query is entered?

Most of the talk today is about having "authority" or "expert" pages link to your site in order to help your "themed" pagerank.

There is a lot of discussion about what is an "Authority" and I feel it is important to clarify the differences of authorities and hubs, plus show you how a search engine will use both concepts to rank a page.

Authority: What makes a page an authority? There is strong belief that an authority is determined by the value of their InDegree (an InDegree in our terms is the number of pages linking from page A to page B). The larger the number, the more authoritative that page is in terms of the types of themed pages that are linked to that page. A page within a theme is stronger based on the number of times a query term is found within the page.

This works just fine by itself for ranking pages if we did not have words with double or even triples meanings (windows, java, etc.). To make up for this factor we need something called "hubs" to help determine the best possible returned results for a keyword phrase.

Hubs: What makes up a hub? A hub can be defined as a site or page that has many links from pages that have the same links. So page A links to page B and page C, page B links to page A and page C, page C links to page A and page B and so on. The more similar and related links, the larger the hub is.

By looking at the authority of a page (InDegree) plus the hub or hubs the page is within (the similarity), the search engine can provide a better results page then just by looking at authority.

Most this information is from an article published by Jon Kleinberg while he as at Cornell. I tried to summarize to help us all understand the importance of what we are calling "authority sites".

I started out as a simple webmaster in the days when websites were simple to build. Then I provided basic search engine optimization services back when basic SEO was enough to pull rank in the top 25 spots. I say twenty-five because although number one rank for a client made me look great, searchers back then were willing to click on sites found in the first 25 results and still considered them "worthy". Nowadays, if a site isn't ranked number one, the SEO is blamed (or a change in Google's indexing), but not the website design.

Nowadays, if a site isn't found in a paid for spot somewhere at or near the top of search results pages, it may never be clicked on. Today, keyword density and linkage are not enough, especially if you have a competitive product like lingerie, automobiles, games or trivia and travel, to name a few. Companies sink a lot of money on SEO or PPC just to get the attention of someone who will at least click on their URL with a mouse. They pay for that click, regardless of whether or not the visitor remains on the site and does anything productive such as make a purchase.

That's about as nuts as me putting on a ton of makeup and pushup bra and standing on the street corner hoping to get noticed and having to pay each person who just looks at me. (Great for the ego, but who in the heck can afford that?)

What is the surfer looking for? What do they want to do once they get to your website? Are they even looking for your type of website? Ads, title tags, meta descriptions and keywords don't accurately portray site purpose, design architecture, ease of use or quality of information.

Continue reading "Rank High and You Will Be Browsed"

We all know Google runs the show for anything search related. Google currently runs about 80% of all organic searches conducted today. They provide the organic results for Yahoo!, AOL, and Netscape. This fact makes it easy for search engine optimization specialists. SEOs really only have to worry about optimizing for one engine, Google. But Google will not be the only player in town in the upcoming months.

Yahoo! is soon going to switch over to Inktomi results, possibly some AltaVista results will mix in (who knows exactly how Yahoo! will handle on a political and technology level both search services). MSN will become a larger factor in the years to come, Microsoft is spending a bundle on developing its own search engine and they should not be underestimated. I have recently become a fan of Teoma, the technology behind Ask Jeeves, which I hope to pick up some steam. And we have FastSearch, the technology that powers AllTheWeb and Lycos. For a complete and fully interactive chart of search engine relationships today, please visit Bruce Clay�s Search Engine Relationship Chart.

So where does this all leave Google over the next year? I believe Google�s market share will greatly be reduced when Yahoo! switched its organic results. I also believe MSN, Teoma and FastSearch, in that order, will have an impact on Google�s market share. As searchers understand the search options available to them, they will seek them out. Ask Jeeves said that the average searcher uses 2.5 search engines during a week (or something like that, the numbers might be skewed based on who they researched). But I do feel that searchers will be more educated and start using what is available to search.

Google�s market share by Q1 of 2005 will be at about 30%, if AOL and Netscape stick with Google. Yahoo! will be about 30%, MSN 25% and the rest will even out amongst the rest. These are my feelings and predictions, I am not a prophet and I have no special magic ball � simply my own feelings. Feel free to comment on them.

In a post on High Rankings Forum, member ProjectPHP takes complainers about Google's SERPS to task, chiding them for misusing the word relevance. I'd argue he's not using the word quite correctly either, but he certainly raises an interesting point.
As SEOs, we spend so much time staring at the various search engines' results pages, and reading about all the underlying technology, and keeping up to date with the latest changes, and analyzing every change in the rankings of the keyphrases we care about, that it's very difficult to understand what the average search engine user is thinking.
Later in the same thread on High Rankings, user Randy comments that three of his relatives have emailed him to ask why Google's not working. I have to point out that I was asked the same thing two weeks ago by a co-worker, who confessed he'd switched to using Dogpile.
So, perhaps some users are unhappy with the new Google, like many webmasters. But we've got to be careful not to be too quick to seize triumphantly on these users and brandish them as an example of how we're right and Google's wrong.
Because what, after all, is relevance?

It's not necessarily for the webmaster to decide, is what Google is telling us. But time will quickly tell whether the searchers feel Google's deciding properly on their behalf.

I wish that just once a SEO person that complains about their ranking sucking (like after the Florida update) could give a legitimate argument about why their site is more relevant than others. So far, all I've seen is lots of things like... "my anchor text is perfect", "my H1 and title tags are perfect", etc...

What I would like to see is a SEO type person pull some random person off the street, and convince THEM why their site is unquestionably more relevant than others ranked above them.

While I'm sure there are cases of mis-ranking (based on relevancy) out there, I think they are the minority. Search engines are machines, and they are fallible. But ultimately they are going for most relevant, not most optimized.