I had a few people from the community ask if I would be interested in running a Meetup Group for Wordpress. I have been helping to run the South Florida SEO Meetup for over a year now. I polled the members to see if there would be enough interest. To my surprise, when I asked the 30 or so attendees at the last meeting about 90% said they used WordPress and would be interested in a new Meetup. With that kind of response it was a no brainer.

After setting up the South Florida Wordpress Users Meetup, I was shocked at the level of response it received. The first meeting is tonight and we already have 62 registered users. Over 30 members have RSVP’d “Yes” and another 15 with a “Maybe” they are coming tonight. I can only compare this to the SEO Meetup which took months and months to hit those numbers. As of now, This group (with 0 meetings under its belt) is the 6th largest WordPress Meetup in the World.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone I know and meeting a bunch of new friends. Not to mention all the great WordPress Karma that will be flowing.

I am going to have to change my tune on a piece of information I have held as truth for quite some time now. My good friend Marjory pointed me to a video the other day (via a shared del.icio.us bookmark) which is counter to what I been teaching for a while now. Matt Cutts of Google in a short interview at PubCon this year give us the real history behind Google’s trademark of the term “Trust Rank”.

The Theory is Still Correct

Now for some time now I have been teaching that “Trust Rank” is an evolved form of “PageRank”. The early versions of PageRank focused on the quantity of inbound links to a site as its primary influencing factor. As it evolved the focus shifted from quantity to quality. The relevancy and trust of the linking site became much more of a factor and this evolved form of PageRank was now termed Trust Rank.

Well, the theory is still sound and the changes did take place, the only difference now is that it is not called Trust Rank … it’s just Evolved PageRank.

The 2008 Predictions

1. Google will remain the #1 Search Engine. Unless of course Microsoft does indeed buy Yahoo, then Microhoo! would be #1 for a short period of time.
2. Major companies in the US (think Fortune 500) will start to realize that most of the 6 figure salaried SEOs are learning on the job. The 6 figure SEOs will use their beefy resumes to move on to other companies which haven’t figured that out yet.
3. Black Hats will make a resurgence because the engines will think they have them beat. All of the freshman Black Hats will make the whole group of them look like morons. The White Hats will continue to evolve too slow.
4. So many people will have so many theories about Social Media that it will be unknowingly abused to the point of global ineffectiveness as a marketing medium. This excludes the early adopters, they will continue to hide in the social shadows and manipulate from behind the curtain.
5. Google will introduce a revenue sharing plan that will allow people who sell links to keep their link juice as long a Google gets its cut. You may even be able to pay Google directly out of your AdSense earnings. On the other side of the plan link buyers will still get screwed.
6. Blogs will finally lose their magic in the rankings as pressure will be applied by Wikipedia and other wikis to be the social media of choice for the algorithms.. Oh sorry, too late.

Self Motivated Promises

1. I am going to do my very best to post every day. If I don’t have anything meaningful or newsworthy to say at the time, expect allot of sarcasm (reference this post).
2. I am going to participate in the SEO community more. I will start commenting on other peoples blogs and make a general nuisance of myself in a forum or two.
3. I am going to continue to learn and study SEO as I know that it is ever changing and I will never be able to keep up, but how else will I be able to sound knowledgeable on those forums and blog comments.
4. I plan on engaging every social media site I can find. One of them is bound to do something useful for me. Not to mention I have way to much free time on my hands.

Ok, I’m feeling a bit sarcastic today, so many posts on blogs or sites which have to introduce the New Year boggle my mind. So I am just poking at them for a bit of fun.

If you are serious about what you do, the beginning of 2008 should not mark a milestone of change. When you realize something needs changed, don’t wait for the New Year to better yourself or your business.

Last week at PubCon in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts of Google mentioned that the search engine giant will soon be treating sub-domains different in their results pages. At first it was reported that sub-domains were to be treated as folders, however in a comment thread over at Sphinn, Matt Cutts explained that this was a bit of an over statement. Here’s what he meant …

“This isn’t a correct characterization of what Google is looking at doing. What I was trying to say is that in some circumstances, Google may move closer to treating subdomains as we do with subdirectories.”

Additionally, a poster named Tedster a Sphinn spoke to Matt directly and had this comment:

“Matt said that Google will make it HARDER to get that 3rd result in a given search, and then increasingly harder for every result after that. But it will not be the exact same treatment that subdirectories get”

Exactly how this is going to play out is still up in the air. Matt promised to clarify things “at some point” after he gets back from the convention. This does bring to mind a number of questions and clarification is needed for sure. I doubt that most of it will come from Matt or Google, however, our industry is very good at analyzing an issue and making its own clarifications. I have one basic question related to this … Till now, sub-domains have basically been treated as separate web sites. How will this change if at all?

The real news in all of this is that Google is starting to make changes in how it handles sub-domains. It’s a tricky issue to solve as eradicating the sub-domain spam would surely hit quite a few legitimate users of sub-domains as well. This said, I don’t think this is the last change we will see in the handling of sub-domains. While this change will help eliminate the multiple listings in a single SERP, there are still the issues of the topical content spam so many sub-domains are filled with. I am looking for a paid linking type solution to appear which will selectively ignore sub-domains based on the quality of their content.

To repeat what I have said for quite some time now, if you can avoid using sub-domains, do it.

I had been playing with the service to see if I could find any real value and instead found the real reason not to use the service in my opinion. They use your username and password to spam the bookmarking sites, and you are responsible for the content they submit under your login.

You agreed to let them do it.

Most people (me included) usually don’t bother to take the time to read a sites “Terms of Service” when signing up. In the case of OnlyWire, its a big mistake. Let’s take a look some of the conditions you agree to in their TOS. These are direct quotes from the services TOS.

1. You agree to let OnlyWire bookmark the http://www.onlywire.com site AND the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor site link one time.

2. The Service is intended for Adult use only. (additional info was included)

4. You are responsible for all activity and usage of the Service and for all content created on, posted to or accessed under your username and password.

Put the above together and you have the potential to have some very unwanted bookmarks added to your profiles and no recourse to stop it unless you quit using the system and change all of your passwords.

Think about the big picture, all the users of the OnlyWire system each add the “Sponsored” site to their bookmarks without any chance to review the site prior to the posting. These guys can get a site bookmarked under a very larger number of profiles in a rather short time and basically without the profile owners foreknowledge. In my opinion and in the opinion of everyone I have talked to about this, this is defiantly Social Spam and may even verge into the realm of Social AdWare.

Needless to say, I spent a bit of time last night changing all of the passwords to the profiles I was testing. I suggest you do the same if you are using OnlyWire. Now I have to keep resisting the temptation to test the other side of the coin and find out if being a sponsor has any real value.

Barry Swartz over at Search Engine Roundtable has some telling examples of Site Explorers Selective Data Publishing.

I can understand Yahoo!’s reasoning behind this if it is a permanent change, however it puts a dent in a marketers ability to accurately assess a site. Until now, Yahoo!’s “link:” command was the most accurate. Google has only shown a portion of the links they know about for years now and a few months ago MSN eliminated the search completely. Yahoo was the one last bastion to get reliable inbound ink data. It seems this is gone now too.

There are some people who are touting that you can still get reliable number from Yahoo if you use their API … We’ll have to wait and see on this one.

Wikipedia keeps a “spammer blacklist” and shares it with several search engines, he says. Domains that appear on the list often lose valuable search engine traffic.

I had never heard of this being done at Wikipedia and sent a quick note over to Loren Baker at the SearchEngineJournal.com. He Wrote this …

Wikipedia Spam Resulting in Google & Yahoo Penalties

Loren is very good at digging into tid bits like this and his article is on this one is very good, well worth the read.

5 hr 39 min 41 sec : Google Factory Tour event on 5/19/05 at Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

If you took the time to watch the whole thing, I applaud you, I just have to much to do to get through it all. Let me know if I missed any thing in the last 4 and a half hours.

Using the popular news site Topix.net as an example, Evin J. Delaney writes a compelling argument for why SEO should always be a integrated part of any decision which effects your website.

Read the full article “How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing” at the WSJ site.

The simple fix for the Topix.net dilemma is a basic 301 re-direct. They need to pick a domain (.net or .com) and create a mapped 301 permanent re-direct from the old domain URLs to the new domain URLs. This may not allow the pages to transfer immediately from one domain to the other, but both sites can be running while the transition is in place preventing the losses they feared. Once the pages transfer it would be safe to discontinue updating the old domain.

Only a few months ago, waves of discussion swept though the search community when it was reported that Google had trademarked the term “TrustRank”�. Many speculated on the significance of the term and on what it may mean to tried and true search marketing techniques. But in truth, it’s just a new term for a very old marketing technique, “Word of Mouth”�

Trusting in Friends

Before the search engines or even the http protocol, people used word of mouth to find that great BBS or UseNet group. But people did not just listen to anyone; usually they would only visit places recommended by friends and neighbors or other people they “trusted”�. In the days of 3200 baud modems, you did not waste time on unknowns if you could help it. This was probably the true beginnings of TrustRank online.

As the Internet started to grow, specifically with the advent of http and web pages, it became almost impossible to only rely on friends to give you advice on where to go. You had to start placing your trust in someone else. The parallel between methods of creating trust online and the growth of the search engines is no coincidence. As people yearn for new content online, the search engines vie to be the focal point of discovery and the only way to do that is to first earn the trust of the surfers.

Trusting in Editors

The formalization of TrustRank first started as human edited directories. Since the task of reviewing and suggesting websites was a bit much for one person to handle alone, directories started popping up which would review sites and list the ones which it deemed worthy. Yahoo! started as a human edited directory and quickly became one of the most trusted sources for new websites. At one point, getting the Yahoo! “Cool”� icon next to your URL was the equivalent of getting a #1 Google ranking for your primary keyword or phrase today. This worked because of the trust people put in Yahoo’s Editors and the sites they selected for the directory.

Other directories started showing up and even finding more unique ways to use editors to build a directory. The DMOZ or “Open Directory Project” used a large number of volunteer editors and assigned each editor to a specific category. This provided specialists in categories and the ability to fine tune site selection. The volunteer editor core was not without its problems, but the concept was clear. Dedicated editors would provide listings that could be trusted even more due to the content specialization of the assigned editor.

Trusting in Engineers

The exponential growth of the web made the job of categorizing it quite impossible for a single editor or even a group of editors. Computer engineers and programmers devised a way to retrieve content from the web and categorize it automatically, hence the birth of the now infamous search engine spider. This process could perform the work of thousands of human editors and a fraction of the cost.

The trust test of these new processes was the accuracy of their results. A combination of two processes, the collection of the pages by the spiders and the analysis of the page content by the search algorithms had to perform together to produce results that people trusted. WebCrawler became the first search engine, relying on automated results and not human editors. More portals and directories began to utilize this new process and soon Lycos and Altavista were trusted household names (houses with an Internet connection that is). Even Yahoo had added a search engine alongside its famous directory. Search engines have now earned the surfers trust as a legitimate tool for finding content online.

Trusting in Webmasters

About this time, we also see the unfortunate birth of search engine spam. Fairly quickly some webmasters realized it was easy to manipulate the results of these automated systems to their favor. As the abuse grew, something needed to be done to restore the trust in the search engine results people were seeing. A small emerging search engine seemed to have the answer. The founders of Google realized early on that they could rely on the “votes”� of other sites in the form of links to help them identify the best sites. The more sites linking to a page, the more the page could be trusted.

By relying on the assumption that webmasters would only link to good sites on a topic, the ideas of “link popularity” and “Page Rank” were born. As you can guess, the ideas worked. Google soon became the most trusted search engine and others followed suit. Yahoo, MSN and others now incorporate some form of in-bound link analysis into their ranking algorithms. This “voting”� process continues to evolve as those same abusive webmasters tried to find new ways to manipulate the search results. The effect of this fight against search spam only strengthens the ability of the search engines to identify quality sites.

What does this mean in terms of TrustRank? It means the major search engines have moved from a solely technological approach back towards one which incorporates the behavior of a specific group people to add trust to their search results.

Trusting in People

We are currently in the middle of the next phase of TrustRank evolution, one that takes us back to the beginning in a way. The influx of social media over the past couple of years is starting to affect the Internet as a whole and how people interact with it. The higher levels of interactivity and customization allowed on web sites today provide the means for individuals to build collections of their own favorite sites or pages and share them with friends and strangers. All of a sudden, you have hundreds of thousands of “Editors” categorizing and ranking the millions of sites and pages on the Internet. Once again, you can trust your friends and neighbors to let you know which sites are the ones they recommend.

The search engines are not oblivious to this change in trust behavior and are making moves to capitalize on it. Yahoo purchased the webs largest social bookmarking site del.icio.us as well as the popular photo sharing site Flick’r. If they are not currently doing so, I would bet the data from those sites will eventually find its way into their search algorithm. Google and MSN will probably make similar acquisitions in the near future. Digg.com is rather ripe for the picking I’d say.

It is interesting to note, that as the web grows, so does the number of people needed to provide trust to a specific site or page. It took just a couple of people back when the web was very young. Now, with billions of pages of content available to the average surfer, you need the help of 10’s of thousands to keep that trust alive. Over time, TrustRank has evolved to form what I like to call “The Circle of TrustRank” …

• First trust came from specific individuals
• Then groups of individuals
• Then Automated processes
• Back to groups of individuals
• Finally back to specific individuals

TrustRank seems to be traveling in a full circle from listening to your close friends and neighbors, through a variety of incarnations, then back to friends and neighbors. Not just yours this time, everyones.