Conspiracy theories are generally pretty silly. When people talk about a “conspiracy,” they are usually referring to the very common occurrence of someone taking power over someone else — by force, allure, deception, whatever. This doesn’t stop theorists from inevitably seizing the first possible chance to compare anything they want to “the Nazis.” Naturally, when a company like Google gets Big, it’s a great excuse for everyone to get all X-Files about it.

One dramatic video claims that Google — with the lion’s share of the search engine market — is collecting individual data with which it could easily create detailed profiles of its users. “These men pursue a great vision,” it explains, “the Google Master Plan. Any kind of information will be accessible to anybody, controlled by Google itself with the credo: don’t be evil.”

The video, the thesis of two German students, goes on to address Google’s well-known policy of scanning G-mail accounts for advertising purposes. “Google is methodically collecting personal data in many more ways, using cookies and account information — merely to offer relevant text ads?” In addition, “a former CIA agent” alleges that Google is cooperating undercover with the US government; they are also purportedly involved in decoding the human genome – clearly, sinister stuff.

The CIA — this is pretty much the staple of any conspiracy story. In fact, one wonders what conspiracy theorists even talked about before they had the elusive organization to fall back on.

I don’t imagine you’re entitled to much privacy over the internet. I’ve never read the fine print of any software agreement I’ve clicked on; I’m pretty sure that’s why they make them so long and impenetrable. I take for granted that anything I do on a public information exchange network is accessible to anybody who wants to bother. It’s safe to assume you’re not safe. Do I share information I shouldn’t? Yes, all the time. Do I believe most people care? No. You should definitely be as protective as possible of your financial assets and personal privacy, but within reason. The one thing online privacy has going for it is the overwhelming quantity of information. A company like Google is inundated with a flow of data that would be so tedious to organize, it would be simpler and cheaper just to take over the world by force.

Much focus in the video is put on the ways in which Google could take control. Hardly any is spent on the question of why they would want to.

If Google had a “personal dossier” on every user in the world, what would they do with it? Steal our money? Tell the government about our habits? Come surprise us at dinner? Map out our individual genomes and turn us into human slaves at their beck and call? Anyone who ever watched Pinky and Brain knows how that turns out. If Google has an agenda, it’s probably super banal. It’s about gain, and gain — if it’s not world domination — is usually about money. Right now, they’re making money in a traditional, legal way — by selling an abstract idea.

There’s some egomania in the notion that “someone is watching” and actually cares about what you do, where you live, what you eat, who you associate with, or what your genes look like. But if people want a deity, I’m sure Google is just as good as any other. I heard someone say once, in reference to the Kennedy assassination, that what people really refused to believe was that one little guy like Oswald could kill someone like the President. Whether he did, or every sinister plot that’s been implied is true, I think the point is telling — people don’t like the easy, disappointing answer.

If we can weave Google into a Nazi fairytale, all the more exciting. Intelligent debate? No, give us Indiana Jones. How boring if they didn’t try to take over at this point.

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In an article printed on June 13, 2008 regarding the agency backlash to the proposed outsourcing of Yahoo ads to Google, Michael Mothner, President, CEO and all-around head honcho of Wpromote, was quoted in the online edition. Mothner mentioned the frightening potential repercussions of a partnership between the Internet’s biggest two search players:

Michael Mothner, who runs a search-marketing firm called Wpromote, said the deal was “really scary from an advertiser’s perspective, knowing that we need Google, and if they decided to raise their prices or assess other fees, they have a lot of power now.” He added: “Even though Yahoo would be a separate entity, outsourcing search is essentially giving the keys to Google. From an advertiser’s perspective, it’s really scary how much it resembles a powerful monopoly over search ads.

We here at Wpromote are very concerned with the search landscape, which seems to remain in constant flux. The only consistency with the search marketing environment seems to be inconsistency itself. Mothner’s comments will hopefully elucidate the risks of a Google/Yahoo partnership to some of the right people. Kudos to Mike for his high-profile quotation; let’s hope that this is just the first of many such opportunities for the company.

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This Year’s Seattle Search Marketing Expo (SMX Advanced) conference was great, aside from the uncomfortable red chairs it went off without a hitch.

⁃ Monday night started with a Microsoft sponsored party that had great catering, a DJ and great hors d’oeuvres. It took place close to the conference at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

They were offering to take pictures of people for fancy luggage tags (branded by Microsoft of course) which was funny to watch as people were drinking from an open bar and taking silly photos.

Many of the well known SEO companies were present and it was a nice start to the conference, I found some people I had met at SXSW and SMX Long Beach and the networking had begun.

It did rain the entire time, but that’s alright as we were inside the whole time anyway. Looking for cabs could get you wet and annoyed, but at least there were lots of ‘Vancouverish’ trees everywhere and it was a beautiful location on at the Bell Harbor Convention Center.

The three major search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live finally announced some clarifications on how they treat the Common REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol) Directives.

See YAHOO!’s blog about REP Directives.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog re: REP Directives.

MSN’s blog about REP Directives can be read here.

There were some different answers regarding how the SE’s treat things such as the ‘nofollow’ attribute in links.

The MSN crew at first didn’t seem clear on what their own standards were, however at the end they did clarify that they don’t do anything different for nofollow links at this time. I’m still confused by their confusion. Good old Microsoft!

Google: - Were very clear that they don’t use noindex, nofollow for discovery (finding new content to index or at least store somewhere)

Yahoo: - Confirmed they do use nofollow links for Discovery.

I think the way to go here is to follow the industry leader, Google and do what they say and suggest.

For example, Yahoo! was really pushing the use of Yahoo Site Explorer to provide rewrites for URLs that are not SEO-Friendly - This will drive tons of traffic to Yahoo Site Explorer but I think its a pain in the ass to be honest. Plus the Yahoo folks didn’t even know how to use the microphone or speak in a way you could hear them, at EITHER panel I saw different Yahoo! folks at.

Google’s reps put on their ‘Google faces’ and obviously had public speaking training and were very easy to understand. Google’s Maile Ohye recommended that you take care of your own canonicalization issues using cookies for session IDs and putting the exact URL in your sitemap of canonicalized pages.

Pictured here is Maile from Google with Michael from Penwell, Colin and Pete from the UK and Mike from San Diego. I rolled with this fun crew most of the time, pictured here at the SeoMOZ party. Kudos to Jane and Rand’s crew for always being easily accesible to discuss SEO and for giving out sweet shirts and hoodies. - Back to the technical stuff…so this this can seem rather confusing…USE the sitemaps and tell Google which versions of pages to use. The key here is to put the canonical version IN the sitemap, NOT the human readable version and 301 the canonical page to the SEO friendly URL.

i.e. http://www.example.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CF300%2D006 would go in the xml sitemap.

And you would 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/human-readable-page.html

Obviously…

There’s a long road ahead of us but at least the Search Engines are finally starting to try and work together to provide standards for webmasters to follow that are the same for each engine. Google is obviously way ahead of the pack on this one.

Another interesting and completely unrelated topic was when a presenter explained this: How do you explain the word ’spicy’ to a child that has never tasted spicy? It is pretty much impossible without ever tasting something spicy….he also mentioned how the dictionary is a circular reference…A book full of words describing other words…circular. You would be able to point to a tree and say that physical thing over there is a tree…but without that the words describing it are all defined inside the ‘circular reference’ of the dictionary. I never thought if it that way…one for all the nerds out there i guess…

BUZZWORD: Progressive Enhancement

Some of you may not know this term. The Wikipedia definition is as follows:

“a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page.” - Source - Wikipedia

It is now recommended to start websites over using this methodology to make them accessible at every level rather than try to implement backwards changes to your existing sites.

Buying old Domains:

Some cool ways to find and buy old sites without losing their historical strength in Google were discussed. The goal is to use a TRUST to keep the WHOIS information the same, and to also buy the hosting account from the owner as well.

The way to do this if you do NOT want to see the WHOIS information change is to do the following three things.

1. Get a Lawyer and establish an intent to create a trust.
2. Make sure the certainty of the property - Take inventory and it is a wise idea to include the hosting as part of what you are buying to avoid any WHOIS changes.
3. The Object is the beneficiary.

So what does this legalese mean?

- Well I’m not a lawyer but the general idea here it to use legal means to ensure that the WHOIS registration does not change and it is also highly recommended to also purchase the hosting account from the current owner of the domain.

If you are interested in this I recommend checking out Seoroi.com who presented this at SMX Advanced.

H1 tags - only one per page? that’s what all the SEO’s say, but really why? any proof?

So I had an opportunity to discuss an issue about H1 tags that my company was having with Matt Cutts who is very easy to talk with and obviously passionate about his work at Google. Even during one of the panels he was sitting with some of the folks I was hanging with and was very helpful with his little notepad describing how Google does specific things that would affect the sites he was asked about.

At the end of it all we pretty much agreed that, - Matt even said this - “You don’t need Matt Cutts”. The reason is that it is at this point pretty obvious when something is shady or not. If the work you are doing is for the search engines and not for the users and affects the user experience than it could be risky.

(Matt Cutts discussing use of multiple H1s on pages with Aaron Kronis) and using his diagram pad as always.)

We discussed the issue that our programming team here at Wpromote is having with regards to the use of H1s at the beginning of sections rather than reserving it for just the main page header.

Almost every SEO I know swears by ‘One H1 tag per page with the top keyword phrase for that site in it’ and here Matt said that it was alright to have MULTIPLE H1s on the page as long as you don’t stuff too many keywords into the H1 tags and design the site for the users.

My question to any SEOs out there (thanks to Merlin for pointing this out btw) is that other than all the SEOs saying to only have one H1 per page, where is this proven to be any different then if there are multiple H1s used at the heading of each section the way the H1 tag was designed. This reserves H1-H6 for usage if needed - great for automated pages and sites… the limit of the H1 to one usage can change the programming and possibly cause you to run out of Hx’s if you get up to the depth of H5 o H6 and have used up your H1 at the top of your pages. Not super critical but nonetheless not very well explained or documented in the SEO community.

Other things to note - if you are using IP Delivery (Cloaking) then the content you serve the search engines MUST be the same as the media you are normally serving users. i.e. the text of the flash better look like the text you send Google or you will be booted from the index. The question was asked “Can you describe the video that is in flash?” the answer from the Search Engines was ‘NO - you may use a static image however’.

- So if some of this was a little dry, there’s a lot of new exciting things going on in the SEO community and with the new tools that Wpromote are developing (thanks to CP) for our SEO division will really help us out with getting the best results for our clients. Welcome to the next generation of Internet Rockstars who know how to use Progressive Enhancement to build search friendly and great user-friendly websites.

I missed the SeoMOZ party but I had to get home…back to LA.

Taken on the final approach to LAX looking off the edge of the world.

-KRONiS

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Over the past weekend, Nike released another video online of Kobe Bryant sporting the new Hyperdunk shoes.  This time, the League MVP wasn’t leaping over a moving vehicle, but rather jumping over a pool filled with poisonous snakes.

While some fans may believe Kobe when he says his stunts are real, we at Wpromote are just enjoying the videos for the laughs they’ve provided.  Today, we look into how these videos have been received online, their viral success and how they’ve jumped the search engine results pages (SERPS).

At the time of this post, Kobe’s original Aston Martin leap video has accumulated over 8 million views (this is only factoring in the first page search results found on YouTube).  Bryant’s most recent pool jump is currently surpassing 1.5 million views.  While Kobe may still have a lot of work to do to catch up to Tay Zonday the popularity for a video so blatantly produced by Nike is nonetheless impressive.

Video Search Results

Video Search for professional athletes have generally been dominated by League, ESPN or FOX broadcasted content.  For the most part, the top 10 video results for the majority of professional athletes can be broken into the following categories:

• Highlight Reels / Top 10 Plays (either fan created, league produced or copied from national broadcasts)
• Player Interviews
• Sports Shows & Announcer Commentary
• Fan Created Montages (Photo & Video)
• Press Events & Signings

Of course thrown in are the occasional scandals or episodes of MTV Cribs, but rarely do commercials come in top for professional players.

As of yesterday, the Nike and Aston Martin video held the top position for Google Video searches for Kobe Bryant and came in 10th on a general search on Google (Google Search: Kobe Bryant).

Where does this bring us?

This comes to show the power of a successfully produced viral video.  For companies and brands contracting professional athletes and celebrities, the success of their videos do not necessarily end after the initial viewing spike, but rather can carry on much longer as the video is continually displayed high in search results for that talent.  As Google continues to integrate in Universal Search even more, the ability for a brand to capitalize on top image and video search results for a celebrity becomes more valuable.

Will this be a new form of search branding?  Will Herbalife try a viral video with David Beckham?  It’s very possible a year from now when someone searches for Kobe Bryant that they’ll be reminded of Nike shoes and an Aston Martin.  But until then, may the search results be dominated by playoff wins and maybe a 1 or 2 more daring jumps.

Go Lakers!

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