What You Have in Mind

Google just applied for a patent to apply it’s PageRank algorithm to Social Networks.  On the surface, this seems like a great idea for Google and for Advertisers. But is it actually useful?

Search results are based off of two completely independent factors, relevance and importance.  PageRank is about importance, but other parts of Google’s organic search algorithm address relevance.  Applying PageRank to social nets makes tons of sense for determining importance, but targeting ads requires relevance, not importance. (Google already has the best-in-class social network page *relevance* determining engine: Google AdSense / Content Match.

The only new added value I see for Google/Advertisers in determining which social network pages are more *important* are:
a) Improving organic search results by differently valuing links from different profiles (although PR already does this indirectly, since friends=links).
b) Charging more for ads placed on more prestigious pages, like on Tila Tequila’s MySpace profile.

This seems really cool on the surface, but the more I think about it, the less impressed I am.

There are, generally speaking, two philosophically different kinds of SEO. Honest SEO is a process applied to a site to obtain more organic search traffic from the target audience. Very often, this involves creating content that is tailored to the way that search engine users phrase their search queries. This is just smart, customer-centric marketing. The other kind of SEO — maybe we could call it spam SEO or black hat SEO — seeks to trick search engines into believing a page is about something that it’s not actually about. For example, this post is trying to capture Miley Cyrus related search traffic, while this post is trying to capture traffic where people search for (non-existent) photos or video of Zac Efron nude. These pages provide a poor experience to the users who land on them, because they patently do not offer what the user was looking for. They are just designed to attract traffic where traffic is available.

However, not everything that is a “trick” is a black hat technique, in the sense of deceiving the user. Misspellings are a prime example of that. Suppose someone searches google for “quizes”, when they probably meant “quizzes”. Someone has to rank #1 for “quizes”, and hopefully for the user’s sake it is a page that is all about quizzes. All to often, however, misspelled queries return results from whatever rinky-dink web pages happen to have also misspelled the same word. It provide a service to the user when marketers create targeted content around the misspelling, such as this page about “quizes“. This page offers users a chance to get the quiz content they wanted from a high-quality source. So yes, it’s an SEO trick, but not a dirty one.I actually just created the quizes page. I’m working on creating some more “quize-related” content for it. I’ll update this post with info on the progress of this page in terms of organic search rankings and traffic.

By the way, here’s an example of quizes-related content:

Mass media can drive search traffic on the internet like nothing else. And if you’re a performance based search advertiser, you’ve gotta be on the lookout for 800 pound gorillas impinging on your keyword space. Take, for example, this poor fellow, who is just trying to sell jars of gourmet French foods in the UK, and cannot figure out why he gets such huge volumes of search traffic for the keyword ratatouille. Someone had to break it to him that this was not click fraud, but simply the fact that the biggest animated film of the past three years had the same title as his delicious eggplant ragout.  So sad.

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