MSN

According to the WSJ and Bloomberg, Yahoo thinks it’s going to reject Microsoft’s Takeover offer.

It begs several questions. Not the least of which is how the hell are they gonna do that?

When someone offers a 60% premium over your current stock price in cash, you’ve got to come up with a pretty darn good reason not accept it or your shareholders are going to revolt.

Some have speculated that Yahoo might make a deal with Google to outsource search or advertising or something: But a deal like that would certainly be the death nail in Yahoo’s coffin.

Remember how well that deal worked for AOL years ago? AOL had 30% of the search market when they outsourced to Google. Now they have about 5%.

The same thing would surely happen to Yahoo if they got in bed with Google Yes they would get more money per search over the next 3-5 years, but after that they would have no bargaining leverage with GOOG and would have to renew on far less favorable terms.

What other options does Yahoo have to reject the Offer? Find a white knight to put up a bid with more favorable terms? Almost no one has the cash to start a bidding war – and who would even want to?

Yahoo is screwed. All they can do is try to bargain a better price. Filo and Yang are just flailing to add one last bit of shareholder value before they’re both out on their asses as an all cash takeover from MSFT would leaves neither with an equity stake in the new “MicoHooey!”

The other question is whether Microsoft anticipated a rejection (either by Yahoo or regulators) and tendered this bid just to fuck with Yahoo. How desparate will Yahoo get to try to stave off Microsoft? Will they have a fire sale? Merge with a worse suitor? Or even sign a dark Pact with the Prince of Searchness?

One thing is certain: 2007 2008 is the End of Yahoo as we know it.

For a predator like MSFT, that’s probably what they were looking for all along.

Tagged none | 4 Comments »

Via Threadwatch, Live now has the command LinkFromDomain: so you can see what sites a domain links too.

Here it is for SEOblackhat.

SEO Black Hat has some real dogshit links in there. Gotta love Zombo at number one and itsatrap at number 7. Wierd Results. Are they ranking them by most authoritative or something?

In case you needed further evidence that the search engines care where you link, now you have it. It sure does look like Linking to autority sites will help you in the SERPs.

Tagged none | 1 Comment »

As an SEO experiment, a little less than a month ago we:
1. Removed all the categories from the sidebar
2. Listed titles of every post with links every page
3. Got rid of the Google Sitemap.

Because we updated the theme on friday to include a new navigational setup, it’s time for some observations about the experiment.

For the month of September, SEO Black Hat had these search referral numbers:
Google 24889
Yahoo 1047
MSN 503
Ask Jeeves 91
Google Images 82

In August, 2006 with search referrals of
14258 - Google
1603 - MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 - Ask Jeeves
19 - Google Images

and these numbers in July
11995 - Google
1145 - MSN
828 - Yahoo
514 - Google Images
34 - Ask Jeeves

There was a 74% climb in the number of Google search referrals. MSN switched to live – and live hated my old layout because it was ugly (let’s see if that picks up any with the new design).. Yahoo was down slightly and Ask Jeeves up slightly.

Also of interest is that SEO black hat had gone supplemental after 182 results prior to the experiment. Today, SEO Black hat does not go supplemental until 554 results (which is pretty good considering this is only my 334th blog post.)

Of course, all this did not happen in a vacuum. I continued to write posts and people linked to those posts. Also, I took advantage of two internet “trends” with a couple of my posts that contributed to these search referrals:

Keyword Search Referrals
Fortuny 3151
lonelygirl15 715

Those Keywords, which accounted for about a third of the increase, should probably be disregarded.

The private SEO Black Hat forums increased stickyness and number of visits. Therefore, if Google is tracking user behavior, there’s a good chance that SEO Black Hat would be seen as more authoritative site.

My theory is that Google probably does track user behavior and is factoring this into their algorithm. It also seems very likely that Google cares about click distance from the homepage – especially for indexing purposes (as in: what goes supplemental).

What is click distance? Click distance is the minimum number of clicks it would take you to get from one page to another. During the experiment, the click distance from the home page to any post (or from one post to another) was 1.

What does that mean for your site design? Make sure your navigation is set up well. Google sitemaps are not the answer. If a post is 10 clicks from the homepage, it’s going to be a lot harder for that post to rank in the search engines.

I’ll detail what changes were made to SEO Black Hat from an on page SEO and usability perspective throughout this week.

Tagged Design, Case Studies | 15 Comments »

In the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Live.com. My observations have led me to the theory that “Live” is a very human editorial intensive project. As such, how aesthetically pleasing a site is will dramatically effect how well that site ranks. Understanding this shift will be crucial to you if you want to rank well search engines in the years to come.

Here’s why . . .

Let’s say that you are in charge of Search at Microsoft. You have a virtually unlimited budget and your job is to do what Microsoft has done in every market they have entered: your job is to win.

Step 1.
The first thing you should ask yourself is “Who is my target audience?” Who do you want to adopt your product? Is it the technically savvy? The very intelligent? The techie crowd? The power user?

No!

If you are at Microsoft and your goal is to win, your target audience must be the median 80% of searchers.

Step 2
What does your target audience want to see as a result when they are searching? Do they want to see authoritative sites? Sites that have been online for 5 years? Sites with a lot of links pointed at them? The sites that are the most popular in a given niche?

No!

For your target market, when they click a result they want to see a professional looking site: a pretty site - something that is aesthetically pleasing. They want a nice layout with pretty graphics. They want simple navigation. They do not want plain Jane text or a site that looks like 95% of blogs do.

They want to feel like what they landed on is not spam, not old, not geeky and might just have the answer to what they were searching for. They want to think that there is a legitimate company behind the site they landed on.

This part may be the toughest part for you to swallow. But you are not in the median 80% of users. You are a power user and you are a geek. Don’t believe me? Try going to your average football game or night club and using terms like “SEO”, “Blog”, or “Tag Cloud” with everyone you meet.

Most people don’t even know what the term “Search Engine” means. Once you get your head around that we can move on to . . .

Step 3
How can we deliver what that median 80% searcher wants? Well, there are about 6.5 million sites tracked by Alexa. We can safely say that any site without an Alexa ranking does not need to be indexed. Is there an algorithm that can tell you if a site will be pleasing to the human eye? Probably not. “Art” and “Style” would be very difficult to teach to a computer.

But since you only have a set of ~6.5 million sites to worry about, why not just hire people to review all the sites manually? The top 500,000 sites would represent more than 90% of web traffic. So lets say you hire 500 people to review those sites and 1,500 people to review the other 6 million.

For the High priority sites that’s just 1000 sites per person. That’s Hardly a difficult task for 1 person to monitor. For the lower priority sites, it’s about 4000 per person. That’s more difficult, but still doable.

I’m not saying you throw out the algorithms, I’m saying you use them as a starting point and then pick the best looking ones from there.

This method would satisfy the greatest number of users and it would be a drop in the bucket relative to the value of the market.

2,000 people, even if you hired them in the US (although I don’t know why you would) would only cost you about $50k per person per year or $100 million per year. Considering that Microsoft made $12 Billion in profits in the past year, they can easily swing that.

In fact, they could spend even more on human review. They could hire people from overseas for much less. They could easily hire 10 times that number of editors for less than $600 million per year (just 5% of company profits). Considering that revenue related to search advertising brought Google $2 billion in profits in the past year, I’d say that investing $600 million to deliver the best results is a no brainer.

Now will these people all be experts in every field? No. But they don’t have to be. There job is deliver the results that the median user will like most. Those results will be professional looking sites that answer the searchers queries. The blend of human editorial review with algorithmic analysis will be the wave of the future. Simply changing algorythms will not be able to best what an army of human reviews armed with similar algorythms can produce.

What does that mean for sites that are ugly looking? Sites that look like, say, SEO Black Hat does today? It means that we will either have to redesign to “Look” pretty, or we will not survive in the rankings long term.

Look for an SEO Black Hat redesign in the very near future . . .

Tagged Future of Search, Design | 11 Comments »

You know that the best SEO Black Hats are doing something more than scraping, using a site generator, comment spamming, and pinging to be raking in more than $100k per month.

But what is it?

Right now, there is way too much good stuff that I simply can’t publish on the SEO Black Hat blog. If I posted these tactics and exploits they would immediately get all the wrong kind of attention. The detailed conversations about how exactly to abuse search engine algorithms, generate massive traffic, and what other Black Hats are doing must remain underground to retain their effectiveness.

But what if I told you that you could discuss these exploits with me without paying my $500 an hour consulting fee? What if I told you there was a way to join in on the private, cutting edge discussions with some of the best Black Hats and web entrepreneurs in the world?

Would you be interested?

Because now you can . . .

Today is the official launch of the resource you’ve looked everywhere for but never found:

The Private SEO Black Hat Forum

Normally what you get on forums are people who don’t know anything talking with people who don’t want to say anything. You can occasionally find amazing tips on some forums: but you have to dig through 400 crappy posts just to find one post that is useful. That becomes a huge time sink.

How are the SEO Black Hat forums different?

Quality: We’re not going to have any contests to see who can make the most posts. That just creates tons of crap that no one wants to read. Our focus is on quality over quantity. Our primary concern is with succinctly answering one question: “What works?”

Sophisticated: Many of the topics we discuss are very advanced and require a high level of technical or business acumen to appreciate.

Expert Discussions: The SEO Black Hat forums are not for everyone and they may not be right for you. If you are relatively new to SEO or building websites, then do not join the SEO Black Hat Forums: you will be in way over your head. There are plenty of newbie forums out there for you – this is not one of them. Our forums are for successful web entrepreneurs to develop strategies that drive more traffic and generate more revenues.

Forum Membership Benefits

Access to Expert Advice and Discussions
We have both White Hat and Black Hat Experts that are already benefiting from new tool development, techniques, scripts and the sharing of ideas.
Some members you may already be familiar with include:

* CountZero from blackhat-seo.com (Black Hat)

* RSnake from ha.ckers.org (Web Security Expert)

* Dan Kramer from Kloakit (Cloaking Expert)

* Jaimie Sirovich from seoegghead.com (Token White Hat / SEO Geek)

There are several other members that you are certainly familiar with who are using handles for anonymity. We have others who are more focused on security, vulnerabilities, and coding. There are still more that you are likely unfamiliar with but are nevertheless web millionaires.

Databases – Large Datasets
If you want your sites to have massive amounts of unique content you need large data sets. The trading, discussion and posting of large data sets is going on right now on our forums.

Expired / Deleted Domain Tools
Want to use to use the same domain Tool that I used to get a Page Rank 6 site in the Gambling Space for just $8? This domain tool is available for members to use for free.

50% off on Kloakit – The Professional Cloaking Software

Scripts – Several useful scripts have already been posted – interesting thing you may not have thought of before are being discussed and developed.

Exploits and Case Studies: The really good stuff I can’t talk about on the SEO Blackhat Blog is being discussed on the SEO Black Hat Forums. Right now, some of the conversations include beating captchas, domain kiting, data mining, hoax marketing, XSS vulnerabilities as they relate to SEO, and much more.

Pricing: $100 per month.

The price will soon be rising significantly as more databases, hosted tools, scripts and exploits are added. However, once you lock in a membership rate it will never go up and you will continue to have access to everything.

So, if you think you’re ready for the most intense Black Hat SEO discussions anywhere, then here’s what you need to do:

1. Register at the SEO Black Hat Forums.

2. Go to the User CP and select Paid Subscription.

I’ll see you on the inside!

Tagged Forum | 9 Comments »

Want to know what it means to rank 4th in MSN? How about to rank 2nd in Yahoo? Or what about ranking 1st in Google and 3rd in MSN?

Well then grab the number of overture searches the term had last month and use our new “Expected Clicks by Rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Other Tool.”

By combining the AOL User Search Data, Hitwise Search Engine Market Share and Overture Search Tool, you can now estimate with some certainty how many clicks to expect for ranking anywhere in any search engine for any term.

The AOL user search data has been harvested to determine the CTR (Click Through Rate) for ranking number 1 vs. number 2-10. The sample size is large enough and broad enough that we can infer that this average holds true across many verticals:

Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs.
Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs.

The rest of the Long Tail (ranks 11-1000) = 11.3 percent of click throughs.

Search Engine Ranking #1: 2,075,765 clicks
Search Engine Ranking #2: 586,100 clicks = 3.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #3: 418,643 clicks = 4.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #4: 298,532 clicks = 6.9x less
Search Engine Ranking #5: 242,169 clicks = 8.5x less
Search Engine Ranking #6: 199,541 clicks = 10.4x less
Search Engine Ranking #7: 168,080 clicks = 12.3x less
Search Engine Ranking #8: 148,489 clicks = 14.0x less
Search Engine Ranking #9: 140,356 clicks = 14.8x less
Search Engine Ranking #10 147,551 clicks = 14.1x less

Search Engine Ranking 11+: 501,397 clicks

Now you may want to know the Market Share of the Search Engines Google, Yahoo, MSN and Everyone else: From Hitwise, we find:

The Search Market Share for Google: 60.2%
The Search Market Share for Yahoo: 22.5%
The Search Market Share for MSN: 11.80
The Market Share fore Everyone Else: 5.5%
(more…)

Tagged Tools | 22 Comments »

While checking out the details of someone who is referral spamming me, I noticed that Alexa’s results are no longer provided by Google. They now say “Powered by Windows Live.” Here’s a pic:

Now, I know that I’m probably 1 of about 15 people in the world that ever see alexa results, (they have about a 1.5% share) but still – 1.5% more for Microsoft is like increasing their searchshare by 15%.

Windows Live is looking pretty darn good these days and providing some relevant results that are HUGE improvement over MSN. I would say that they are on par with Google for relevancy. Some people complain about the scrolling Ajax SERPs bar - but I really like it. It lets you dig deeper much quicker. I like the interface and the bar that lets you remove descriptions, or add “Search within this site.”

My biggest issue with windows live now is that it is much slower at returning results than Google – often taking 6 secs to return a result page. Maybe I’m nuts, but could that be because people are hand coding the results in real-time? Is that what they mean by Windows “Live”? That there are live people giving me these results? //half in jest.

I like the Live results so much that I have added the Windows Live Toolbar to my IE7 browser. IE 7 is great, but that’s a whole other post . . .

Here’s what I noticed about the Live toolbar during installation:

Microsoft bundled Onfolio with the toolbar:

Collect, Save and Share with Onfolio
Easily save, organize and share your online research with Onfolio. Capture copies of pictures, text or Web pages to your PC for reliable access later. Organize your Web research and publish it in emails, blogs and documents. Search through your clippings anytime with Windows Desktop Search.

 

When I tried to install that component, it said you need to have the .NET framework installed to run it and where to download it. I didn’t bother - it should have said “Install .NET framework?” in a checkbox.

The toolbar also pushes the install desktop search (it’s bundled by default) which I went ahead and installed. The desktop search is using about 26 megs of ram in the background, so I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it. But they didn’t stop there:

The Windows Live toolbar includes a button linking to Microsoft Spaces . . . these guys thought of everything! Not that I use Spaces or want that stupid button, but that’s exactly why Microsoft is so successful. They are the masters of bundling and pushing their products into the market. Some people find it annoying, but I find beauty in business genius.

The “You making Money” Part

In the firefox spirit, the Live toolbar has a gallery of customized buttons submitted by various designers. The most obvious ways to search are by number of downloads or average user rating. It looks like the most downloaded one has only 1500 installs at the moment. Do you see the marketing opportunity yet?

Number of installs and ratings with such a small number of users are figures that are easily gameable. It’s not that hard to figure out how to increase the number of downloads and pump the rating (most plugins aren’t even ranked). So:

1. Develop a customizable button that doesn’t suck now
2. Develop a plan to monitize that button and
3. Pump that button towards the top of their results.

We know that Windows Vista will come out . . . eventually. Windows Live Search doesn’t suck and is improving. It will get more popular and will eventally replace MSN. All those old MSN toolbars are likely to be updated to Live toolbars through a push - It’s just the Microsoft way.

Even if they “fail”, they’re going to get at least 5% of the worlds computers to install this toolbar. Right now, that’s about 5% of 1 billion online computers. Imagine if they do what they always do and actually win. Then we’re talking 300 to 600 million people using that toolbar in 3 years.

So by creating and pumping a custom plugin/ button now, you will be getting in on the ground floor before Vista’s launch makes this toolbar use widespread. This could give you a significant first mover advantage that allows you to ride on the on the coat tails of Microsoft’s inevitable success.

Another way to skin that cat might be developing IE7 plugins or Vista Gagets right now.

Now the only question is what the hell to call this post:

A. “Alexa chooses Microsoft Live for SERPs”
B. “Microsoft: Still Writing the Book on Bundling”
C. “Microsoft Live Search – Supprise! It doesn’t suck.”
D. “Build you Business with Live Toolbar Plugins”

I guess I’ve been reading too much copyblogger lately, because I decided to go with:

E. “Prepare to Make a Killing with MS Live. Here’s How:”

Here’s the Live Beta Developers Guide.

Tagged Future of Search | 5 Comments »

Here’s an interesting nuget frm Cringelys weekly column:

And speaking of phones, last week Yahoo and Microsoft supposedly connected their instant messaging systems in a move that will eventually allow full interoperability, which was viewed almost universally as a defense against the threat of Google. Not so. It is all about phones.

There are a dozen or more healthy startups that already enable users to send instant messages from one IM system to another. What MSN and Yahoo quite specifically announced was the interoperability of their VOICE chat products, which of course also include text capabilities.

 

Cringley predicts that eventually all the major IM clients will work together on Voice to reduce costs. But isn’t it also possiable that Yahoo and Microsoft are are getting their systems working together because of a potential merger? Yahoo has been taking a beating lately in the market; their stock is near a two year low. Maybe their shareholders would accept a 35% premium over the current price - roughly $45 Billion.

Tagged Future of Search | 2 Comments »

The top result for “search.msn.de” is one of Ice Blog’s Blogger accounts.

It took me 4 days, a blog full of personal bullshit and a few freebie backlinks to rank for search.msn.de. What will it take to rank for ebay.com or amazon.com?

 

The MSN hand coders apparantly haven’t gotten to that one yet.

Tagged Case Studies | 3 Comments »

I’ve giving some thought to how real time MSN SERPs could be delivered by hand coders. While it doesn’t seem pretty far fetched, what MSN could do is this:

They receive a query in real time and send it through a script that pulls the Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Cache of their top tens for that query. That’s 40 Results. Since it’s the cache, they should come up very fast.

Those 40 results are sent to a total of 8 hand coders – 5 to each. A window pops simultaneously on each screener’s window and each makes a Blink Decision rating from 0-9 on the quality of the site: 9 being the best. After the rating is entered, the first window closes and the next pops in succession until a set of 7 results are found with these characteristics:

2 with a score of 7-9
1 more with a score of 5 or better
All with a score over 3

When there is overlap, an average score is used. They are then sorted by rating and delivered as results. Anything with a score of 0 is removed from the index as spam.

The “ratings” could then be used in later searches as a ranking component.

Of course, this does nothing to explain why they would need to type 149 words per minute.

It seems pretty unlikely but I think it could be doable with the right training. What do you think? Am I off my rocker on this or what?

Tagged Future of Search | 3 Comments »