SES 2006: It's Hard Out Here For A Blogger


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Top San Jose SES News

SES 2006: SE Algos: Can You Please Them All?
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SES 2006: Optimizing Your Feed
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SES 2006: Search Engines, Friend Or Foe
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SES 2006: SERP Sharp-Shooting
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SES 2006: Blog/Feed SEO: Watch Out For Bullets
The information flooding out of the Blog and Feed Search SEO session at SES San Jose was so rapid and powerful it knocked all of Mike McDonald's hair off. Because the information is so plentiful, we'll cut the right to the bald and shiny of Mike's notes.

SES 2006: A Case Of Duplicate Content
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SES 2006: Searchonomics
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SES San Jose 2006: Leveraging Social Media
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SES: It's Not Persuasion; It's Presence
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SES 2006: Demographic Targeting
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SES 2006: Social Search Overview
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Thursday August 10, 2006

SES 2006: It's Hard Out Here For A Blogger

Mike McDonald found himself in a room with a larger A-list than a Nathaniel Hawthorne character sketch. San Jose (or thereabouts) is where the big search engines and their famed bloggers live. The only thing better than this, says Mike, would be Danny Sullivan in lederhosen.

Editor's Note: Managing editor Mike McDonald of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session featuring a number of A list bloggers. Discuss your reaction at WebProWorld.

"I lost a World Cup bet, so tomorrow I will be wearing lederhosen for the organic search panel," says Sullivan.

Score!

Sullivan is the moderator for "Speaking Unofficially," a panel comprised of Google's Matt Cutts, Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny, Microsoft's Niall Kennedy, and Ask.com's Gary Price. The four of them spill their guts about life on the corporate blogging A-list.

Cutts and Zawodny, as may be expected, seem to have the most to say on the subject. Cutts feels as though he's a "security blanket" to an extent, as SEOers and Webmasters hang on his every word for the next Google tweak. Zawodny just wants everyone to know that bloggin' ain't easy.

Keeping up with a blog is a lot of work. How do you guys do it?

Zawodny: It does take a lot of time. People ask: 'how much time does it take?' And I never know how to answer that because it's so hard to quantify. Sometimes it takes no time at all, other times it takes half the day.

Are you having to show the company what you guys write about?

Cutts: Maybe 3 or 4 posts I've sent over to legal or PR, but in general it's just something I write at 3 am and just send out.

Zawodny: I think maybe I've done that 3 or 4 times, but I've never had anybody say 'don't say this' or 'don't post out' or anything like that.

Jeremy on speaking for Yahoo:

Mike

"One thing that happens is that someone will see something I've said and ascribe that to Yahoo, as in 'Yahoo draws a hard line,' or whatever, which is just wrong. And then what happens a lot of the time is that people won't link back to the original statements, or whatever, and the inaccuracy just lives on in the headlines."

How has the blogosphere created something of a democracy, and also somewhat of an imbalance insofar as what gets talked about? How do you feel about that underlying democracy wherein you have so much more influence over what is discussed than the smaller guy?

Cutts: I try to look for a lot of important feeds where news might break where people wouldn't normally look. I try to track down the smaller guys. The blogosphere can act as an echo chamber in both a good and bad way.

Zawodny: I think the whole democratizing nature of it went away a couple of years ago. I've actually tried to shy away from more of the echo side of things. The skill, I think, for companies is knowing when to get involved and when not to get involved.

Price: There's so much in the blogosphere where one person says something's great and the next will say it sucks.

Are you PR people at the end of the day?

Cutts: "I don't view Jeremy as a PR man when he writes that Yahoo Finance has this and that problem. I view that as ballsy. People care more about an authentic voice than they do anything else. If you only use your company's products, for example, people will think you're fake.

Zawodny: I think it's tricky for people to see because we don't always say when we're putting the hat on or taking the hat off. There are people at Yahoo who think my job at Yahoo is the company blogger. A lot of people will have that perception just because that's the most visible thing you're doing.

Price: If i become a shill for Ask.com, then I'm no longer valuable.

Kennedy: It really depends on who it is. If it's the official product team it's one thing.

Where do you draw the line about what you talk about?

Cutts: The supplemental results have been completely refreshed with completely new infrastructure, but I can't really delve too deep into the underlying details. That's an example where much beyond the surface would be inappropriate.

Zawodny: I guess for me figuring out where the line was by repeatedly crossing it and getting some visits in my office - usually not a lawyer - but a VP or whatever. I average about one of these office visits every year. I'm actually overdue about now.'

What's the feedback on the video blogging?

*Matt recently began video blogging on SEO topics.

Cutts: Like so many things, I kinda just backed into it. My wife is out of town, I had the bills paid, the cat groomed, caught up on my email. And I'm looking around and there's the video camera, so put all the lamps in the house in one room and just kinda threw something up on Google Video. Now there have been something like 80,000 downloads. It's important to keep trying new things and it's a lot of fun.

Zawodny: What I've been looking at, something I think has really come along, I think is screencasting. That's what I hope to spend some more time working some more with.

About the Author:
Jason is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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Both Google and Yahoo plan to place more emphasis on quality scores when ranking sites, and that topic quickly dominated the Search Algorithm Research session at SES 2006.

Doug

Staff writer Doug Caverly of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session on Search Algorithm Research. He also described one of the presenter's attempts at humor as "falling flat, by and large"; we will refrain from mentioning which one. Talk about quality scores at WebProWorld.

If you don't have a high-quality website right now, the search engines may begin to drop your site in the rankings. Although that was just one of several topics discussed during the session, it was the one that grabbed attention from the attendees.

Jon Glick of Become.com brought up quality during his presentation time at the session. Quality scores as determined by the search engines will have more influence.

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David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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Making Social Networking Work For Your Site

As the explosion of Web 2.0 sites and services continues to increase, social networking has also grown as another method with which to market your web site. Taking advantage of services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Furl (to name a few) can yield positive results when it comes to spreading the word about a site. Take a minute to check out Jason's write-up, based on a San Jose SES session and see if you can incorporate some of the tips into your marketing strategy.

|| Chris||

Social Networks and SEM

At the Social Search track at SES San Jose, Doug Caverly lends an eager ear to panelists discussing how community-built websites, like Wikipedia, Digg.com, and Del.icio.us, can be utilized for search engine marketing.

Neil Patel, cofounder of Advantage Consulting Services began the session by illustrating how a Wikipedia articles often appear quite high in the search results.

This presents an opportunity, on relevant pages, to add and monitor content about a company or brand. It may also be a good idea to create your own page(s). Patel warns about what is common sense to those familiar with social sites: be fair; be honest; be transparent. Spammers, promoters, and cons often receive backlash.

...Click to read more

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