Caydel’s SEO Blog

Perhaps Google’s algorithm isn’t as difficult as we all think?

No, I haven’t been sitting in front of the microwave for too long again. Before you rip me to pieces, give me a few seconds to explain myself!

Possible Technology Limitations

Now, we all know that Google has one of the largest server farms in the world, estimated upwards of 250,000 individual servers spread worldwide. In spite of this fact, many people lost sight of the fact that Google only has a finite (albeit large) amount or resources.

If we estimate that Google crawls 100 million+ new pages per day, they are likely to encounter a billion or more new links on a daily basis. I think it is plausible that given the ‘100 factors’ supposedly composing the algorithm, Google may find itself running short on server power while crunching all the incoming data. For example, many of the ‘factors’ which are assumed to influence an outgoing link’s value are dependent on characteristics of incoming links. This could continue recursively back through many layers of the page heirarchy. Links are only one example of hard-to-crunch data; undoubtedly there are more costly factors to take into account.

Additionally, one needs to consider latency times to transmit data between server farms located on all different continents. For instance, data transmitted from Eastern Asia would take likely 100ms to reach the Continental US. Since page information is likely distributed among the various server farms, there could be signifigant transport delays involved in obtaining the data for a larger algorithm.

Remember that a certain proportion of Google’s server farm is not dedicated to their ranking algorithm; much of their hardware contains the finalized results which they serve out. Not only that, much of the hardware contains duplicate information: for instance, there are numerous data centers serving out identical information to search requests in the United States; a similar situation is seen in most foreign countries.

Geniuses and ‘Good’ Algorithms

Cringely’s recent article on PBS once again brought to the forefront one important fact: Google is composed of genius engineers and computer scientists. Every computer scientist knows that the ‘best’ algorithms are the ones that solve the largest number of potential cases in the least amount of steps, in the simplest fashion possible.

A well designed algorithm conveys a sense of beauty to a computer scientist; there is nothing like taking a huge, ugly algorithm written quickly to solve a problem, and refining it into a short, effective, and quick piece of work. A simple but effective algorithm has an elegance around it that is recognized by all who work with it.

Conclusions

As a result of the makeup of Google’s employee body, I would suspect work is constantly being done to simplify the Google algorithm while maintaining the same level of effectiveness it currently has, and I believe it is quite possible that the algorithm that is currently in place is much simpler than we have been led to believe. There is financial benefit to using a ’simple’ algorithm: by cutting down on machine time, Google would be able to get better use out of its machine time, which has obvious financial implications.

What are your thoughts? Personally, this is just a theory: until we know better, I am just going to continue with my mental picture of the ‘big’ algorithm, and all the various on-page and off-page factors we traditionally assume they look at.

A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.

People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.

What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.

I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.

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I heard someone say the other day that a link in the Best of the Web Directory was one of the more cost-effective ways to build link strength. I feel somewhat skeptical of this claim since I would think that linkbaiting or other techniques may be more so; on the other hand, as far as directories go, BOTW is probably one of the top, and big enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if Google gave it some weight since it is nearly completely spam-free, human-reviewed and edited and all that.

Have any of you purchased an inclusion there? Did it make a noticeable difference for you? What are your thoughts?

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I spoke with one of my clients this morning, and he told me about some recent successes they have been having through email marketing to a mailing list targetted at a tightly defined mailing list.

You can read more about it at my (other) blog: Tried, Tested and True: the Mailing List

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A while back, I first commented on the fact that the entire .cm (Cameroon) TLD appears to be redirected to the Agoga.com parking page in my post ‘Typo Squatter loses Thousands of Dollars Due to Missed Details‘. This post generated tons of interest and comments, and a large amount of search traffic.

The move by the government of Cameroon has become an ongoing mystery for many domainers - few could fail to see the benefitsof owning the .cm registry. Think of the profits - any time you mistyped ‘.com’ as ‘.cm’, you went to an ad-driven parking page. It is estimated that millions of people make this sort of error every day, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad revenue daily. In essence, whoever redirected the .cm registry pulled off the perfect coup of the domaining world.

Well, the mystery is finally solved. According to a recent article on CNN, the mastermind behind the .cm switch is Kevin Ham, domainer extrordinaire with an estimated net worth of $300 million dollars. According to the CNN article, Ham sent a group of his employees flying to the nation of Cameroon to convince the government-run registry the value of landing-page redirection. Ham splits his profits off this scheme with the government of Cameroon.

According to sources, he is also eyeing Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) for the same type of agreement he has with Cameroon.

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As some of you may already know, I’ve started my own web design / development / SEO / SEM business handling everything from internet marketing, to site design, to web applications development. Early on, I am throwing a fairly wide net until I have a chance to find where the demand and the money is - at that time I will narrow down my focus upon that particular industry.

Currently, I am trying to land my first few clients. I’ve had a few already who have been happy with my work, but it looks like I will have to cold call to get the ball rolling. Does anyone have any strategies with respect to cold calling? Is there anything you do which seems to garner a great response?

I appreciate any tips!

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Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

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