X SEO

Each month, YouGov polls people on their perception of more than 1,100 brands and assigns a Buzz score ranging from 100 to -100. The brand whose raw score rose the most in April was Google, which got loads of attention last month for its augmented reality glasses and the annual Google Doodle content. Other big gainers were Netflix, which rolled out 10 new episodes of Arrested Development; Sears, aided by its nude Kardashian sisters ad campaign; and Hyundai, which got a boost from its new global ad campaign.

Source: YouGov BrandIndex brand research service 

Beware Google Bearing Gifts? When Too Much is Too Much was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

There are a few experiences that stand out ━ not only because of the impact of the action in that moment in time, but also for the reverberations that persist long after.

One such event occurred at SMX East 2011. The Ask the Search Engines session was standing room only. Google’s rep was Tiffany Oberoi and she sat at the front of the room next to reps for Bing and Blekko. Tiffany had brought with her a bottle of Windex. You can just make out its small blue form on the table next to her in the picture.

Google aims to improve its transparency, as evidenced by @tiffanyoberoi‘s bottle of windex. #smx #33a yfrog.com/khrdqmcj

— Bruce Clay, Inc. (@BruceClayInc) September 15, 2011

Her visual aid supported a claim that Google was going to be more transparent with webmasters. High marks to Tiffany for a presentation that cut through the noise. Even more impressive, Google’s stuck to its word ━ whether or not for the better of the search engine optimization industry remains up for debate.

That event was a turning point in the way Google addresses the SEO industry.

We used to get confirmation that some 400+ obscured algorithm changes had occurred over a year and we were happy to get it. Now Google parades 50+ changes to search each month, spelled out in straightforward detail. Launch codenames, project codenames, and algo updates named after cute critters?

Google’s up to something. The search engine used to lock down its intel tighter than Fort Knox and now it’s spilling secrets faster than Niagra Falls. I suspect their intent is to bombard us with more information than we know what to do with. Google tried to keep SEO in check by withholding information. The less they told us, the more we poked and dug and snooped. Now they hurl every update at us in bloody detail, sending us into a tailspin of overanalysis.

Here’s a call to value SEO wisdom above knowledge. We can use that Windex alright, but to our advantage. Let’s clean up the discourse and clear up our thinking to embrace a long view of search engine marketing beyond algo chasing.

Internet Week, a slate of showcases, conferences and workshops around New York City spanning the depth and breadth of the tech industry, kicks off May 14.

The annual gathering this year will include keynotes from such industry notables as Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation; Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp; and The New York Times journalist Brian Stelter. Additional speakers include Anomaly creative director Suzana Apelbaum; Hayley Barna, founder and co-CEO of Birchbox; Federated Media executive chairman John Battelle; Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore; Jessica Coen, editor in chief of Jezebel;  Machinima CEO and chairman Allen DeBevoise; Jane Hu, head of programming strategy at YouTube Next Lab; Andrew Madden, Google's head of magazines and news partnerships; and Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed.

Beyond the headliners, there are a number of shorter- and longer-term programming options at this year's Internet Week. There's the OMMA Mobile Conference, which will be held all day May 14 at the Internet Week Theater on Mercer Street, the Streaming Media East summit will be held concurrently at the Hilton New York and The Digiday Conference will take place the same day at the W New York. 

Other sessions of note include "the newsstand 2.0," online dating, game design, customer acquisition in emerging markets like China, the digital music industry, business blogging, mobile apps and women in tech.

Internet Week is also home to the CLIO Awards, which will be held from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. May 15 at the American Museum of Natural History.

Instagram—a company whose acquisition by Facebook made major headlines recently—is partnering with Times Square for Internet Week to spotlight photographers in a first-ever Instagram photo exhibition.

For the full list of sessions and locations, check out the Internet Week calendar. 

MySpace joined Google and Facebook in settling Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated millions of users' privacy, contrary to what the social network said in its privacy policy.

As part of the settlement, MySpace must establish a comprehensive privacy program designed to protect consumers' information and will be subjected to third-party audits of its privacy program for the next 20 years.

The FTC claimed that MySpace shared personally identifiable information with advertisers. Advertisers could use MySpace's Friend ID to locate a user's MySpace profile that included in most instances, the user's full name, as well as age, gender and profile picture. MySpace also falsely certified that it complied with the U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor Framework, according to the FTC.

The complaint covers the years 2009 and 2010, when the majority of ads on MySpace were served through Fox Audience Network. News Corp. sold MySpace last year to Specific Media for $35 million.

The MySpace settlement is the latest in a long line of actions the FTC has taken against Internet companies for privacy policies that FTC found to have violated the federal law prohibiting fraudulent, deceptive and unfair business practices. Last year, both Google and Facebook settled privacy-related charges with the FTC.

The FTC has also been active in the debate over privacy policy and regulation, recently spelling out its privacy policy guidelines in a final report released in March. Chairman Jon Leibowitz and commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen are scheduled to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee May 9 to discuss the report.
 

The Facebook IPO. Few would argue against the social media giant’s initial public offering being one of the most anticipated and watched debuts of recent history. I’d wager a tidy sum that you’re one of the 845 million reported daily users of Facebook, unless you shun technology or are a card-carrying member of protest groups that claim Facebook is destroying civilization (according to Hitwise, Facebook accounts for a ridiculous 20 percent of all Web pageviews). 

Even if so, if you read the news, it’s nearly impossible to escape the hype surrounding Facebook’s stock market opening. Valuation estimates are high, and speculation is swirling in the final days before we see if the market is ready to hit the “like” button. Here’s a look at some of the potential outcomes of Facebook going public:

1) Facebook will exceed its expected valuation in the first few days of trading. Zuckerberg et al filed IPO docs in February indicating it was seeking to raise $5 billion. With shares reportedly priced between $28 and $35, Facebook’s valuation is now expected to be between $60 billion and $75 billion. But some analysts are predicting the company’s valuation to rise as high as $140 billion. 

2) The company’s valuation and share prices will tumble after the first week. We saw it in Groupon’s stumble, as well as with Zynga, Pandora and Demand Media. Tech stocks may rise fast but just as quickly can drop off a cliff. In a way, they are as tumultuous as the whole of the technology sphere.

3) Facebook will begin—finally—to maximize mobile ads.  A recent amendment to the company’s S-1 showed that it has experienced a drop in overall ad revenue. Meanwhile, the value of each Google user is $30, compared to Facebook’s paltry $4.39 per person. Why? The ability to use geolocation in the targeting of ads (not to mention that Google's been at this monetization game for a lot longer). Facebook claims an amazing 425 million mobile users, yet the company's only mobile ads are in fact the same as its Sponsored Stories. This is going to have to change. Facebook is hiking ad rates ahead of the IPO, but the social giant—in spite of its mission to keep Facebook from becoming like ad-clogged MySpace—is losing out on a large swath of business by not maximizing mobile.

4) Zuckerberg will continue his acquisition spree. Since its inception in 2005, Facebook has swallowed up competitors and companies with technology that could be assimilated into its model. For example, in 2009 it purchased the social network aggregator FriendFeed; in 2010, it purchased rival network Friendster’s patents. Last year, Facebook made a total of nine acquisitions, including the purchase of location-based service Gowalla and mobile app developer Snaptu. This year, young as it is, has already seen Facebook acquire Instagram for $1 billion, and most recently, social discovery platform Glancee. Depending on Facebook’s stock market success, more such acquisitions could be imminent.

5) Zuckerberg will continue to wear hoodies to all major press events and executive board meetings. If nothing else on this list comes to be, this is at least certain. Whether he’s amending his “I’m CEO, Bitch” business cards is unknown.

6) A bunch more people will delete their Facebook profiles. Deleting Facebook profiles has become the new rebellion. Just like when quitting smoking cigarettes, it’s often helpful to have a catalyst or a set date on which to say goodbye—perhaps an IPO date?

7) Zuckerberg will retain majority control of Facebook, but the company’s corporate culture will change. For example, Facebook has come out in support of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which has many Internet entrepreneurs (like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian) boycotting the IPO. A public company has much more to lose by taking such polarizing positions. Much has also been written about how much fun it is to work for Facebook—with Zuckerberg banging gongs to celebrate good ideas, etc.—but as a public entity with shareholders, more attention is going to be paid to profits and professionalism. Zuckerberg has previously been criticized by his own employees for not being a more professional CEO.

Facebook will either completely revamp or kill its f-commerce platform. It hasn’t taken off. Many companies would vastly prefer commerce traffic take place on their own websites. A few companies are buying in, but many more big names are not.

9) Facebook and Google will end up in some kind of death match. Facebook doesn’t offer search yet, but it doesn’t mean it won’t look into it—especially when the company finds itself flush with IPO cash. Same goes for streaming video. Google is a mighty contender, thanks especially to its efforts to integrate its various services, but Facebook has the means and audience to give it a run for its money. A symbiosis? Not likely.

10) Facebook will finally create its own ad network. It will likely continue to try to preserve its (relatively) clean website feel by using its ad network to serve targeted ads to Facebook users on other sites. But Google and Facebook compete for ad dollars, and with its own network in place as a competitor to AdSense, it could give Google a run for that money. It’s already been working hard to beef up its analytics. 

Do you have some predictions of your own? Feel free to leave them in the comments. And remember to share this Facebook story on Facebook, just because it's meta.

It’s all over the news these days: Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of “boxes and rectangles” is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and “standard display” is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years*, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to….

…well, to something else. Mostly, if you believe the valuations these days, to big platforms that have their own proprietary ad systems.

All over the industry, you’ll find celebration of new advertising-driven platforms that have eschewed the “boxes and rectangles” model. Twitter makes money off its native “promoted” suite of marketing tools. Tumblr just this week rolled out a similar offering. Pinterest recently hired Facebook’s original monetization wizard to create its own advertising model, separate from standard display. And of course there’s Facebook, which has gone so far as to call its new products “Featured Stories” (as opposed to “Ads” – which is what they are.) Lastly, we mustn’t forget the grandaddy of native advertising platforms, Google, whose search ads redefined the playing field more than a decade ago (although AdSense, it must be said, is very much in the “standard display” business).

Together, these platforms comprise what I’ve come to call the “dependent web,” and they live in a symbiotic relationship with what I call the “independent web.”

But there’s a very big difference between the two when it comes to revenue and perceived value. Dependent web companies are, in short, killing it. Facebook is about to go public at a valuation of $100 billion. Twitter is valued at close to $10 billion. Pinterest is rumored to be worth $4 billion, and who knows what Tumblr’s worth now – it was nearly $1 billion, on close to no revenues, last Fall. And of course Google has a market cap of around $200 billion.

Independent web publishers? With a few exceptions, they’re not killing it. They aren’t massively scaled platforms, after all, they’re often one or two person shops. If “display is dead,” then, well – they’re getting killed.

That’s because, again with few exceptions, independent web sites rely on the “standard display” model to scratch out at least part of a living. And that standard display model was not built to leverage the value of great content sites: engagement with audience. Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it’s driven by direct response metrics. And unless you’re running a high-traffic site about asbestos lawsuits, that just doesn’t pay the bills for content sites.

Hence, the rolling declaration of display’s death – often by independent industry news sites plastered with banners, boxes and rectangles.

But I don’t think online display is dead. It just needs to be rethought, re-enginered, and reborn. Easy, right?

Well, no, because brand marketers want scale and proof of ROI – and given that any new idea in display has to break out of the box-and-rectangle model first, we’ve got a chicken and egg problem with both scale and proof of value.

But I’ve noticed some promising sprigs of green pushing through the earth of late. First of all, let’s not forget the growth and success of programmatic buying across those “boxes and rectangles.” Using data and real time bidding, demand- and supply-side platforms are growing very quickly, and while the average CPM is low, there is a lot of promise in these new services – so much so, that FMP recently joined forces with one of the best, Lijit Networks. Another promising development is the video interstitial. Once anathema to nearly every publisher on the planet, this full page unit is now standard on the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and countless other publishing sites. And while audiences may balk at seeing a full-page video ad after clicking from a search engine or other referring agent, the fact is, skipping the ad is about as hard as turning the page in a magazine. And in magazines, full page ads work for marketers.

Another is what many are now calling “native advertising” (sure to be confused with Twitter, Tumblr, and others’ native advertising solutions…) Over at Digiday, which has been doing a bang up job covering the display story, you’ll see debate about the growth of  publisher-based ”native advertising units,” which are units that run in the editorial well, and are often populated with advertiser-sponsored content. FMP has been doing this kind of advertising for nearly three years, and of course it pioneered the concept of content marketing back in 2006. The key to success here, we’ve found, is getting context right, at scale, and of course providing transparency (IE, don’t try to fool an audience, they’re far smarter than that.)

And lastly, there are the new “Rising Star” units from the IAB (where I am a board member). These are, put quite simply, reimagined, larger and more interactive boxes and rectangles. A good step, but not a panacea.

Before we do, let’s step back for a moment and consider the independent web site. The…content creator. The web publisher. The talent, if you will. The person with a voice, an audience, a community. The hundreds of thousands (millions, really) of folks who, for good or bad, have plastered banners all over their site in the hope that perhaps the checks might get a bit bigger next month. (Of course this includes traditional media sites, like publishers who made their nut in print, for example). To me, these people comprise the equivalent of forests in the Internet’s ecosystem. They create the oxygen that feeds much of our world: Great content, great engagement, and great audiences.

Perhaps I’m becoming a cranky old man, a Lorax, if you must, but I’m going to jump up on a stump right now and say it: curation-based platform models that harvest the work of great content creators, creating “Thneeds” along the way, are failing to see the forest for the trees. Their quid pro quo deal to “send more traffic” ain’t enough.**

It’s time that content creators derived real value from the platforms they feed. A new model is needed, and if one doesn’t emerge (or is obstructed by the terms of service of large platforms), I worry about the future of the open web itself. If we, as an industry, don’t get just a wee bit better at taking care of content creators, we’re going to destroy our own ecosystem – and we’ll watch the Pinterests, Twitters, and yes, even the Google and Facebooks of the world deteriorate for lack of new content to curate.

Put another way: Unless someone cares, a whole awful lot…it isn’t going to get better. It’s not.

Cough.

So I’m here to say not only do I care, so do the hundreds of people working at Federated Media Publishing and Lijit, and at a burgeoning ecosystem of companies, publishers, and marketers who are coming to realize it’s time to wake up from our “standard display” dream and create some new models. It’s not the big platforms’ job to create that model – but it will be their job to not stand in the way of it.

So what might a new approach look like? Well first and foremost, it doesn’t mean abandoning the site-specific approach. Instead, I suggest we augment that revenue stream with another, one that ties individual “atomic units” of content to similar “atomic units” of marketing messaging, so that together they can travel the Seussian highways of the social web with a business model intact.

Because if the traffic referral game has proven anything to us as publishers, it’s that great content doesn’t want to be bound to one site. The rise of Pinterest, among others, proves this fact. Ideally, content should be shared, mixed, mashed, and reposted – it wants to flow through the Internet like water. This was the point of RSS, after all – a technology that has actually been declared dead more often than the lowly display banner. (For those of you too young to recall RSS, it’s a technology that allows publishers to share their content as “feeds” to any third party.)

RSS has, in the main, “failed” as a commercial entity because publishers realized they couldn’t make money by allowing people to consume their content “offsite.” The tyranny of the site-specific model forced most commercial publishers to use RSS only for display of headlines and snippets of text – bait, if you will, to bring audiences back to the site.

I’ve written about the implications of RSS and its death over and over again, because I love its goal of weaving content throughout the Internet. But and each time I’ve considered RSS, I’ve found myself wanting for a solution to its ills. I love the idea of content flowing any and everywhere around the Internet, but I also understand and sympathize with the content creator’s dilemma: If my content is scattered to the Internet’s winds, consumed on far continents with no remuneration to me, I can’t make a living as a content creator. So it’s no wonder that the creator swallows hard, and limits her RSS feed in the hopes that traffic will rise on her site (a few intrepid souls, like me, keep their RSS feeds “full text.” But I don’t rely on this site, directly, to make a living.)

So let’s review. We now have three broken or limping models in independent Internet publishing: the traffic-hungry site-specific content model, the “standard display” model upon which it depends, and the RSS model, which failed due to lack of “monetization.”

But inside this seeming mess, if you stare long and hard enough, there are answers staring back at you. In short, it’s time to leverage the big platforms for more than just traffic. It’s time to do what the biggest holders of IP (the film and TV folks) have already done – go where the money is. But this time, the approach needs to be different.

I’ve already hinted at it above: Wrap content with appropriate underwriting, and set it free to roam the Internet. Of course, such a system will have to navigate business process rules (the platforms’ Terms of Service), and break free of scale and ROI constraints. I believe this can be done.

But given that I’m already at 2500 words, I think I’ll be writing about that approach in a future post. Stay tuned, and remember – “Unless….”

———

*As a co-founder of Wired, I had a small part to play in the banner’s birth – the first banner ran on HotWired in 1994. It had a 78% clickthrough rate. 

**Using ad networks, the average small publisher earns about seventy-five cents per thousand on her display ads. Let’s do the math. Let’s say Molly the Scone Blogger gets an average of 50,000 page views a month, pretty good for a food blogger. We know the average ad network pays about 65 to 85 cents per thousand page views at the moment (for reasons explained above, despite the continuing focus of the industrial ad technology complex, which is working to raise those prices with data and context). And let’s say Molly puts two ads per page on her site. That means she has one hundred “thousands” to sell, at around 75 cents a thousand. This means Molly gets a check for about $75 each month. Now, Molly loves her site, and loves her audience and community, and wants to make enough to do it more. Since her only leverage is increased traffic, she will labor at Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, promoting her content and doing her best to gain more audience.

Perhaps she can double her traffic, and her monthly income might go from $75 to $150. That helps with the groceries, but it’s a terrible return on invested time. So what might Molly do? Well, if she can’t join a higher-paying network like FMP, she may well decide to abandon content creation all together. And when she stops investing in her own site, guess what happens? She’s not creating new content for Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Google to harvest, and she’s not using those platforms to distribute her content.

For the past seven years, it’s been FMP’s business to get people like Molly paid a lot more than 75 cents per thousand audience members. We’re proud of the hundred plus million dollars we’ve injected into the Independent web, but I have to be honest with you. There are way more Mollys in the world than FMP can help – at least under current industry conditions. And while we’ve innovated like crazy to create value beyond standard banners, it’s going to take more to insure content creators get paid appropriately. It’s time to think outside the box.

—-

Special thanks to folks who have been helping me think through this issue, including Deanna Brown and the FMP team, Randall Rothenberg of the IAB, Brian Monahan, Chas Edwards, Jeff Dachis, Brian Morrissey, and many, many more. 

Google has clearly placed a lot of focus on freshness in recent months, and that continues with the company’s big list of algorithm changes for the month of April. It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable improvement in results following these changes.

Have you notices freshness-related improvements yet? Let us know in the comments.

Here are the changes Google listed today for the month of April, related to freshness:

• Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
• Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
• No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
• UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch codename "Smoothie", project codename "Smoothie"] We’ve improved the user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh news results.
• No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.

Notice that two of those are pretty much identical. Not sure if that is a mistake or if there is a subtle difference. That is the two about no freshness boosts for low quality. One of them says “content” and the other says “sites”, but the descriptions are the same.

Either way, it’s a noteworthy change, and it will be interesting to see if there is a clear impact.

As I’ve written about recently, I have found freshness to be outweighing relevancy in results sometimes, but I don’t necessarily think it’s been in relation to actual poor quality content – just when an older result makes more sense than a newer result, even if the newer one is high quality too.

Image: Parents Just Don’t Understand (via Fade Theory)

Google publishes a list every month to keep us aware of the changes coming to their search quality. April is no different and it’s a massive update containing 53 changes from domain diversity to better HTML5 resource caching.

This month’s update contains one particularly interesting change though. Google will be increasing the base index size by 15 percent. Under the codename “indexing,” Google describes the change as thus:

The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.

Related to the increased base index size, Google will also be introducing a new index tier. As you might be aware, Google keeps their index in these “tiers” where documents are indexed at different rates depending on their relevance. The new tier should increase the comprehensiveness of search for all users.

There’s another 51 changes to go and they range from fascinating to interesting. One of particular note is Google’s introduction of instant answers for the MLB season. Just trying typing sf giants score into Google and get the latest updates.

As expected, Google has finally released its big list of algorithm changes for the month of April. It’s been an interesting month, to say the least, with not only the Penguin update, but a couple of Panda updates sprinkled in. There’s not a whole lot about either of those on this list, however, which is really a testament to just how many things Google is always doing to change its algorithm – signals (some of them, at least) which could help or hurt you in other ways besides the hugely publicized updates.

We’ll certainly be digging a bit more into some of these in forthcoming articles. At a quick glance, I noticed a few more freshness-related tweaks. Google has also expanded its index base by 15%, which is interesting. As far as Penguin goes, Google does mention: “Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.”

Keyword stuffing is against Google’s quality guidelines, and was one of the specific things Matt Cutts mentioned in his announcement of the update.

Interestingly, unlike previous lists, there is no mention of Panda whatsoever on this list, though there were 2 known Panda data refreshes during April.

Here’s the list in its entirety:

More to come…