“I got an e-mail from a company that says they will submit me to 181 search engines for $(small amount of money). Should I do it?”

Truly, these people mean well. They see a low price tag and think/hope there might be value in it.

I always end up having to crush them. Assuming a $35 submission fee, that’s between 8 and 10 delicious gourmet schmancy coffee drinks. Mmm, caffeine.

Submission to the top 3 search engines — Google, Yahoo, and MSN — is technically unnecessary, as they’re all crawler-based, but if it makes you feel good, it can be done while drinking one of the abovementioned caffeinated treats. Yum. I actually tend to recommend submitting to MSN, because they’ve been totally irregular about indexing some of the sites I’m associated with even when we submit. Ask only recently started allowing submission, rounding out the top 4 properties.

Then, let’s look at Nielsen’s list of the top 10 search referring properties in the US, June edition. Pretty much everything in the 6 remaining entrants in the top 10 have some relationship or data feed from the top 4. So, with the top 4, you’re really probably reaching into about 96.5% of households.

So, what to do with those other 7-9 coffee drinks? I typically recommend making a coffee date with your web traffic reports, once a week, for 7-9 weeks with the rest of the money you saved by not using a submissions service. Check your referring sites and URLs. See if you see any chances for inbound link building. Get all happy inside if your search referrals start going up. Be a coffee achiever.

I think for both agencies and little guys, this is outstanding news. I’ve said before that I think some bad behaviors by little webmasters tends to occur from good intentions (the road to hell, etc.). Having clear communications when these good intentions really do lead into hell will benefit the perpetrators, and hopefully improve overall content quality within SERPs.

As far as agencies are concerned, I already think Webmaster Central gives the agency a better view of what the client may be doing on their own, especially as far as ill-conceived (well undoubtedly well-intentioned) independent link-building is concerned. Having a formal communications channel when penalties or removals occur helps deal with client confusion, and to deal with the inevitable questions:

• “You’re an SEO. Can’t you just call someone at Google and have them fix it?” (no)
• “How can you tell I’m penalized?” (duh, check your traffic and indexing)

Ought to be fun to see how this develops…

I completely agree. However, I think it becomes increasingly difficult in our world of information abundance. How many ’signals’ are really just noise?

Take, for instance, the meteoric rise of online video. Allegedly, 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube each DAY. Many of these are likely low-grade cell phone videos. I shudder to think how many camera phone images are put on sites like Flickr each day. (I admit guilt, there. The camera phone is useful for impromptu cat pictures.)

When faced with this kind of volume, many small businesses and even large Web sites are prone to doing things that create noise, mistaking their actions as signal-creation. Video is a form of interactivity, true, but what is in your video? Just as early business web sites presented brochures in HTML, I expect to see a lot of web sites uploading their standard TV commercials, regardless of buzz quality or content. Arguably, this is just noise, but it may be evolutionary for these businesses. It lets them get started thinking about how to use video to create real value.

Similarly, most cases of content duplication within a domain is done out of a wish to create signals — at least within my experience. Unfortunately, in most cases, all the site owner does is create noise. Having 50 pages of the same content, save for the name of a state, adds nearly no value for a user or a search engine. On the other hand, while this may potentially get a site into some hot water, it too may be evolutionary.

Determining what actions create value — ’signal’ — versus actions that do not — ‘noise’ — is a constantly evolving art. In many cases, even for experienced search marketers, it’s a matter of throwing some spaghetti against a wall, and seeing what sticks.

Some might think this dilutes the value of working with an SEO pro, but I think it reinforces the value. A dedicated SEO is going to have experience on multiple sites in multiple verticals, and will have aggregated experience to apply to your unique situation. A good consultant can prevent you from making rookie mistakes, and build out far more robust experiments that can result in creating a very good signal to both search engines and your target prospects.

But here’s the thing: Search engines aren’t biologically programmed to do the same. In fact, they aren’t biological at all. They’re logical. Tech-no-logical. Robots don’t love you, no matter what watching Steven Spielberg movies, Star Wars, and Terminator films may have had you believing. I know this may be hard, but you need to separate yourself from your fantasies of Googlebot as R2D2.

There are many snowflakes on this cold, icy and loveless glacier we call the Internet. What makes you unique amongst the snowflakes? Do you have prettier edges? Are you more crystalline? Are you whiter? Are you the proverbial yellow snow that should not be eaten?

Make your web site reflect that, even if you’re yellow snow. Some people like that kind of thing — the Internet was built on that kind of content. Search engine logic loves that kind of thing: communities grow around the eating of yellow snow, links spring up, and you become unique. Uniqueness is algorithmically recognizable, and will earn you the closest thing a search engine has to love: attention and traffic referral.

Unique Value Propositions have been the basis of marketing for years. The internet has not changed this equation. If anything, it encourages businesses to engage in true self-reflection on what they can offer that someone up the street cannot. If that means pouring blue liquid on yourself and calling yourself a snowcone instead of a snowflake, that’s what it may take to drive traffic to your business, whether online or offline.

I think even in the biz, black hat is an overused phrase. I’ve always assigned technical prowess and intent to deceive to black-hattery. Keyword stuffing is amateur-hour stuff.

Here’s how I would break it down:
Black Hat:

• IP addressing
• Cloaking
• Squatting (where it requires server exploits)
• Scripting exploits
• Certain types of doorways

Dunce Cap:

• Keyword stuffing
• White-on-white text and links

The thing is, a lot of black hat tactics are either smart, or require some sense to make work. Dunce-cap tactics are the sort of thing anyone’s technophobic great-aunt could execute, and are dumb ideas to boot.

Personally, I prefer to be a tinfoil-hat SEO. The tinfoil protects my brain from rays emitted by Google’s Earth-orbit satellite data centers, and is a charming fashion statement in years where metallics are considered a must-have accessory.