Put yourself back in 1996. Imagine you’ve just pitched your tent online, and you’ve been given a blank page and 15 megabytes to tell the world about yourself. Think about how intoxicating it must have been to be able [...]]]> GeoCities died yesterday. This has led to mass mockery of old-school GeoCities pages. Others have some sympathy:

Put yourself back in 1996. Imagine you’ve just pitched your tent online, and you’ve been given a blank page and 15 megabytes to tell the world about yourself. Think about how intoxicating it must have been to be able to do that for the first time. Wouldn’t you, too, have gone a little heavy on the blinky text?

I was there in 1996. Heck, I still have the diskettes for a beta of Mosaic here at my desk – an install that requires multiple 3.5″ floppies. And it’s true: For the early adopters, GeoCities was a place you could set up and get your feet wet. You could put your site into awesome webrings – the concept that later launched a million reciprocal link exchanges, and even could be given a nod as a seed for the whole Google linking algorithm.

I think a greater point to mock for that era were the number of companies who started setting up web sites, and putting them entirely in the hands of their ‘geeks.’ Now, I love geeks. I am a geek – but I’m also a geek trained in branding, marketing and communications. Back in 1996, a lot of the geeks in charge of web sites were none of the above. But ‘web pages’ were computer things, so they handed them to computer people. Many of them made abundant use of such treasures as the blink tag, because any new piece of knowledge had to be incorporated somehow. This early round later led to various battles for control of web sites once marketing departments realized that maybe they didn’t have a huge audience yet – but the audience they had was getting a warped view of their brand.

So raise a toast to GeoCities, the first taste of the Interwebs most old-schoolers ever had, without which.

today reports that the city of North Oaks, Minnesota, has requested that all street-level images of their community be removed from Google Maps.

Google says that no community has ever issued such a blanket request. This doesn’t surprise me – North Oaks, sometimes known as the ‘Forbidden City,’ is somewhat unique. [...]]]> The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

today reports that the city of North Oaks, Minnesota, has requested that all street-level images of their community be removed from Google Maps.

Google says that no community has ever issued such a blanket request. This doesn’t surprise me – North Oaks, sometimes known as the ‘Forbidden City,’ is somewhat unique. All roads in North Oaks are private land, which means that the typical Google approach to getting street-level images – sending in a car with a dashboard camera – isn’t legal to use. Non-residents (or uninvited guests) using the roads in North Oaks is considered trespassing.

North Oaks aren’t requesting to Yahoo or MSN that satellite-level images of the city be removed from their services. However, satellite image collection would not violate right-of-way rules on city streets as the Google street-level collection does.

Interesting stuff.

If you get a really coherent domain name, chances are it’s been used before. Now, sometimes you’ll be fine. [...]]]> If you’re out registering a dot-com domain, and an available domain seems too good to be true here in 2007, go see if it has any residual inbound links (use Yahoo!) or a history over at archive.org.

If you get a really coherent domain name, chances are it’s been used before. Now, sometimes you’ll be fine. Other times, just slam up a dummy page, get it verified via Yahoo and Google, and see if it indexes.

…and be ready to file a reconsideration request.

Most domains that are really coherent and dot-com and available in 2007? Probably banned at least once already, or used for a porn-squatter spam site. You’ll end up having to do some housecleaning.

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a [...]]]> I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.

Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:

• Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
• Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
• Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
• Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.

With Google’s move to Universal Search and personalization, and the various manuevers of Yahoo, it’s hard to say where the people who promise rankings will land. It’s certain [...]]]> One of the interesting things to watch over the coming year will be what happens to a fairly common SEO business model, that of the ‘guaranteed top rankings!!!!’

With Google’s move to Universal Search and personalization, and the various manuevers of Yahoo, it’s hard to say where the people who promise rankings will land. It’s certain that a lot of businesses will still listen to their pitch and buy into the promise, but what will the result be? Graywolf, at SMX

, said that the best bet is to encourage the customers to log in and use Google a lot to egowhack, as it will make an SEO’s effort look effective, even if actual traffic is flat.

A lot of the guaranteed ranking crowd require various plug-ins. It’s hard to say if this will keep working, although I’ve never quite understood how it worked in the first place. In a somewhat hard-to-believe confession, I am sad that some people are so dumb to buy into that.

I also have to wonder how this is going to hit other businesses with self-defeating business models that relate to SEO. For instance, I used to work for an agency that owned an affiliate portal focused on aggregating offerings from many providers of a consumer commodity — used cars. This agency also did a lot of agency work for the providers of said consumer commodity (used car dealers!).

Fundamentally, from an SEO perspective, the providers’ sites and the affiliate portal were competing for the same searches and eyeballs. How many clients could this agency really hope to serve and satisfy while maintaining their own strong position in search engines? Do Universal Search and Web History change the playing field there relative to SEO service? Right now, my money is on ‘no.’ That’s why most agencies try to avoid too many competing clients in a single vertical.

Especially used car dealers. Ech.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively [...]]]> This one’s for the Funk King of Minneapolis, Paul Jahn.

There’s a Salon blog post today on the reliability of online reviews. Here’s a choice bit:

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating.

The article is pretty good, so I won’t rehash it here. One thing that notably isn’t mentioned is ‘business owners posting wretchedly fake reviews in some mad faux-SEO urge.’ I’ve seen some awful, awful fake reviews — no real human writes like these reviews, or would say these things about a business such as that reviewed.

The visual range depictions discussed in this article won’t do much about those written reviews, although they’ll show the bias in the starred reviews a little more strongly. On the other hand, Paul and I have discussed that if a reasonable person found these fake reviews, they’d make a sane reader less likely to go to a business. Even though there’s massive response bias in even real reviews, at least they’re real.