Aaron Wall, you're my hero. Positive uses for Google Knol copyright destruction

Aaron Wall recently wrote about Google Knol in his blog. Effectively Google is trying to create a wikipedia of its own. A place where people can write any article (with an easy to use interface that requires no knowledge of code) about anything they want.

Aaron postulated that a badmamajamma SEO could "write" an article with stolen content and publish it, outranking you for the same terms, WITH YOUR OWN ARTICLE. Gnarly no? Google Knol is a copyrighting nightmare, Aaron is spot on.

But what about its possible uses for building traffic. Aaron talks about how the links are all rel=nofollowed but what if you werent looking for page rank. What if you posted an "article" that was more an advertisement on Google Knol? Not only do you get a pretty solid placement with your keyword loaded article, but you may convert a sale or three. In the process another listing gets pushed down the results list..

Do you see where my mind is wandering off to?

So I decided to try my little devious advertising scheme. My "knol article" about pest control in san diego is really just an advertisement with a general rewording of Happy Pest Control's index so as not to create too much duplicate content.

I have linked to it on Happy as well as on here, and might even in a few other spots. Nothing big, just a couple links to see what kind of power this little idea could bring about.

Over the next few weeks Ill track this baby, and if the Knol article takes off and does well on the listings, well Ill be writing a lot of articles on Google Knol.

Your thoughts are always appreciated.

Cuil.com not so cool for SEO/SEM/Internet Marketing

Cuil.com is a new search engine that is a spinoff from some of the boys who left google. Want to learn the backstory, get learned up here.

I think its a neat idea people are trying to challenge the almighty Google, however the name of the game is not to launch websites (especially major sites) in beta mode.

Cuil is an interesting concept, giving each site more of an advertisement with its image and brief description from the first 200 characters or so on the site. In fact I was pretty excited when I typed in "pest control san diego" and saw that Happy was already listing 1st page for it. That excitement dropped when I saw the site cache was from what looks like 2 months ago. I decided to look up "full monty marketing inc" next. Not only did I not come up with the logical, most relevant site, but instead I was provided:

Salisbury, Ct Jobs - Simply Hired

Iron Man - Go Sale

Not really relevant considering that though we like neato toys in the office, we don't own an Iron Man suit. If we did though we could fly out to Salisbury, Connecticut to apply for a job for our own company.

I started looking around and playing with Cuil some more, I found that relevance isn't nearly as important to Cuil as just being generally on the right website theme is. To be more specific, your index page's first couple hundred characters. So if you want to rank well for Cuil (at least currently) keyword spam the hell out of the first words on the page.

Im actually advocating spam...

For its faults, I think they're on to something at Cuil. If Im arsing about on an Iphone, I don't want to deal with the small fonts of google, I want pictures and head tags. It gives me the "good enough" information Im seeking at that moment, and if I want to expand on it, Ill do it at home on a laptop later on.

Now if only they could work on the relevance issue so that sites dont start looking like:

"Football Picks, Football, Footballs, Football and Football Players, Football Games and who won the Football Superbowl..." You get where Im going.

Hi Tech Termite Control website launch

Hi Tech Termite Control in San Diego

Hi Tech Termite Control in Orange County and Los Angeles

Its a short post, but again, working during shark week is near impossible, especially when you find out the childhood bully who you told to get bitten by a shark.... actually did.

*I know, nuts right? What are the odds?*

Page Rank Updated!

Ah, friggin finally! Google has updated their page rank numbers folks. Hopefully everyones sites have gone up from the change up.

Anchor Text is the Enemy! - Google Bombing Explained

After the comments I received on the last blog post, I think I need to explain that I was using a technique called "google bombing." For those who don't know; Google puts a lot of seo importance on links. Now those links, while good for page rank, can also be detrimental to your name, branding, etc.

In semi recent news, a bunch of bloggers and web sites got together and wrote on a "miserable failure" and then linked those words to the presidents web page, whitehouse.gov. So if you looked up "miserable failure" in google, George W Bush was the apparent definition as it became the first link from all of the posted anchor text online.

Google has since changed this around a bit and only made links effective when they are actually words on a page. Hence, if you can find the words "small, minded, marketing" on a page, you could, in theory google bomb them for such things, and if spammed out enough times or enough people do it, then they will rank for such terms because anchor text is valued so highly.

Pest Control Marketing and Advertising Links

With the national pest management seminar coming up in Scottsdale, Im busy gearing up for an all out pest control marketing push. So here are a list of the pages I have lined up;

• Pest Control Marketing - Happy Pest Control
• Pest Control Advertising - Local Search Results
• Internet Marketing for Pest Control - Full Monty Marketing Inc.
  

As you can see this is link whoring, but still, good information for pest professionals.

Full Monty Marketing Website Release!

Its official, were uploaded, running, incorporated, the works. (albeit some textual content still needs filling) Full Monty Marketing Inc. website is finally done and Lynn and I are stoked because it means now we dont have to dance around the "whats your website addy?" question.

Admittedly, local-search-results.com was done for a quick fix and semi bragging rights that were going to take over the san diego search marketing world with a template from dreamweaver. Its insult to injury you know?

But now were legit and have a full fledged internet marketing site we can be proud of. I suggest you all go check out the code, Jeff's work over at chico is awesome. My demands of cleaner and cleaner code aren't going unnoticed, and I especially like the hidden divs in the java. Allows me to use google against itself by legitimately cloaking text. Legitimate uses for cloaking, who would have thought?

Now watch, google bans my ass for bragging about it...

San Diego Home Improvements & Chico Web Design

San Diego Home Improvements joined Full Monty Marketing. We expect to have their new site loaded up in the next couple weeks. Their current site can be seen at www.choosesdhi.com

Chico Web Design in California has hired Full Monty as well to finish off their seo works on their site. If you need a solid web hosting, logo design, graphic design, or web development firm, these are your guys. 

More updates on these sites and others soon.

The Yellow Pages & Yellow Book are Doomed

I have a friend who works for one of the big books out here in San Diego. Hes a cool guy, doesn't force the sale like most of the blood suckers that work for the yellow pages. After I finished his most recent pest control service, I spent the better part of an hour talking to him.

The books are loosing a ton of business, roughly 10-14% per year according the reports. But we all know this already, so I asked him what they we're doing to save the company both on paper and virtually.

• SEM Online Informational Videos
• Price Reductions for Book Clients
• Television / Internet Local Advertising
• Virtual Listings Online

The video SEM series to me is a totally failed marketing ploy. They shoot a video of someone explaining why their company is better than the competition with a camcorder, and put it up on a couple sites. Rarely do I see these videos sent to major sites like You Tube, and frankly the videos are rarely entertaining enough to keep the attention of the person watching for more than about 15 seconds. I mean really, how interesting to your average person is a pest control guy talking about his equipment? A plumber talking about his pipe snake? I'm developing interest in watching paint dry just talking about it. Its not a wonder that companies I talk to are willing to drop the video SEM campaign after their one year contracts are up.

Price reduction is well, obvious. If less people are using the book, then you have to make it worthwhile to the clients, however I'm sure theres a lot of cost behind producing several million books. However, a full page ad in most of the books I've seen are $2,500 a month! So I'm sure they can afford to cut the coin a bit.

My friend mentioned that in the upcoming future the yellow pages are working out a deal with cable companies to effectively allow consumers point and click interfacing with television ads. Say a round table pizza ad comes on the screen, with a click of the remote, they can order what they want on a pizza and have it delivered to them. While this idea works well for pizza companies, I have trouble seeing the correlation between tv advertisements and a fashion or clothing store.

In the last few years the yellow pages have been running online search engines with listings of clients to provide a searchable database. Google and yahoo have emulated this with the local search listings, which initially were entirely book based, but as time has gone on, the search engines have begun to separate themselves from the books, which is going to hurt them greatly in the long run.

As you can see, the situation is grim for the big yellow book. Unless these boys get with the times and start offering real SEO and website development, its only a matter of time till the gimmicks and advertising ploys are recognized as such.

"rel=no follow" is worthless unless youre too cool for school

I have been playing with rel=nofollow tags on some of my smaller sites and have found that when using it in every outbound link that has a low page rank - the site will actually rank worse. After scratching my head for about a half an hour I came to the realization that no follow tags actually tell google and yahoo:

"dont look anywhere in this link, not for keywords, or link information, or text, or anything else for that matter"

Which means if you link whore like you should in on page SEO that you're going to lose all those nicely placed keywords in the alt and title tags.

So all the hype of no follow tags to prevent page rank from bleeding out of a page are basically worthless. Unless that is, you're too cool for school. Sites with higher page rank can pull it off cause on page SEO isn't as mandatory as it would be with a page rank of 0 or 1.