Search Engine Tigers

“Do you use a lame algorithm?” asks Ask. Well, Ask, how about not using an algorithm, but instead using human editors to write all of the content? Is that lame enough? Yep, I’m talking about the ‘new’ search engine Mahalo, launched in alpha mode yesterday, run by a certain Jason Calacanis. Mahalo currently claims to have landing pages for the top 4,000 search terms prepared, with a further 6,000 to follow. Interesting, I wasn’t aware that Jason Calacanis and Sequoia Capital were top 4,000 search terms, but I guess you live and learn. Interestingly enough, given that the results pages that they do have links to a lot of wikipedia pages, there’s no entry for wikipedia…

Other interesting results, no pages for the most supported soccer teams in the world – Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona, etc, or even a nation like England. However, according to this site, the South African National Football Team is a top 4,000 search term…

What about local search? Well, there’s some in there, handy if you’re looking for Lisbon Hotels, although if you’re looking for a hotel in Lisbon you’re forced to select your SERP, as the ‘algorithm’ will only return the exact SERP on an exact match, even when there’s only one result – i.e. Bafana. As for other locations, it would seem from their plans that if you’re going to be looking for a locksmith in Lincoln, NE, this site will never have a result for you.

A human edited site will just not be able to scale to grab all of the long tail results that people are going to want. Yes, it may have some nice results for some searches that you’d want to do, but when you need to find something in a pinch, and you get the message that that SERP hasn’t been created yet, you’re going to stay away from it in the future.

What about relevancy? SERPs change, new data shows up, events happen. What’s the turn around time on the SERPs getting updated? What happens if there’s some major event in one of his categories, and Jonathan is out sick / doesn’t hear about it?

Then there’s the whole Calacanis factor. For those who don’t know, Jason Calacanis came out at SES Chicago in December last year and announced to a packed room of Search Marketers that SEO was BS. This, and his later statements comparing Search Marketers to Snake Oil Salesman have not endeared him to this particular crowd. Yes, it’s helped him to get exposure, and I know that there’s the old saying that anytime you get your name out in front of people it’s good, but I can’t imagine that the exposure that he’s been getting for this project is what he, or Sequoia Capital were hoping for. For example, Todd Malicoat, Andy Hagans, and Jennifer Laycock, to name but a few, have said their piece on Mahalo, and I can’t say I disagree with any of them, but given that I started this post by calling Mahalo lame, I guess you could have already figured that out.

So what could be done with this site to make it a destination site? I would say that the scope needs to be narrowed. Having it as the Search engine for 4,000-10,000 ‘popular’ terms is asking too little of a search engine. If they were to target a category such as celebrities, then they could become the goto site for celebrity information, similar to the way that imdb is the goto site for movie and actor information. Another alternative is for them to forget the search engine altogether and just become a data provider for other sites, I’m sure that IMDB would love to be able to easily expand out their results pages with the extra information that can be found on the Mahalo pages (for those actors that have had their SERP created).

I saw the other day that AndyHagans.com had been hacked, and thought nothing of it, until this morning. I went to show a picture of my daughter to a co-worker from my personal blog, when I noticed the following in the footer…

Of course, none of these were links that I’d placed on the blog. So I went into the template, and discovered a script tag that I hadn’t placed on the blog. Removing it removed the nefarious links.

So how did they do it? If they managed to guess my password, why did they only alter that one blog (I have multiple blogs on that account)? There’s no ftp for this blog, as it’s hosted on blogspot, so there’s no opportunity to hack it that way (as happened to Andy Hagan). Ah well, a change of passwords is in order, and I’ll see if that stops it from happening again.

There are several ways that people do this. Some challenge their readers with outlandish statements, expecting them to post rebuttals on their blogs (I’m not linking to any of the proponents of this, even with a nofollow). Others run contests, offering a variety of prizes for a winner. Jim Boykin just blatently comes out and offers a free wall clock for anyone that links to one particular post on his site by 5pm EDT on Friday (yep, there’s also a contest element too, where you can win $720 in free ads for your site, along with some handy, dandy rubber throwing stars to sate your inner ninja).

So why would anyone link to this post? Is the, sight unseen, wall clock really enough of an enticement to link to a post on linking to him? Well, maybe, if it’s a nice wall clock, free is a nice price to pay.  But freebies aside, the post itself does have links to the newest additions to “The Best Of Jim’s Posts”, and those are some good posts on Links, SEO, and the Supplemental Index in this post that are really worth a read, or even a re-read, although for some reason his political posts didn’t quite make the list (sorry Jim).   

Now Jim, if you read this, let me just say…

Hey mr Boykin,

First thanks for your site which I frequently visit, at {url}. Your articles, stories and tips have helped me a lot, which has resulted in more profits at the bottom line. So an incredible thanks for you great site, keep up the good work!

So far, I like what I’m seeing with WordPress, the enhanced controls that you get with comments, the different plugins that I’ve played with, and the WYSIWYG sidebar widget tool make the change worthwhile. Now for the one issue that I’m having. My previous atom feed was located at /atom.xml, the new feed is at /feed/atom/. Should be a simple fix right? Put together a simple 301 redirect from one to the other? That’s what I’ve done, but Bloglines doesn’t seem to recognize it. Now it could just be that bloglines has a delay for rechecking for a feed when it’s encountered an issue, so I’m going to leave it for tonight, and see if it takes care of itself by the morning.

Why do I care about this? Well, I have 11 people subscribed to that particular feed through Bloglines, and since they’ve gone through trouble of adding it, I’d rather it be seamless for them.

After looking with envious eyes at the plugins and features available for WordPress, I decided that it was finally time to move from Blogger. I had read the directions for the change, and was especially interested to see that WordPress had integrated a migration tool in their new 2.2 version.

The first step was to get a new host, the one that I had wasn’t that great, and didn’t offer a great deal of options. So I picked one of the WordPress recommended hosts, and set up my account. The great thing about this host was that it had a one-button WordPress install. So I went ahead and clicked the one button, installing WordPress 2.13. Ah well, not the latest and greatest, but at least I could use the old plugin to migrate. Given that the DNS would take time to change, I went to bed.

The next morning, the DNS change had taken, and I was able to login to the account, after a bit of fiddling around, I found out that the migration plugin no longer worked with Blogger. Not a great start… time to uninstall the 2.13 version my host installed last night and run the 5 minute WordPress install. Interestingly, I uninstalled the 2.13 version, and the one-button install informed me that I could now install 2.2 if I wanted. So I did.

Next came the auto-migration. I ran the tool, logged into my blogger account… then watched as it told me the accounts that I could migrate, and the number of posts that could be moved. My other blogs all came up with the right amount, this one… 0 posts, 0 comments. Then I realized, this one wasn’t available because it wasn’t hosted on a blogspot domain, but was on it’s own domain. So I tried the RSS migration. No luck. Then, I moved my blog to a blogspot domain, and tried again. There it was, so I ran the migration, and here I am.

The first 100 posts ran on Blogger, but starting today, the rest are running on WordPress.

Anthony over at OldSchoolSEO has put together a list of SEM job hunting resources to help you find your next career move.

Speaking of which, as of this Tuesday I’ll be taking up my new position as Director of Search for RedBoots Consulting. (For the record I found this job through both Craigslist and word of mouth networking).

The date, time and location for the first meeting of the Virginia Search Engine Marketing meetup group has been set. We’ll be meeting on Sunday June 10th at 4pm at Mr Smith’s of Georgetown, 8369 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, VA 22182. Bertucci’s, 1934 Old Gallows Road, Tyson’s Corner, VA, 22182.  Phone 703-893-5200 (the original venue has closed down).

All are welcome to come along, just let me know (through the meetup site), and I look forward to seeing any and all there.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to drive up to King of Prussia for the Search Marketing get together hosted by Li Evans. I actually managed to time it fairly well, leaving at 2.15 and arriving at 6.15 (stupidly I’d left my cell phone at home, so rather than leaving from work as planned, I ended up leaving 35 miles further to the west, not a good thing when you’re heading north east.

The company for the evening was very nice, with Li, Chris Boggs, Kim Krause Berg, Bill Slawski, along with others from Commerce 360i and Avenue Razorfish whose names I can’t recall (sorry). The conversation was good, and covered a variety of topics, mostly on Search Marketing (I did also hear the big news that Li has said she’ll break, probably today). Was the 360 mile round trip worth it? I’d say yes. I don’t think I’ll be a regular visitor to the Philly meetings, but the timing was right, and I had a place to stay in the area, so it worked out nicely.

Thanks again to Li for putting the whole thing together. Now she promises to post about the VA SEM group, and I promised to actually set a date for the first meeting. So stay tuned…

Are you curious as to who has checked out your linkedin profile? Well, this week linkedin has implemented a new feature that gives you an idea of who has taken a gander at your information. As you can see below, it list the organization, and sometimes the type of role that they have in that organization, but it doesn’t list the actual person. How is this useful? Well it can make you think about who you may know at the organization that’s looked at you, and potentially send them a linkedin request, or if you’re looking for a job at a company / working on a contract with a potential client, you can see whether someone from that company has done this level of due diligence on you, and maybe it’ll give you a good feeling that it’s moving forwards, as long as you’ve done a decent job on your linkedin profile…

There has been a minor debate recently about “Supplemental Hell“, with Matt Cutts of Google talking about how having pages in the supplementals isn’t necessarily the issue that it used to be. Of course, people aren’t thrilled to be in the supplementals, as they’d much rather be in the main index and rank highly for searches. I prefer to think of supplemental results as being in a state of limbo – a perpetual state of being neither indexed nor non-indexed, due to their not being baptized with the holy link juice, or due to them not being free of original seo sin, such as duplicate content.

From what I’ve seen in the past, pages in the supplemental index are only shown in the results when the pages in the main index that match the query have all been displayed. Is that true? It would appear not to be. Here’s a search I did for “Manassas speaking Heseltine”. The first couple of results were my personal blog from the main index. Then the next result looks like a cloaking scraper site that Google has placed in the supplementals. So there should be no more main index matches for the query right? Wrong, this blog comes in next, and is quite clearly in the main index.