Cre8tive Flow

You’ll see many people who feel that SEO is marketed using FUD, that’s Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The assumption is that all those spamming emails you receive offering to get you on the first page of Google use this. You must have thousands of web pages and thousands of back links or you will not achieve this obviously important ranking.

I realized the biggest creator of FUD in this scenario is Google itself.

Discuss Fear and Loathing on the Search Engine Marketing Trail

In an end of the year slap in the face to web site owners and marketers, Google shows it is now a true kissing cousin to Microsoft.

I’m quite convinced the Google “response” was misdirection. Oh hell. Its a lie.

There is some real disdain being felt right now for the screwy way in which Google has responded to questions about why they made this change. Google has a way of compounding existent frustrations caused by poor communication by then giving conflicting responses to issues like these.

the google reaction was weak. Something is going on. They aren’t being straight.

Introduction

The biggest factor to consider on the Internet when planning marketing efforts are the search engines and the way they operate.  The major ones here are Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN.  They bring a lot of visitors to any web page and so it is important to know how to maximize that traffic.

For every other article in this series, it is possible to put down a few key principles that will have a major impact on your Internet marketing effectiveness.  This is not the case for Search Engine Marketing.

Google officially stated the other day that they’ll be crawling through HTML forms. It’s an interesting move — their stated goal is to increase their coverage of the web by adding this new aspect to their crawling. I’ll note right away that this is not an immediate general addition to their crawling practices:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. Google Webmaster Central Blog

It was inevitable that, with another PageRank obsessive week in SEO, people would start calling to ditch PageRank, lose the PageRank display on the toolbar etc etc. I believe that all such arguments are flawed, and for a variety of reasons, that I’ll keep to two.

Firstly, there is the problem of measurement. What, exactly, is the problem that removing PageRank, form the toolbar or the algo, suppossed to solve? And what metrics do we use to measure this? Comscore data shows that, despite having over 50% of search, Google increased their market share in August, 2007. The most important metric (market share) seems to favour Google by a wide margin, so i can;t really see that any of this really hurting their bottom line.

Normally, I hate wading in on topics that have been done to death, but on this occasion I feel the need to.

For those that don’t know, Google reduced the PageRank for a number sites, in many cases between two and three the toolbar scores/ranks/numbers. This has caused many people to write a heck of a lot of posts, and make me eternally thankful that Blogs use bits and bytes, not paper (I reckon an Amazon worth of trees would have been cut down otherwise).

I was reading a great paper about the first Google (aka backrub) trial and cam accross a fascinating quote:

I feel stupid when I see a TV ad from ASK.com about “The Algorithm”. They don’t make sense to me. So the advertising makes me feel dumb and somewhere in there should be incentive to use the search engine?

Nope. That can’t be right.

Since so many people question the logic and message behind ASK’s ad campaign, I find I’m not alone. Many of you have no idea what the hell is going on either.

Cre8asiteforums’ members are all over this, in Ask’s Bizarre Bad Taste And Weird Ad Placement