And as I talk to those who would label themselves SEOs, I really have to disagree with their self-assessments. Here are a few [...]]]> Despite the recession, I’m in a fortunate place where we still hire talented SEOs fairly regularly. No hiring freeze, no reduced demand for services, although sometimes the traffic we’re after is in decline.

And as I talk to those who would label themselves SEOs, I really have to disagree with their self-assessments. Here are a few things that I see as failure points in their claims:

• If you claim to be an SEO, you need to have a web site. Your own web site. maybe even 3 or 10. It can be a blog. It can be pictures of your dog. But no web site, and I will doubt you. Claiming to be an SEO and not having a personal site is just suspicious for me. (Exception: You work on sites outside of your work for other groups, like a non-profit.)
• You’d better have a Gmail account. Seriously. You’re an SEO without a Google account? What?! I may wear a tinfoil hat as far as Google services are concerned, but I do, in fact, have something like 5 Gmail or Gmail-powered e-mail accounts. (I’m using it as the back-end for e-mail on one of my domains.)
• You know what ‘Vince’ is. I’m willing to be flexible about knowledge of ‘Florida.’ But know the big recent stuff. Read. every dynamite SEO I know reads the industry news – at work, at home, on the bus via mobile device.
• You come in to tell me about your good ranking for a term like ‘plastic patio furniture.’ I don’t give a rip for rank. Did you make phat profit on traffic from the term? No? Then what’s the use? I have a site that ranks great for the term ‘boldly.’ Woo hee hoo. It’s a completely useless referral term. Rank is stank.
• You have never submitted a site to a directory or requested a link from another web site. Don’t tell me you’re an SEO if you’ve never done either of these. They’re basic. If you haven’t done them, I’m supposed to buy that you understand the nuances of domain strategy?
• You aren’t using FireFox. The things you can do quickly and without thought in FireFox are so significant that failure to do so tells me you overvalue manual processes. Efficiency:We likes it.

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Sure, recession = employer’s market. But even during the boomtime of ‘everyone needs SEOs! Everyone can be an SEO!’ much of the above could be seen as an engagement factor. Want to transition from dead trees to web marketing? Go build yourself a site and doink with it. Talk about how you did it, what you did, what you learned. That goes far with a lot of legit web marketers, because you know what? They didn’t teach me black-hat in business school. I learned it over double-shot mochas farting around with a domain I didn’t care if I blew up.

I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator. The blogs I have subscribed in Reader fall into three categories: Search/Marketing, Bicycling, and maybe one or two blogs belonging to friends that are a mix of both [...]]]> I have personal proof that your search history, when logged in to Google, is applied to other Google properties.

I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator. The blogs I have subscribed in Reader fall into three categories: Search/Marketing, Bicycling, and maybe one or two blogs belonging to friends that are a mix of both SEO and personal stuff. I also subscribe to updates on my friends’ Flickr feeds.

Nothing about parenting in there. However, I had been doing a lot (LOT) of searching around infant feeding recently due to the need to feed an infant, and figuring stuff out as a new parent. Note that NONE of my Google Reader feeds had anything to do with these topics.

So, today, in my ‘Top Recommendations’ box, what’s suggested to me? Two SEO-focused blogs and a blog about… breastfeeding:

(image is clickable for detail. You can see the sort of stuff I have subscribed in Google Reader, too, if you’re that kind of voyeur!)

Nothing in my RSS history suggests I care about breastfeeding. My search history is another thing altogether. I can only conclude that the suggestions are feeding from my logged-in search history, and not just which feeds I have live in Reader. There is no other logical explanation.

I really don’t know that I like this. There’s all sorts of stuff I search on that I might not want to read about every day. Like… breastfeeding.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on [...]]]> Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

• Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
• John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
• Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
• Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
• Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
• Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

The first isn’t truly a privacy concern, but it crosses [...]]]> The latest round of privacy (and other) concerns of various types are now hitting Google Earth:

1. Salon discusses how the alleged plot against JFK airport was being plotted with the images on Google Earth.
2. CNN discusses the ick factor of finding nosepickers in action on Google Earth imagery.

The first isn’t truly a privacy concern, but it crosses over into the concepts of how reliable GPS is set up to be, and government oversight (or wish to borrow) the data streams collected by a search engine.

The second does get into privacy. CNN itself covers it. If a picture is at the wrong time, we can identify people getting medical treatment, etc. Now, sure, they’re walking into a public door. But there’s still a sense of that being a moment, and not captured in an image to be searchable for a long time. There’s a lot to be said for people’s sense of moment vs. memory — I did entire papers on such subjects as an undergrad lit major, and the reason it’s so thematic in literature is because it’s a truism of the human condition.

It’s interesting to see how more broad-market publications are starting to look at these issues. It makes me wonder when they’ll hit more of personalized search.

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its [...]]]> In all the hub-bub about Google Universal Search, and the impact of Web History/Personalization/iGoogle on results, there’s something I don’t know that I’ve seen, but seems like an inevitable next step:

Impact of Universal and History on the display of PPC.

One of the places where AdWords pales in comparison to the MSN AdCenter is in its behavioral targeting category. Given that it’s being said that Web History is impacting search results for users, and now we have Universal Search impacting the results pages… it’s really a no-brainer to have these elements hit the profitable part of any given search page.

While Mom-n-Pop PPC advertisers may not use much in the way of behavioral targeting features, if available, big-brands and agency PPC buyers will be all over it.

He doesn’t mention Google Analytics, but I think GA also factors into Google’s reach for control. There’s some extent to which I [...]]]> I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook wrote a great post this week about Google and the ‘death’ of affiliate marketing. He really focuses on AdSense publishing, but I believe it goes further than that.

He doesn’t mention Google Analytics, but I think GA also factors into Google’s reach for control. There’s some extent to which I believe that the ‘free’ implementation of GA may have a greater price than many perceive.

First, it’s free up to 5 million page views/month… unless you’re displaying AdSense. Then, it’s unlimited. By doing both AdSense and GA, you’re providing Google a lot of traffic data on your site.

…the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may retain and use any data they collect via one’s use of the GA service:

Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

Generally speaking, they cannot disclose specific, identifiable information about your site data to others without court order or consent. However, nothing within anyone’s privacy policy I’ve ever seen or written restricts a company’s ability to take the confidential data and use it internally.

I just think this opens a huge can of worms. You run a business that you want to develop qualified leads from search engines. You are handing a complete picture of all your traffic issues to one of your traffic sources — who can then learn all about where all your traffic is coming from, not just the traffic they’re sending you (or the traffic they can identify via people using Google Toolbar and Web History…).

Obviously, with some sites, this gives Google insider information to bid on other services to absorb into empire. This could lead to a better bid… or an early bid that’s lowball, but more than a lot of people ever thought to hope for. With many others, it gives them information to create speedbumps and roadblocks to search optimization.

This is why I typically tell my clients to pay for an analytics package, and why the company I work for provides an analytics package. It just seems safer and less fraught with peril.

Now, to be fair, there are ways to disable flowing [...]]]> Today’s big news:

1. Google revenue is up 60%. Google profit is up 69%
2. Google re-named Search History to Web History, and are pushing the toolbar with PR enabled to track it better.
3. Tinfoil futures are UP as I manufacture hats for myself, all my loved ones, and my cats.

Now, to be fair, there are ways to disable flowing your surf history into Google Web History. Danny Sullivan does a nice job of explaining how to ‘pause’ the feature.

I remain she who bites the hand what feeds her, and this data collection makes me queasy. I may start lining my tinfoil hat with asbestos.

Update: Look at all the privacy complaints rolling in. Kick ass.

I know Notebook launched in April 2006, but I can’t recall having seen this show up like this prior to now:

Is this another collaborative filter-Web 2.0-data collection manuever? Or is it just a ‘hey, [...]]]> Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but when did Google start showing ‘Note This?’ links in search results for signed-in users?

I know Notebook launched in April 2006, but I can’t recall having seen this show up like this prior to now:

Is this another collaborative filter-Web 2.0-data collection manuever? Or is it just a ‘hey, no one knows this exists?’ moment? And why can’t I find people saying anything about this?

Need more coffee now.