Search Engine Tigers

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, so what have I been up to?  Well, if you follow my Twitter account you’ll have a little bit more of an idea, but if you haven’t, the basic reason is that I’ve been busy.  Outside of regular work, I was heavily involved in putting together a conference in Las Vegas for SIPA (Specialized Information Publishers Association), which ran from Dec 8th to the 10th.  I thought it went great, with a few minor hiccups, as you’d expect from such an event.  I’d like to especially thank Frank Gruber, Li Evans, Stoney DeGuyter and Dana Todd for coming along and speaking to the publishing community.  For those that weren’t there, I believe that Frank became the first ever keynote outside of an educators conference to attempt to get the crowd to join in on a verse of “The wheels on the bus”. 

After Vegas I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies Chicago on the topic of Reputation Management.   Despite being the last session of the last day, and up against the popular ‘Black Hat tips and tactics” session, we still managed to pull in a decently sized, attentive crowd.

From time to time trolls will attack you and / or your company, most likely for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes they’re just in it for ‘fun’, sometimes it’s to be malicious, other times it can be simply because they’re angry. So what should you do when one of these hateful little trolls pops up and decides that you or your company is the bane of their existence and should be treated as though you ripped a puppy from their waif like hands before callously throwing it in front of a steamroller while laughing maniacally twiddling your overly large comedy mustache.

The first step is to identify the hateful little trolls from the real people who have an issue that can be resolved. Usually it’s in the language that they use, and the way that they self-justify everything that they say and do, despite all evidence to the contrary (SMG has a great post detailing the differences between a troll and an upset customer).

Now, there are a few different types of trolls that exist in this online world, and here’s my breakdown of the kinds I’ve seen:

1. The attention seeker – “Look at me, look at me”
2. The instigator – just wanting to provoke a response
3. The righteous indignant – the only opinion that exists is theirs, all must bend to their will
4. The two faced liars – When you communicate with them they claim to have an understanding with you, then revert to their prior troll-like existence once they’re back in public
5. The ‘ethical moralist’ – Communicating with you one on one they are foul mouthed and abusive, back in public they claim to take the moral high ground
6. The multi-faceted troll – Take any combination of the above to create your own hateful little troll

So, what should you do with these hateful little trolls? I expect you’re thinking that I’m going to say that you should just ignore them, and that ’sticks and stones… etcetera, etcetera’, well that is, unfortunately, one of the best ways to deal with these ‘people’, if you don’t feed the trolls they will generally tire and go away to harass their next victim.

But what about the collateral damage? What about the comments and the posts and the reviews, and the people that they may influence? Well, in those cases the best defense is to get your evangelists out there putting out good content about you, giving them the tools and the opportunity to defend you by offsetting those negative reviews with positive ones, the truth will come out, and those lone voices will be seen for what they are, people who don’t deserve attention, or the spotlight turning on them for even a fraction of a second.

So the best way to kill a hateful little troll is with silence while it sits in the dark slowly fading away. Now it may squeal and grunt in a desperate attempt to be noticed, but to do so would give it power, so don’t give in, resist the temptation.

Last night a new search engine launched – Cuil, pronounced Cool. Normally this wouldn’t make too much of a splash, but it’s backed by $33 million of VC money, and was founded by former Googlers. They claim to have built a better mousetrap, with more pages in their index than Google. So how does it stack up?

First things first, the home page is cleaner than that of Google’s (no specialized searches listed), and they seem to be going for the anti-Google label, with the background being black, while Google’s is white.  But what about the searches?  Naturally the first one that I did is a vanity search.  Time for it to run – 8 seconds the first time, 3 seconds the next.  Ok, so it’s not as fast as Google, but what about the results?

Rather than 10 results in a column surrounded by paid listings, Cuill has gone for 3 columns containing 11 results (4 each in the first 2 columns, and 3 in the last).  Each listing has a nice chunk of text associated with it, and an image where one can be found (not always that most contextually relevant image, but an image nonetheless).

Result quality?  Hmm, not so good.  For a search engine that claims to index more pages than Google, none of the blogs that I write on, on a regular basis are there (weekly or more frequently).  However, seosfightfat, a blog I was writing for a month earlier this year shows up in 11th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, etc.  Not something that you’d see on Google, with no more than 2 results displaying for the same domain.

I’d seen some people tweet that spam was a big problem on Cuil, so I thought I’d do some further searches to check that out, to see exactly what the extent of that problem was… unfortunately Cuil is no longer working, due to the number of people hitting their service to try it out today, which in itself is not cool.

So, is Cuil the fabled Google killer?  Probably not.  It’s going to take a lot of cash and luck to get any sizable chunk of the search engine business, just ask ASK, and MSN, both of which have tried throwing money at that very same issue, to not succeed.

For more thoughts and opinion, check out the various discussions on the topic linked to by the Search Engine Roundtable article on Cuill.

One question I’m asked at conferences is whether or not I use Twitter. I don’t. I’m quite happy using the Facebook status setting if I have something to say in 140 characters or less, and I don’t want to have another time-suck that pulls me away from doing things that need to be done.

Matt McGee and Jeff Quipp both used to be of the same opinion… now they’ve turned to the dark side and begun tweeting. On the plus side, they’ve turned it into a little competition, with money being donated to the charity of the winner by the one who gets to 500 followers last.

As for me, I’ll still resist the bright lights of Twitter, and follow the advice of the late Frankie Howerd…

Thanks to all those that attended on Saturday, especially those that drove in from Richmond & Williamsburg.  We had some great discussions, and the largest attendance to date, which unfortunately meant that we didn’t all get to talk to everyone, but I think we tried to talk to as many people as possible.  We did do some round table discussions about various topics, and got to meet some new people.

So thanks again to those that attended, and we’ll hope to see you there the next time we have a meeting.

This was my first SES in the country of my birth, but my 6th SES altogether (I did also attend SMX London last year). I would have to say that this was a very enjoyable conference. The sesions seemed to be well put together, with the moderators being encouraged to meet with their presenters in advance of the show, which I think really helped. The moderator for my session was Jon Myers, and given that he works in Manchester, and I was staying at my parents house, 20 minutes outside town… we met at his work the week before, as well as meeting for breakfast the day of the presentation.

Unfortunately I came down sick with a rather nasty cold, so I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, but those that I did attend were great, there were a great batch of presenters at this show, and like Li, I didn’t see any blatant plugging going on in presentations…

The only ‘official’ after party was the London SEO party on the last evening, when everyone that didn’t have a raging cold (that would be me) really did their best to try to drink the Camden Head pub dry, but every night there were opportunities to head out to dinner with presenters, organizers, and other attendees, which really went to show what a friendly conference this was (so friendly in fact, that I’ve been receiving emails all weekend thanking me for sharing my cold with everyone).

It was great to see old friends, and meet new ones, so here’s the shout out to one and all: The Incisive / SEW / SES / ClickZ crew (Rebecca, Marilyn, Stewart, Jackie, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin (I think that’s enough Kevin’s)), Conference co-chair Mike, the Ayima crew (Rob, Melissa, Dean, et al), Matt, Nick, Patricia, Jon, Dave, Kristjan, the SEO-Chicks (Lisa & Judith), Lee, Dave, Greg, Adam, Matt, Dixon, Christine & Li from Key Relevance, Scottie, Frank, Andrew, Amanda, Anne, and many others who I either can’t remember right now, or I put their business card in the back pocket of the jeans I washed last night… whoops.

Thanks for a great conference, and a great time, and for those of you headed to NYC in a few week… see you there.

I guess the people at the new Adam and Eve Agency (UK) didn’t do some due diligence to find out about the problems they’re going to face… I wonder how many potential clients will type mistype their adamandevelondon.com url without the ‘london’ part? Although it obviously didn’t stop them from getting Cadbury Biscuits as a client, so congratulations to them on that.

Unfortunately their site doesn’t yet list their services, it’ll be interesting to see if Reputation Management is one of their specialties.

This morning I received an email claiming to be from Blogging Zoom (I say claiming as the email address used to send the note was from  insert_your_email_address_here@server.hostgatorz.com, based on the the fact that this is also over on their blog, spelling and grammatical errors and all, I believe that it’s legit and they just messed up on the email). This note complains about the number of cut and paste submissions that have been showing up on BloggingZoom.

No More Copy Paste!!! We have made over 5 post since the birth of Blogging Zoom letting Bloggers know that they are not allowed to copy paste submissions. Your description has to be original. Now we had given an opportunity for new bloggers to get accustomed to the system and we hoped once they read all the post about submitting with copy paste, it would stopped. Unfortunately this has not happened… Every time you copy and paste your content in a submission let it be here at Blogging Zoom or any other social voting site you are giving yourself and Blogging Zoom a duplicate content filter penalty with Google.

So what do they intend to do about this?

One warning will be given, if the following submission after the warning is a copy paste submission we will be forced to BAN the URL from Blogging Zoom.

So, if there’s someone that you want to get banned from Blogging Zoom, just simply go and submit a couple of their articles over the next few days, cutting and pasting text from the article. Would they care? Well, according to Blogging Zoom, they should, as they’re bigger than Digg*

*Blogging Zoom is heading toward one day being a much stronger site then Digg and any other social site. If you need proof of this look at our Alexa vs Digg we are month ahead in traffic for the same time of Digg. If you want to be a Power Zoomer and grow with Blogging Zoom please help the community.

Semi – Latin prefix meaning half.

Semi – Slang for a semi articulated truck.

The SEMMYS – The year’s best posts in Search Engine Marketing.

Today marks the official announcement of the first annual SEMMY awards. The 2008 SEMMYs list posts from 127 authors from 111 blogs / sites in 15 different categories such as SEO, PPC, Local Search, Analytics, and Rants… The list of nominees is sourced from the month end ‘Best of the month’ posts on Matt McGee’s SmallBusinessSEM blog, and the judges include such luminaries as Rand Fishkin, Debra Mastaler, Vanessa Fox, Andy Beal, Aaron Wall, and for some strange and bizarre reason yours truly was obviously accidently asked to be a judge (maybe Matt had been watching watching some American Idol previews, and decided that he had to have an English judge named Simon).

Not only am I a judge in the Social Media section (a section which has 37 nominees!), but a post from this blog has also been nominated in the Local Search section, so I’m doubly honored. So now it’s time for you to head over to the SEMMYs, take a look at the different nominees in the different sections, and comment on your favorites, don’t take too long though, as fairly soon Matt will be standing in his tux at his virtual podium opening the envelope and saying “The SEMMY goes to…”

Oh, and next year I fully expect to see nominations for 2 new sites that I heartily recommend – EndlessPlain.com, and OldSchoolSEO.com.

Unfortunately, due to my late arrival time at the conference, I was only able to take in one other session, beyond the one I spoke at, at the Kelsey ILM conference last week. However, it was an interesting presentation titled: “Maps: They’re not just for driving”

Aaron Kahlow was the Moderator, and he actually began the session with a presentation of his own, which basically asked questions of the presenters. Firstly he asked them how maps fit in to the marketing puzzle, and how they should be prioritized. Then he reminded people that while new, disruptive technologies are fun to play with, people shouldn’t just get excited for the sake of getting excited, they need to answer the big question: What are the business applications and what’s the ROII?

The first speaker up to attempt to answer the questions was Joe Abraham. He spoke on the topic of making sure that you get your data into the various mapping systems. The first step that you should take is to make sure that you have your data correctly listed, then go to the Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, Live Local, and InfoUSA to upload your data. In Google you can add multiple locations and coupons. One way to get your business ad listed quickly in Google Maps is to create a local business ad through Adwords.

Benu Aggerwal continued the conversation, reminding people that by getting their business in the mapping systems, Google maps in particular, they run a much better chance of dominating their SERPs and pushing any ‘bad’ listings ‘below the fold’. She recommended checking the data aggregators such as Acxiom and Amacai to verify that they have your listings entered correctly. Ensure that your website is fully optimized, and if using CSS use it to stick your address as high up in the html as you can, regardless of where it actually appears on the page. Use the map APIs to enhance your website i.e. showing local atractions / restaurants for a hotel.

• Get listings on 2nd tier local directories
• Get listings in vertical directories
• Get references from other local sites
• Get Reviews on social networking sites
• Use Geotargeted PPC

Up next was Danny Moon of the appropriately named company upNext. He spoke on the natural evolution of mapping systems from 2d to 3d. His belief is that the map will eventually not be the endng point of a search, but will instead become the starting point. This will be possible as users become more sophisticated, and is supported by hardware improvements over recent years that have improved rendering capabilities.

The last presenter was Andy White. He spoke on difference between a ‘free’ mapping solution and a paid solution. While the initial price may be better, the price of development will at some point push the cost of the ‘free’ solution above that of the paid solution. You really need to look at how critical the mapping features are to your core business.

During the Q&A phase, the panel reiterate their belief that mobile will be a big driver in the growth of maps for local. One question that was asked that doesn’t have a great solution at the moment was how to handle mapping for service based businesses. The response from the panel? It’s a challenge.