Twitter Hacked Again…

Posted by Pete - 14/04/09 at 11:04:34 pm

Well this is getting old. Twitter seems to be undergoing another spate of account hacks, this time using dating and NSFW style messages.

Seriously guys, I love your service as much as anyone, but get your acts together. You really need to get this sorted and fast.

kthnxbai

Why Google’s Ranking Factors Have Changed Over Time

Posted by Pete - 09/04/09 at 09:04:16 am

Thought I’d leap on Rand’s recent post on SEOmoz about Google’s ranking factors, and how they’ve changed over time. However, I’m going to look less at the what (which I agree with), but the why.

The problem at its core is that whilst UGC is all well and good, if I want to read a review of say, a hotel, I’d much sooner trust one review from someone from The Times or BBC than a review from TripAdviser. As a general rule, people don’t have the depth of experience to give me a truly authoritative answer to the questions I have.

As such, Google is now presented with working out what will be the digital equivalent to our newspapers. What should be the sites that get massive trust and are seen as authorities in their areas.

In the past, I think Google did this more on a page by page basis, but now with the greater prominence being given to domain-wide authority, I think it’s going to bias further and further towards fewer sites.

This then leads to an obvious question, which is how do you continue to complete in the search space in five years time, assuming that domain trust (or something like it) continues to increase in prominence?

My belief is that if you want to rank for something, you need to become the online authority in whatever it is you do. Otherwise all you’ll rank for is your business name (because your site is the authority on your business, and nothing else).
This in turn creates an obvious change in how we currently build websites – most sites we work on nowadays have a blog of some form, which is where we can place great content with the aim of attracting links and traffic, and building the client’s profile online. However, if that is the end goal, then the blog part really should be what the site is about.

As such, I’d propose that any site you’re building, or going to build in the future, should focus on the content and authority building elements first, and the company should play a secondary role. I’d actually run two sites – one corporate one, which is more like a brochure for your company, and a second one, with a small section for your company, and the rest dedicated to being the online authority in whatever it is that you do.

For instance, if you’re a company that sells beds online, build your site with the intention of making it the authority online in beds, so that if I want to know about how to sleep better, or cure insomnia, or anything else bed-related, your site is the one I end up on. Then, both the search engines and your visitors will trust you more, and that will lead to more sales.

The Coming Revolution in Internet Service Revenues

Posted by Pete - 07/04/09 at 01:04:57 pm

Much has been written about the problems services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg and most other large, productless websites have in breaking even, let alone actually making some money. Essentially, the problem comes down to two things:

  1. Companies believing that advertising is a business model, and
  2. The “success” of the ad-supported model thusfar

There are two staggering and obvious flaws in these ideas. Firstly, focus. People are not, repeat not on your site to view adverts. They’re there to use your service. If that’s MySpace, it’s to listen to tracks from their favourite artists, without paying for them. If it’s YouTube, it’s to listen to music or watch videos. If it’s Twitter, it’s to watch conversations and interact with others.

Note, in none of these places does “view or click on an advert” appear. Ads work on Google’s search product because a link is a link, and as long as the end result is still a good match for what the user searches for, they really couldn’t care less.

As a result, as a marketer you need a lot of eyeballs to make ad impressions work, even if your ads are highly targeted to the demographic viewing them. Therefore cpm costs aren’t that high, and never will be. In fact, they’re likely to get lower and lower over time. This is bad for publishers.

The second massive flaw is that if, for instance, the bottom fell out of the ad market, all of a sudden the ad supported business model dies. So here’s a radical idea for you, that you may not have thought of, if you’re either starting, or already running a service-based site:

Have a product.

Seriously. If what you’re doing is worth my time, then charge me for it. If it’s useful, and I’ve no other choice, I’ll pay. Why do companies still buy MS Office rather than using Google Docs? Because it’s worth it. Why do people spend hundreds of thousands on a house rather than living in a tent? Because it’s worth paying for.

Offer me something that satisfies a need, and ask me to pay for it. You’d be amazed at what’ll happen…