March 2007

Another week, another Tea Time. Here were the interesting posts from wonderland this week:

* To start off, I found this last week from Jakob Nielsen. 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities from the usability master of the world. From creating passionate users we have a post on eliminating fear for profit. Good read from Kathy Sierra. Finally from the persuasion architect himself: Pencil Twirling & Navigation. Just so you know, I can twirl my writing utensils.

* Andy is apparently going to be reading non-stop for the next two weeks. Make sure he gets your RSS feed. Suggestion for the bloggers: make sure your post titles kick ass.

* I really hate MySpace, but I guess you can’t deny the immediate power they have in driving traffic. Since we’re on the video topic now, check out the YouTube Case Study from Startup Review. It’s an interesting read.

* Advanced SEO topics now. Want to know how to spam social networking sites? Have at it. Actually that’s not very advanced, but I already wrote it so it’s staying.

* Advanced SEO topics for real this time: Bill had a couple of posts that caught my attention this week. The first is on clustering users for personalized search which is something I really think Google is going to move towards. Secondly, Yahoo research posted a paper on detecting templates inside a web page. I went through this because it could also give you a little better idea on how they detect paid link footprints and so forth.

* A lot from the affiliate front this week. First, Jon is on a mission to destroy crappy ebooks. I’ve never actually purchased a ebook (or actually finished reading on of those damn 40 page sales things). I give him props. If your product sucks ass, that’s what you get.

* ShoeMoney outlines some ways to make passive income and gives pros and cons of each. He also tells us when you should build landing pages for your affiliate program. Finally CPA Affiliates gives some tips on selecting your affiliate network that has some excellent info for getting started in affiliate marketing.

* Blog time! Here is an interesting test comparing Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla from an SEO standpoint. There are a lot of outside factors in this so take it with a grain of salt, but Wordpress is coming in last. So go watch Michael explain SEO for wordpress with some interesting visual aids, or if you prefer reading check out the complete Wordpress SEO guide from Jim Westergren.

* Rebecca over at SEOmoz has a good summary of the latest A-list blogger nonsense and proclaims that Calcanis is a tool. She’s a feisty one…

* Interweb Gold - Just click here!

I had to leave some out this week, too many good posts and I don’t want you to get bored. Time to go find out what’s on the other side of the mirror!

Back in January I posted a fairly extensive write-up about why Home Depot sucks at search marketing and as a follow up I figured I should point out that they know a thing or two about reputation management. Recently MSN featured an article about Home Depot shafting shoppers. There were thousands of responses to this article, the majority of them on the negative side. In order to control the damage a little, Home Depot CEO Frank Blake posted a response to all the negativity. Here are a couple excerpts from his post:

I’m Frank Blake, the new CEO for The Home Depot. I’ve read a number of the postings on the MSN message board (unfortunately, there were a lot of them), and we’ve dispatched a dedicated task force – working directly with me – that is ready and willing to address each and every issue raised on this board. Please give us the chance.

There’s no way I can express how sorry I am for all of the stories you shared. I recognize that many of you were loyal and dedicated shoppers of The Home Depot … and we let you down. That’s unacceptable. Customers are our company’s lifeblood – and the sole reason we have been able to build such a successful company is because of your support. The only way we’re going to continue to be successful is by regaining your trust and confidence … and we will do that.

I’d like to thank Scott – his column about our company was insightful and revealing. You can easily tell that it struck a nerve with me. Scott, we’ll do all in our power to again make The Home Depot the store you and your wife, Carolyn, once referred to as “our store.” I’d also like to give my thanks to the many people who posted comments on this board. We want them. We need them … to enable us to keep getting better. We’re committed to being the company that helped set the standard for customer service excellence in home improvement. Please continue to hold us accountable.

A very well done response in my book. He apologizes, addresses the concerns, lays out what they are going to do to fix them, and finally thanks the author and the responders for their feedback. He couldn’t have done a better job in my book. Way to go Home Depot! I’m off to buy some patio furniture.

I just landed in beautiful Salt Lake City, UT for Omniture Site Summit, a 3 day conference around advanced web analytics. I’ve been excited about this one for a while since we have SiteCatalyst running and it’s a powerful piece of software. If anyone else is here, drop me a line and we can grab some beers and talk about how I’m going to break my knee skiing on Friday at Snowbird.

I’ll be posting some insights I get from this sometime next week. Analytics rock! (I know, I am a huge geek)

Welcome to Tea Time. Go find your favorite cup of tea, coffee, beer, whiskey or whatever. We have some great posts from the week, so let’s get right to it!

* Bill just posted this a few minutes ago and since it’s about personalization I’m throwing it in. Tracking triplets covers a new patent from Microsoft. No one ever beats him to the bank explaining these things. He also had a very comprehensive post earlier in the week with the Google local search glossary. Check it out!

* On the blogging front, Brian has 5 ways to look like an idiot. English was never my forte, but hopefully I don’t make those very often. For all you readers out there, Kris at Pepperjam lets you know how to piss off a blogger. I don’t really have this problem since I only have like 5 readers and they’re all my friends, but anyway. Hey Kris, you know how to piss off a blog reader? When your navigation links don’t work from inside your posts.

* I’ve been on a conversion kick lately. The smart guys at Future Now discuss landing pages and first impressions with a dose of humor thrown in. The first section certainly made me chuckle. They also pointed me to nobody actually reads what you’ve written from The Wizard of Ads, a good blog I just found.

* Jordan from Marketing Pilgrim has a nice collection of mobile marketing resources since it’s the hot new market. Hey Dean, you all right out there?

* Jessica Alba - Just helping you out Brian. I’ll be making a Kate Hudson post soon, so you can return the favor.

* Affiliate time. Jon tells you how to make money now and he’s not kidding. If you want to get going in the affiliate world, pay attention. If you’re going to be using PPC, make sure you are maximizing the impact of your ads and once you get started you’ll be on your way to becoming an E-Commerce Mogul.

* Social Media time. Chris from 10e20 let’s you know a white hat way to becoming a top Digg user. Seems a little gray to me. Jane Copeland from SEOmoz has a very comprehensive (that’s twice in this post) article on social media marketing. Great post Jane, I’ve got that one bookmarked for future reference!

* Since I just bought a house, this one from hitwise caught my attention. It appears the Google Base Real Estate section is picking up steam. I didn’t find the house I bought there, but I did use it quite a bit. Also from hitwise, a good post from LeAnn Prescott on the Vista/iPhone marketing battle.

* Interweb Gold - Cover your testicles!

Welcome to Part I of a long awaited collaboration between TheMadHat and TheGypsy. We’ve been digging deep into personalized search lately, and there has been a lot of chatter about the subject around the SEO world. In part I of our collaboration, I’m going to go through the latest patent on the removal and manipulation of personalized search, and what this means for you, the SEO mastermind. You can see the full patent here.

This patent is a fairly simple one (when it comes to the world of patents anyway). Essentially it goes through the different methods a user could remove unwanted results, and how this data could be used in ranking results. Let’s break it down:

Each search result would have an option to immediately remove the result for that search if the user deems it spam, irrelevant, or offensive. By default, the result would be removed only for that search session. The next time you jump back on and perform the same search your results will be standard (assuming other personalization factors and not influencing the listings). This is the basic, bare bones example and would cause the least problems from and SEO standpoint.

The second option is one that could cause a little more turbulence. The user would have the option to remove that specific result from all future searches. Keep in mind we’re talking about only one listing at this point. Bye bye. You’re now invisible to this user for this particular page. It will never show up again for that search.

The third option is the killer. This option allows you to remove this result, and all documents associated with this result. Bye bye big time. Your entire site is now invisible to this user from now on.

What does all this mean to you? Not a big deal you’re thinking? Well think again. Sure, users removing you from their results were not likely to buy anyway. Not a big loss there. However, let’s look at these specific sections of the patent:

“…aggregating information regarding documents that have been removed by a group of users; and assign scores to a set of documents based on the aggregated information.”

“…determining a remove list score associated with the documents in the set of documents based on the aggregated information;”

Now we’re talking. Each result will be assigned a “remove list score” and rankings will be determined by “link-based score, the information retrieval score, and the remove list score”. My first thought was that this would be easily gamed by all you spammers. Automated account creation, mass removals, etc. Obviously Google has thought of that as well:

“identifying a set of legitimate users and a set of illegitimate users; and collecting information regarding documents that have been removed by the set of legitimate users.”

Now it doesn’t go into detail about how they define a legitimate user. My theory (guess) is that they will look at: length of time on the account, number of searches performed, number of removals done, etc. Sort of a trust factor for the account in question.

What does this mean to us? The ease of removing a site will be a big factor, but if it’s easy I can see lots of users removing stuff in droves. If your site sucks, people will remove you and this will cause your rankings to plummet. It just emphasizes the fact that you need to have content that people will eat up and demonstrate you are an expert in your niche. A professional, well designed site that makes your users comfortable is also going to be a factor. Obviously Google doesn’t know what your site looks like, but it can make some assumptions based on removal data. Goodbye MFA’s and a ton of affiliate garbage.

Make sure you’re ahead of the curve with unique and compelling content and you should reap the rewards. Seems like a standard sentiment now days.