Dunkin Donuts & Danny Sullivan

Like most in the search industry I’m a big Danny Sullivan fan & wish him the best in wherever he goes next. But even more exciting than search news (I understand some people don’t find search news exciting) are his posts on Dunkin’ Donuts (I think everyone should find donuts exciting.)

First a little background. Read the rest of this entry »

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Search engines love their signals of quality, but how about 37 signals of selling pagerank.

“Plus, The Deck ads are not redirected and the average page rank of the eight Deck sites is 7.125 which can make a significant difference in an advertiser’s search rankings during and well after a campaign is complete”

so are they selling pagerank? if it quacks like a dog…

Three points of interest:
1. Toolbar pagerank down to the thousandths?? sure, it’s an average, but is that really necessary or meaningful? don’t answer…
2. Is that 7.125 a result of “the deck” TM or a result of only accepting advertisers to “the deck” TM that they have heard of and like?
3. who cares? TBPR is next to useless. I cut myself off over a year ago and really, life is better. Even white hats agree

There are many reasons - I was going to say legitimate and not, but I think it’s actually all “not” - for a site owner to try to hide which sites he/she owns and operates. When doing your due diligence on the competition, these sites are exactly the types of things you want to uncover. So here is a task list to figure out if those two sites that you are slightly suspicious of are a little too closely related:

1. Check the whois
domaintools.com/domaininquestion.com will quickly tell you if the site owners were complacent enough to just use the same registrant info or same name servers. Sometimes it will be the same DNS privacy company which is a hint in itself. I’ll do another post some other time on how to figure out who it is if the DNS is obfuscated. Read the rest of this entry »

More people doing fun stuff

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/suggest.php
http://www.dontdelete.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-08-n53.html
http://fakerake.com/tag/AOL

one thing that sticks out is how people keep going back and searching for the same thing. i know people use search as navigation now, but I didn’t realize how many people did this and how frequently. one user kept searching for “bankofamerica” almost daily. Bookmarks & the address bar is your friend, use it. But it’s a good reminder of the level of sophistication you’re dealing with. You can’t expect people to learn to use their browser when they need to figure out “how to make a leprechaun trap” or beat the system and get the “free pregnancy test online to see if you are pregnant or not.” They just don’t have time…well, unless they’re now time travellers after finding out “how to change time of day to pm from am“

Googlers seriously love their company, but they don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Oh no. That stuff is way too cheap for a company with a market cap of $114B. They drink the $4 a pop naked juice in all of its’ tasty goodness.

As we rolled up to the mecca that is googleplex there were googlers cheering and clapping. Word is they were wating for the Trose, but biding their time by cheering everyone else in as well. There was beer, ice cream, food, tshirts, live music, a weird dance video thing, robots playing soccer, dunk-a-googler, and baby blue shirted googlettes (including one set of blonde twins) walking around all over the place.

After a Googler named Thunder (who worked on internal tools?)handed me a mango naked juice (I made the switch from Gordon Biersh) I met a few other google folks, got to hang out w/ some webmaster friends, met a few new ones, and got a demo of their AudioAds - Radio media-buying - coming soon. i’ll be getting the full hand-held tour on Friday. And hopefully a couple more of those expensive beverages too.

While some people at SES are talking govt conspiracy theories with this “release” of data - all signs point to incompetence. I wish I had more time in the first few days to dig around and put up a linkbait site for it, but instead I’ll just watch them as they come out.

There are going to be some insights search marketers can get from this data. Both competitive intelligence as well as searcher behaviors over a 3 month period.

http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/

http://aolsearchlogs.com/

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com

and of course the raw data itself is mirrored and bittorrent at various places. Good times, it’s a little weird that it’s not really making any kind of news at SES though