SoloSEO

The Google Buffet

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 30th, 2007

I have been able to take some more time and mess around with Google’s Universal Search over the long holiday weekend, and I really like the direction. More simple search power to the masses is very cool, but I am most happy at the possible advantages of Universal Search to small business owners, and not only as a searcher who needs more specific results more quickly.

Search engines previously returned everything they had indexed related to the keywords we entered in the search box. They were hopeful, as were we, that these results were geared and organized to meet our search motivations, and were based on a variety of factors, all weighted by the search engine algorithms. Over the years the search engines have continually got better, they are not perfect yet, but much better. Not only at returning more relevant results, but also at identifying the tricks some online marketers implement in a lame attempt to fool the engines into ranking them higher than they deserve. This has been great to watch, however over the same period of time, more and more relevant sites have come online, and with the additional content comes the problem of congested/saturated search engine results pages. The problem of many of our searches now is there is so much information, we find it difficult to efficiently find the specific category or type of information we really needed in the first place. Search engines have attempted, quite impressively, to provide us with additional search tools which could categorize our results, but typically these tools were not simple enough to use, or difficult to locate. So we just got by with what we were served, or we would tweak the search terms a bit, and tried it again if we didn’t like the first set of results. Not the most efficient way to search, but this search protocol has served us pretty well for years.

So to put the past search situation in a vernacular we can all understand, in the past we essentially had what we could call a “search buffet.” Everything available, all at once, right front of us, with the most predictably desired “food items” being the closest to our “table.” A buffet is fantastic in those situations when you want/need a buffet, but you know there are times when you just don’t want a buffet anymore, you just want to sit down and get exactly what you want. Sometimes (most the time) I just want a New York strip, medium, with a baked potato, with everything on the side, salad with ranch, hold the olives and stale bread cubes you call croutons, and Diet Pepsi (NOT DIET COKE), and keep ‘em coming. Oh, and if you have a chocolate cake with ice cream for desert, please put it on deck, because we are going to need one of those in a bit. You know what I mean? We don’t want or need a buffet everyday, too much of a good thing isn’t always the best, especially when we have a specific meal in mind. Well the same is now true in search, we don’t have to eat at the buffet everyday anymore, and our specific search goals can now be better met.

Google Universal Search gives us the power to more easily narrow our search focus, based on the category of the information we are searching to find. Now to be fair, search engines have previously attempted to give us tools to narrow our search focus, but most people just didn’t use them, maybe it was too confusing, or maybe didn’t even know the options were there, but ultimately these tools didn’t get used. So even though we could have enjoyed a more focused, less buffetish search lifestyle, we didn’t. Now Google hopes they have made searching within predetermined categories so much easier, we will enjoy more focused searches and ultimately a better searching experience with no additional effort.

As business owners, we should all be grateful for this development, and the simplicity of categorized search for searchers. Now we will be not have to compete with Wikipedia and other unrelated sites for a top search position in our marketplace, we will again be competing against our competitors, and that is something we already do and understand. The key is going to be making sure our site relays our business purpose and information properly to the search engines, so our sites can be categorized accurately. Essentially this means succinct SEO will become more important, as it will help us get our sites in front of our “pre-screened” clients. If the search engines don’t know what we are about, they will not be able to put us where we feel we need to be. Which brings me to my next point, these various categories will also allow us to get our sites where we feel they are going to be most successful, where we think we will see more conversions. This added search marketing freedom will give many of us the opportunity for more creative online marketing strategies, which will hopefully make all this SEOing more interesting, while being more beneficial.

Google’s Universal Search, and any attempt by the search engines to further categorize, and fine-tune search results, to a searcher’s true search intent is fantastic improvement. It is a better situation for searchers and for business owners, as the chance of each party finding each other increases over time. Nice.

Add comment Visited 2750 times May 30th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Learn SEO Basics: Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 29th, 2007

Anchor text for inbound links is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. According to SEOmoz’ search engine ranking factors (v2), anchor text is the 2nd most important positive factor.

“The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors — often the most important factor — for how you will rank in Google.” (Danny Sullivan, Mar 15, 2007)

Now that I have your attention, let’s learn about anchor text, and how to benefit from this very important factor.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible text of a link. For example, if I was going to link to a friend’s blog, I might use his name for the anchor text.

Check out Todd Malicoat’s blog.

If I wanted to make the most out of my link for Todd, I would use a nice keyword for my anchor text, for example:

Check out Todd Malicoat’s blog on SEO Consulting.

Todd ranks pretty well already for SEO consulting. If you check the anchor text for his backlinks, he has tons of links for “SEO Consultant” and “SEO Consulting”. If you do a search in Google for “SEO Consultant”, notice how the words “SEO Consulting” get highlighted as well. The words are very related and mean about the same thing, and so Todd is going to rank well for both of those terms. Obviously the anchor text of the link is not the SOLE reason Todd ranks well, but it is a major reason.

The Power of Anchor Text

Many examples show the power of anchor text, but here is one simple one:

Computers

Skip the wikipedia result and look at the Dell result. If you view Dell’s homepage you don’t see the word “computer” anywhere. When you view the source you can find the word “computer” just one time, in the meta tag for keywords. Obviously that doesn’t have the power to get it to that kind of ranking. If you check the anchor text of its backlinks you’ll notice a lot of their backlinks use the text “Dell Computers” or something with the word “computer” in it.

How do I use Anchor Text to benefit my SEO?

Any link building efforts should start with keyword analysis, identifying the keywords you want to rank better for. There are several tools for keyword research, including our Keyword Finder tool in SoloSEO that lets you find keywords from Overture, WordTracker, and Google Adwords all at once and to compare the results side by side.

Link building comes in many forms. Whether you’re requesting links from other sites, submitting to directories, or buying links, it is important to make the most out of your link by choosing the right anchor text. If you are requesting links from others, have the code for your link all ready to go, easy for them to insert into their webpage.

Keep in mind that having all of your anchor text the exact same from all your links may not be the best approach. Try mixing it up by adding a word, changing from singular to plural, or stemming a word differently. Just like above, Google considers “Consulting” and “Consultant” to be very related, enough that they would highlight the other word even though it doesn’t match your search term.

Some other articles on the topic

How to Link to Your Friends, by Todd Malicoat

The Power of Anchor Text, by John Chow (more like Google Bombing, but the Googlebombing algorithm hasn’t hurt him yet)

Aaron Wall’s post about the depreciation of anchor text

V7N discusses link vs content and the ending is a great quote (spoiler alert? hehe):

PageRank does matter. In fact, anchor text and inbound links is 95% of effective search engine optimization. Anyone who tells you otherwise does not practice real search engine optimization.

Subscribe to our RSS feed for my upcoming follow-up post about advanced tips for ways to control anchor text of inbound links, and ways to get more of them.

19 comments Visited 12123 times May 29th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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A Tribute to Those Who Served

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 28th, 2007

I remember the first time I learned what Memorial day was and what it meant. I was in 4th grade, standing in the back of the gym during a school play. My dad was filming the play (my sister or brother must have been in it). Before the play started they asked all the Veterans to stand up. I asked my dad what they were doing and why we were clapping for them. It was Memorial day weekend, and we were honoring those who served and died for our country.

Andy linked to a nice site with information on Memorial Day, and one of the links caught my eye:

How to observe

I’ve always tried to reflect on those who have served and died for our country, pray for those who now serve and their families, and we have a picnic with family. But beyond that I have not really done anything in observance, but would like to begin a tradition with my family now.

These are some of the suggestions for observing this holiday:

- by visiting cemeteries and placing flags or flowers on the graves of our fallen heroes.
- by visiting memorials.
- by flying the U.S. Flag at half-staff until noon.
- by flying the ‘POW/MIA Flag’ as well (Section 1082 of the 1998 Defense Authorization Act).
- by participating in a “National Moment of Remembrance”: at 3 p.m. to pause and think upon the true meaning of the day, and for Taps to be played.
- by renewing a pledge to aid the widows, widowers, and orphans of our falled dead, and to aid the disabled veterans.

The photo is from the World War II Memorial in Washington DC. It is a fairly new Memorial, and there is tons to look at. There are several other Memorials in the vicinity as well.

Thank you to those who have served our country, and thank you to those who serve today.

1 comment Visited 1753 times May 28th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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25% of Google Searches are Fresh

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 23rd, 2007

A couple of items caught my attention yesterday. Aaron Wall reported that Google is claiming up to 25% of search queries run any given day are queries they have never processed previously. I found that to be quite a shocker. Also, Andy reported that Google has included a “Hot Trends” feature to their Google Trends tool, so we are now better able to see what people are searching for in Google. What does this all mean in SEO, quite a bit on one hand, and not too much on the other.

First off, if 25% of Google searches are new and fresh, many of us are going to need to start focusing more attention on figuring out more creative long-tail keyword phrases, which we don’t have any prior data on as no one has used these search terms all together previously. This is actually a pretty exciting concept, it gives us more reason to really think about how our potential clients are searching for our products or services, and then attempt to be there for them on their resulting SERP page. This fresh search revelation should bring more mainstream marketing and advertising concepts/tatics into our search strategies, making it more enjoyable. I am not afraid to admit that I personally have found researching keywords, and finding little variations of keywords to be quite a mundane task from time to time, so this new focus makes me quite happy. We all know that it is important and necessary to finely hone our keywords to gain search traffic, but sometimes it can become a bit too unimaginative, dare I say boring, as we tend to just rely on fabulous tools, and basically let our minds go numb. So now finding out 25% of queries in Google are new and fresh should readjust our attention to keywords quite a bit, and should get those creative juices in our search marketing campaigns percolating. We now know there are many chances to rank #1 in the SERPS, if we get some of the long tail search terms right in our SEO efforts.

Now to Google’s Hot Trends functionality, I believe this will be less important to most business focused sites concerned with SEO, but still will be a socially popular feature. I personally don’t understand the Digg mentality of what’s hot/what’s not in the social media scene, it doesn’t resonate. Unfortunately Digg has proven time and time again to not deliver really good quality content frequently enough to warrant any consideration from knowledge seeking individuals. Along this vein, I don’t think tracking the Hot Trends in Google search will be overly helpful in most online marketing campaigns either (unless you are looking to attract the non-purchasing Diggers). It will be more of a interesting online distraction for those with a little more time to waste than most small business owners typically enjoy. It might generate a business idea or two for some, but for the most part I see little benefit to eventual betterment of anyone’s SEO efforts.

It is an exciting time in search marketing, the Search Engines are getting better as delivering what we need, filtering (punishing) what we don’t, there are many new search patents being granted, as covered by Bill of SEO by the SEA (best blog to stay up to date on new search technologies coming). And with the recent announcement of Google’s Universal Search (can’t wait to see this in action), there are going to be many more changes to search in the near to distant future. We are going to need to be aware of these changes and account for them in our SEO efforts. I am sure with the constant flow of new functionality, we are going to have to have to continually adjust our focus, tools and technique to best exploit new search opportunities, while we maintain a solid search presence. In search change is always an opportunity, and our SEO techniques needs to keep pace to make the most of it.

4 comments Visited 3375 times May 23rd, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Does SEO work in Hawaii?

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 15th, 2007

I was gone all last week, in Maui. Yeah baby. It was our first time to Maui, and I loved it. I didn’t even think about writing a post the whole week, I am sure you understand. We had a great time, we enjoyed the beauty of the island, stayed in an amazing place with good friends, played a bunch of golf, hung out with my wonderful wife (who, we discovered, is allergic to macadamia nuts, poor thing), and made some new friends. One of the new friends we actually met on the plane over, his name is John Kennedy, and he is a manager of a wonderful magic/comedy show in Lahaina on Maui called Warren and Annabelle’s. If you are visiting Maui, you MUST attend this show, it was amazing. John, and the entire W&A staff treated us like family (in a good way), and we will never forget the experience, it was fortunately unforgettable. We saw the show on Monday night and were on the island the rest of the week, so later on in the week we called John and he kindly joined us for a round of golf on the Makena North course (which has some of the best views on the island, better than the Kapalua Plantation course, and is frankly a better course, but once again I digress).

During our round the usual topics were up for discussion, and we eventually discussed what we do for a living. I had given John a sleeve of SoloSEO logo golf balls, so he asked about SoloSEO specifically. (In fact, I will be happy to send out a sleeve of these Callaway HX Tour balls, to the first person who leaves a nice comment, and sends their address to info@soloseo.com, these are so rare and new, not even Michael has a sleeve yet). John listened to my simple explanation of what SoloSEO was, and he asked a question many have asked previously… “Does it work?” Excellent question. Either due to beauty of the course, my miserable play, or our competitive banter I don’t remember ever answering John’s question, so I apologize, and now thought I would take some time to fully answer John’s question here. John, a resounding YES, SEO does work, and here is why.

SEO is a process of getting your site into a format in which the search engines can scan it, quasi understand it, categorize it, then refer it to others when the search engines feel your site can deliver what the search client is looking for based on the text they entered into the search engine. Any of the search engines want to handle searches as efficiently and effectively as possible. They are attempting to earn the public’s trust and gain search traffic, ultimately so they can demand advertising dollars from firms who want access to the traffic the search engine attracts daily. This is why we have sections on a search engine results page, consisting of both organic (free) and paid (ads paid for to the search engine for positioning) search results. To keep the public’s trust, search engines must not unfairly mess with the organic search results, which are algorithmically based on a number of factors, including many of the resulting work we control/create in SEO processes.

In the past there were an enterprising, yet deceitful group, who learned to “game” the search engines, using what has been termed “black hat” techniques. These techniques essentially fooled search engines into believing some poor quality site actually had quality content, and reputable products or services which matched what the search clients were search for. Instead, when these pages were visited, search clients would find a bunch of nonsensical text coupled with paid text ads, ironically usually placed by the search engine which originally referred the searcher to this garbage site. This did not make the search engines appear proficient, and the black-hat site owners didn’t care. They were greedily hoping search clients would click on the paid ads, rather than the browser’s back button, so they could make some commission paid to them from the search engines. Very creepy. It would be like finding what appeared to be the best ad in the Yellow Pages for a plumber, then driving to the advertised address only to find a smelly, dark, smoke filled shop, with a greesy guy convincing you to take some pamphlets they had on real plumbers. Then the slime ball expecting the Yellow Pages to pay them for each pamphlet taken by the originally deceived client. It wouldn’t fly in the real world, and it shouldn’t have flown in search.

Who were the big losers in this game of search deceit? First, the searchers, who were looking for something, but made to go through junk sites to find it. Second, the search engines, who were attempting to provide clients with a relevant site, but instead delivered garbage, making the engine look bad, and hurting their reputation. Third, the firms paying the search engines to place the company ads on quality pages, which were instead placed on pages of non-sensical text, which unfortunately associated the firm with the junk site. In all, it was a very bad period in search, and ultimately called into question the search engine’s ability to decipher the good pages from the bad ones, and the effectiveness of good SEO technique. Now the good news, the search engines are now doing an excellent job, really since November 2006, of figuring out these junk sites and removing them from the search results pages, and search has become much better for it.

Now the search engines have a better ability of determining the quality of the sites they index, good SEO technique is more important than ever. Now solid SEO can actually have a bigger and better influence on your site’s performance, than was possible when the search engines results could be tainted by the black hats. Now we can be assured if we do the SEO work, which is most definitely work, then our hard labor will be rewarded, and our sites will perform better, since site quality is more identifiable. The search engines have essentially created a situation where those who work hard are rewarded, and those that still attempt to cheat are more than likely caught, and their offending sites punished. Just how it should have always been.

There are many wonderful, and quality SEO tools out there, but SoloSEO offers the most comprehensive set of online SEO tools, all in one place. SoloSEO gives you a location where you can manage all your SEO processes, from link building to keyword research, from content creation to online competitive analysis, and keeps it all organized for you. In fact, just having a SoloSEO account can improve your online competitive knowledge. SoloSEO offers monthly SEO related reports that can be customized, and sent to you on a monthly basis, via email, without you lifting a finger. With SoloSEO, you will not only know more about the online competitive situation of your industry, but you will have the tools at your disposal to flex some serious SEO muscle, and improve your competitive online position.

So there you have it John, SEO works, everywhere, and even in Hawaii (even if I don’t). SEO is becoming a better use of marketing time and effort because the search engines finally have their act together. To you John on a personal note, thank you for the conversation on the plane, and advice on what to do on Maui, thank you for the evening at Warren and Annabelle’s is was most memorable, thank you for the golf, it was a blast, and thank you for the question, it was an excellent one. We look forward to meeting up with you again soon on Maui (or here)! Until then, to you a heartfelt Aloha and Mahalo!

5 comments Visited 2394 times May 15th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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SEO and Widgets, Review the SoloSEO Blog

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 11th, 2007

Todd (StuntDubl - SEO Consultant) brought my attention to an interesting widget that lets you put in your own rating of a blog. The widget is still in beta but appears to be working well and to be a neat widget.

RateItAll.com appears to have some SEO sense as they are including two links at the bottom of the code they give you for the widget, and the text of one of the links changes based on the category you selected upon sign-up. Lawrence Coburn’s SexyWidget.com is a great place to keep up and learn about widgets. He spoke at PubCon last year and he definitely knows a lot about SEO and widgets. Creating a widget can be a fabulous way to build links quickly (depending on its virality) if you approach it the right way.

I’m going to wait on putting it in the sidebar for now, but please leave your own quick review in the widget below:

Add comment Visited 2242 times May 11th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Becoming SEO Famous: Neil Patel, YOUmoz, SEM Scholarship

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 10th, 2007

I’m obviously not the authority on SEO fame (if I was I’d be famous), but I wanted to write about a few opportunities that can help you to become famous, at least in SEO. First, Neil Patel from ProNet Advertising has started his own blog with a cute domain, QuickSprout.com. It’s all about this topic, and he gives you experiences and tips on things that helped him and others to become well-known in the industry.

We all know SEOmoz, but do you know YOUmoz? YOUmoz is SEOmoz’ user generated content blog where you get to be featured on SEOmoz. If your post is good enough they’ll even move it onto the main page. That should attract some attention to you! I thought I’d try it out, so I posted a YOUmoz article on Google’s Next Move: Movie Screen Advertising. It’s an interesting post that I think any marketer or business person would find interesting. While you’re there… give it a thumbs up (if you like it, of course).

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim created a scholarship for search engine marketers (SEM Scholarship) that gives anyone a chance to show off your SEM/SEO skills by writing an informative article and then getting it traffic. The winner from the first scholarship was Ben Wills and I know he received a lot more than just those prizes. The scholarship deadline is past now, but subscribe to Andy’s feed and you’ll be ready for the next contest when it comes along.

So, who wants to be SEO famous?

2 comments Visited 3897 times May 10th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO

Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 7th, 2007

I love a challenge. In fact, if I don’t take on a challenge it drives me nuts. So when Darren Rowse came out with his group writing contest (project) with the topic of “Top 5″, I had to come up with an entry. I thought I would get creative and make a top 5 list of top posts from top experts in SEO.

Obviously I couldn’t cover more than 5 industry experts, as they are many more than 5. Also, if you don’t have a “Top Posts” page on your blog I couldn’t include you. Stuntdubl highly recommends you do that.

1) Michael Gray (GrayWolf) has a remarkable series on local search, but one of his top 100 posts on local search is titled 13 Ways to Promote Your Local Business for Free. He gives a comprehensive list of local search techniques and websites that anyone can make use of, no matter their budget. (Interestingly, GrayWolf’s review of SoloSEO is found on his top 100 posts page…neat!).

2) Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl) has a wealth of posts at his top posts page. One of the top posts that I will never forget is on The Link Building Cycle - 6 Steps of the Link Building Process. He goes through the entire process of building links, a great primer for anyone interested in SEO. I couldn’t leave out The SEO Playbook too, which will go down as a classic in Todd’s blog posts and SEO history.

3) In Lee Odden’s (Online Marketing Blog) most popular posts page he includes the top 10 posts in terms of traffic received. One that stood out to me is one of Lee’s signature topics, The Lowdown on Press Release Optimization. Lee was part of an excellent panel at PubCon last year on Press Releases. From his top blog post on press releases:

Other than press releases, another way to get into sites like Google news is to write articles and submit them to publication web sites and also blogs that are already getting picked up by Google newsbot. Perform a search on Google News for relevant keywords and note the sites that are getting picked up. Find out if they accept articles and press releases and submit.

4) Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz, which I prefer to pronounce as sea-moss just for fun) has a most popular ever page but you can also break it down to the past day, week, month, etc.. The top post ever related to SEO (first is his proposal) is Ranking Factors Version 2, which actually points to the actual article, but discusses its overall findings. This Ranking Factors gets help from industry experts to decide on what is important, what is not, and to what degree, in terms of ranking factors for search engine optimization. It is a must read (and must study) for everyone in SEO.

5) Brian Clark (CopyBlogger) is one of the blogs that really made a significant impact in our content business, and is a staple blog for anyone in Internet Marketing. In the sidebar of his blog he lists popular posts, and one that I love is How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. He links out to an incredible list of resources that combat the topic of attracting links and increasing traffic. Refer to this list often, and you will find your SEO starts improving quickly.

These experts and others have provided a wealth of information for SEOs. Without much formal instruction in search engine optimization, this is where we can dive in and learn everything we can about optimizing for both users and search engines. This is one amazing facet of SEO, that SEO experts that charge thousands and thousands for this information will share it freely on their blog. It’s a fantastic community, and I have certainly grown in my knowledge by leaps and bounds just from learning from the experts.

67 comments Visited 11069 times May 7th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Ding Dong Digg is Dead

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 2nd, 2007

There have been many discussions over the recent problems at Digg, Andy of Marketing Pilgrim, Muhammad of Pronet, and Michael of Wolf-Holf have all commented. I have made my less than glowing opinion of Digg known in a previous post. In general, I don’t find the articles typically found on the front page of Digg to be of any particular use to anyone over the age of 20, or with interests outside video games and the latest hack. There are some which claim the traffic Diggers can drive to your site is worth pandering to the Digg clique, but I have never agreed. The traffice is short-lived, and Diggers don’t buy.

In the present situation, we have been provided a clear view of the true nature of the Digg beast. Recently Digg management chose to remove an article posted on Digg, which revealed the decryption code required to unlock copyright protected HD-DVDs. To any business person, who has been around the block and understands the severe problems one can face when messing with copyrighted material, especially from a very wealthy and notoriously litigious industry, the move made perfect sense. But the move was seen as censorship by the Digg asylum and they promptly began flooding the Digg site with story after story containing the same decryption code. Eventually Digg gave up, and issued a statement they were no longer going to remove any articles, despite the potential ramifications. By giving so much power to individuals who don’t care about Digg, nor have the cognitive abilities to comprehend the purpose of law, Digg signed its own death warrant long ago, it is only now they have to suffer it. Lesson learned by all.

This reminds me of the Wizard of Oz in a way. We all remember those creepy flying monkeys, (they used to scare the living be-dangles out of me), as they would fly around doing the Wicked Witch’s work for her. Well the Witch always assumed she had total control over these monkeys, then one day a hack of a monkey showed up with some of the Wizard’s treasure, he just decided to grab it on his own accord and share with the other monkeys. The Witch was furious. She didn’t want the heat of the Wizard focused on her, so she promptly returned the treasure and hoped trouble would be avoided. Well this miserable hack monkey didn’t like being disgraced in front of the gang, so he and all his flying monkey friends started stealing everything they could from the Wizard coffers, and quit paying attention to the Witch’s warnings at all. In fact, Doe-Doe, the talking, flying monkey, told the witch exactly where she could stick her flying broom, and the delicate balance of Oz crumbled. Predictably the Wizard crushes the Witch and her castle in the near future. Now the monkeys have little treasure, but no power or place to live, which was previously provided by the witch. Stupid, stupid flying monkeys (even Doe-Doe), and what are flying monkeys going to do with treasure anyway. Think it through monkeys.

1 comment Visited 2526 times May 2nd, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Google… Here they go again.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 1st, 2007

I read an interesting/alarming Associated Press article by Dibya Sarkar, AP business writer, in the local paper yesterday. Four states, including Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, have agreed to “free consulting services” provided by Google. Essentially Google is going to help these states make searching and finding online public documents much easier. While I am the first to admit the Utah state web site needs some serious help, I have been frustrated more than once looking for items which should be much easier to find then they are, I am not totally okay with the planned partnership. I will admit there have been occasions I have been navigating around utah.gov to no avail, not finding what I needed, and actually have attempted to use Google possibly find a page indexed in their SERPs, but with little success there either. Turns out states really haven’t done a good job making these documents truly public, there are those tax dollars at work again. But despite the mess, is Google the best way to go as “search consultants?”

There are those in the article who raised some concerns over Google’s occasional privacy gaffs, and the possibility that some private information might make its way to the search public. I think the hesitation is legitimate, none of us wants our Social Security number out there for the ID thieves to pilfer. So I too hope these states will be responsible and keep all private information private, even at the risk of holding some important documents back for now, before they go and throw the vaults wide open to the brutally efficient, ravenous spiders of Google.

From a business/SEO perspective this partnership also raises other concerns. Are we now going to be forced to compete for keywords against state governments and their Gigabytes of content to rank in the SERPs? Some industries will be hurt more than others, but off the top of my head I could see legal firms, business consulting firms, and accounting firms being big losers in search if all this content is indexed and added to Google’s already gorged servers. As more content pours online, competition for keywords is going intensify, and the situation may make search a more frustrating and difficult task if the SEs don’t change. This content boom adds a strong argument to the importance of categorized search ASAP. If the public is without a simple way to categorize search results, many businesses are going to find themselves buried in the SERPs underneath content created by their own tax dollars. How grossly ironic, how patently unfair.

Add comment Visited 1860 times May 1st, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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