Search Engine Optimization

Google Goes Public

In a widely-anticipated move, Google has now filed with the SEC to go public, and be a publicly listed company. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Boston were listed as the underwriters. It is probably only a matter of time before Google has an IPO, and there is speculation that the initial public offering could be as much as $2.7 billion in stock. Google has stated that founders (Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) will continue to run the company, but they have expanded their board of directors to include John Hennessy, president of Stanford University; Art Levinson, chief executive of biotech firm Genentech; and Paul Otellini, president and chief operating officer of chipmaker Intel Corp. From a strictly business standpoint, it can be assumed that any public offering would probably result in heavy trading and a very active interest.

From the other side of the business, what does this mean for search engine marketers? Well, certainly no one is coming out and stating that an IPO would change Google -- in fact, every attempt will be made to reassure the world that Google will remain Google, public or not. In practice, however, this may be difficult to achieve.

This first issue will be profits. Those who buy stock in Google will want to see profits from Google stock, and that is perfectly reasonable. Therefore, we can expect to see continuing or even increased push from Google to participate in paid advertising on their site.

The second issue will be control. It's straightforward enough to argue with your co-founder and partner; it might get acrimonious at times and you won't always agree, but overall, the decision-making power to date has been limited to an extremely small circle. Even the modest expansion of the board that just took place means that there are now more fingers in the pie. These new board members are industry experts, and they will definitely have ideas. The original vision of Brin and Page might well end up diverted or diluted.

The third issue is the hard to define "essence" of Google, what makes it Google, the heart of its "Google-ness", so to speak. Google has a feel unlike any other search engine. Overall, right now, most people think of Google as fairly streamlined, not weighed down by too much corporate culture or too much advertising or dead weight. They're also known for a sense of humor notably lacking in many other search engines, not being afraid to indulge themselves in April Fool's jokes at their own expense. Will all that remain the same, or will the stockholders panic in the face of such frivolity?

It seems safe to assume that Google will have to change, at least in some regards, when they go public. That may be for the best, since it's become a huge beast that is probably hard to control with just a couple of people. However, expect a lot of nervousness among Google users at the prospect of their bastion of free internet being corrupted by capitalism! Only time will tell if that nervousness will be justified or not, but let's hope that Google does not follow the trend of so many search engines, and "go corporate", so to speak. They need to make an honest profit, of course, but it would be nice if they could remain the champions of natural search and the unpaid internet. The little guy websites have few champions left.

Google Gmail and Email Marketing

Google's announcement of their proposed new free email service, Gmail, has been creating quite a stir not only in the internet industry, but also in the business sector. Google was wise enough to invite several business people to participate in the trial period and give their feedback, thus incidentally insuring a lot of word of mouth advertising.

Two things stand out primarily at this point in time:

1. Privacy advocates are still up in arms about the fact that Google will be spidering through your email messages and adding paid advertisements to them before they hit the recipient's inbox, and the fact that these emails are NEVER deleted from the system, even if you try to delete them.

2. Everyone who's tried the service really likes it, except in some cases for those ads.

Having email stored essentially forever has pros and cons; it could provide very useful documentation of things like business transactions, but on the other hand, if you fire off an email when you're hot under the collar, you might just want that deleted at some later date. Of course, it could be argued that if you're writing things down that you don't want to be saved and possibly seen by other people, then perhaps you should not be wriring them in the first place.

The issue of the advertisements it another story. On a strictly personal level, I don't care if some computer program reads through my email, but I don't care to receive emails that have banner ads added to them. They're annoying enough to me on websites.

However, my dislike of seeing banner ads in my email is personal; the business implications that it has are a different story. One of the services offered by Sharpnet Solutions is email marketing. What will happen to legitimate email marketing campaigns under Gmail? Your advertisement for your client will be scanned by a spider, and an appropriate paid advertisement inserted. In other words, your client will be paying for an email blast which might very well end up also advertising for their competitors! If the campaigns are sent as pure HTML and images, then it's unlikely the spider will find anything to read; on the other hand, none of those emails will get through to AOL users, since AOL email blasts require text messages.

If Gmail really does become a reality and gets a lot of people signing up, then email marketing companies will have to change their strategies. Perhaps it will require filtering the lists, and either eliminating certain addresses, or doing separate creatives for them. Either way, it's almost certain that email marketing costs will rise.

This is a great pity, because opt-in email marketing (as opposed to the universally-loathed spam) is a legitimate, effective, and extremely high ROI means of advertising a business, product, or service.

Yahoo! Search After April 15, 2004

As any current/former subscriber to Inktomi knows, Yahoo! planned to stop using Inktomi's old database on April 15, 2004. The idea was to switch over to Overture Site Match results, along with free results from their own search spider. Current and former Inktomi subscribers have been receiving emails for several weeks warning them that their current Yahoo! rankings would expire on April 15, unless they upgraded to Site Match.

Not surprisingly, this has led to a lot of curiosity and no small amount of concern about what would happen to some sites. Some sites that had been relatively anonymous found newfound popularity, and were really enjoying that traffic. Would that disappear after April 15?

Another concern was how Yahoo! would set up their new algorithm. Although Yahoo! representatives in several forums stated that they would not give preferential weight to the Site Match results, I'm not the only one who wondered just how that would work out. After all, Site Match, although cheaper than traditional PPC, is not exactly inexpensive, and is well beyond the budget of many companies. Ideally, they could attain great rankings without having to pay for them, if the spider viewed their site kindly. However, if that is the case, then what motivation do people have to pay for Site Match? I sympathize: If I were paying Site Match fees and saw free sites ranking higher than mine, I wouldn't be a happy customer, and I certainly wouldn't feel that was money well spent.

Several of our clients had benefitted from increased rankings, and many of these same clients cannot afford to upgrade to Site Match at this time, so I watched nervously as April 15th came and went. Right now, I have to say I'm not seeing a whole lot of action, although I have no doubt that Yahoo! fulfilled their promise and has switched listings. Customers have called to ask me about this, and ask me what my take is on Yahoo!'s new algorithm.

Although an SEO professional is not supposed to say this, right now I'm just not sure what factors they are using and how they are weighting them. I'm certainly doing my best to sort it out. I can say definitely that right now, free sites are still enjoying some nice listings. Whatever the long-term plans, Site Match right now does not seem to have universal dominance. The current rankings seem to combine those from the Yahoo! Directory with some Site Match and some spidered results, although at this time, it's a bit tricky to tell which are Site Match and which aren't. On the other hand, some sites which have decent Alexa rankings and decent Google PageRank don't seem to be ranking very highly.

All that means is that it will take a lot more time than I have currently invested to figure out what the future will hold for Yahoo! rankings! For now, it seems that Yahoo!'s latest big change is causing far less of a stir in SEO than some of the recent Google re-indexings. We'll be working hard to figure out the best approach for our clients, and keeping our eyes wide open for any new developments.

Doteasy Hosting, and Copyright Issues

It is sad to report that Doteasy.com has finally responded to our complaint of copyright infringement, and shown no intention to cooperate. My third email to the company, threatening legal action, finally received a response -- obviously a template response. Essentially, unless we sue the owners of the website in question and send a copy of the legal papers to Doteasy, they will not pull down the site.

First of all, an earlier email of mine not only plainly stated the infringements, but gave the hosting company exact links to each offending page. Second, this site is being used to defraud citizens of the United States and the UK; by refusing to pull it down after being so notified, Doteasy.com has just become an accomplice to this fraud. Third, the site owners used fake names and addresses, and hence, it is NOT POSSIBLE to directly contact them and sue them.

Although we respect the right of Doteasy.com to protect their clients and to give them the benefit of the doubt, this is a very poor decision on their part. Our attorney will be contacting them on our behalf, and further action will be pursued. In their attempt to give their customer the benefit of the doubt, they are allowing them to continue abusing SharpNET by their blatant theft of our copyright-protected website content, and are aiding and abetting in an international fraud scheme. Monster.com and other job boards, upon learning of the situation, immediately pulled the links and job listings. It's unfortunate that Doteasy.com did not see fit to do the same.

Again, we caution everyone to beware of InsyncSoft, a website using stolen content which is perpetrating fraud. And we also advise caution in all dealings with Doteasy.com, who has proved themselves less than ethical.

Privacy on the Internet

The outcry over aspects of Google's proposed new "Gmail" has brought an old argument back to life. Privacy advocates are opposed not only to the ads that Google proposes to place in personal emails, but also by the fact that these same personal emails will not be deleted -- even if the user attempts to delete them.

What does this mean, in practice? It means that: A) Your personal emails will be available to someone, somewhere, for an essentially indefinite time period; and B) Your personal emails will be put through a spider and altered by the addition of ad content, based on your personal communications. In practice, it means that if you're writing something confidential, self-incriminating, or inflammatory, you'd be well-advised to pick a different email service (or of course reconsider writing it in the first place). It also means that you could be sending emails back and forth with a friend, perhaps discussing a visit to the dentist, and suddenly find a paid advertisement for toothpaste showing up in them. If you'd find this unnerving, annoying, intrusive, or all of the above, this is not the email service for you. So in the small picture, people can avoid potential privacy issues by simply not using Gmail, or corresponding with those who do.

What is the bigger picture? The very strengths of the internet become weaknesses where privacy is concerned. You can easily share information with literally millions of people with just a mouse-click, but the down side is, that information is now available to any number of people. Those other people might copy it, steal it, or use it for malicious purposes, and most of the time, you wouldn't even know.

Free and open email communication, sending information across the world in seconds, also carries risks. Spam permeates email inboxes everywhere, pounding recipients with useless and unwanted information. All of it carries the risk of a hidden virus bomb which will detonate on your computer, doing everything from sending out spam to your friends, to hijacking your browser and implanting spyware on your computer. Some of that spyware can be put to malicious use, stealing passwords, PIN numbers, and personal information, leaving you at serious risk of being stolen from or defrauded.

Privacy issues are dominating many discussion forums and articles, both in the internet industry and in the general public. Identity theft is becoming a serious problem, along with the other less dangerous but still annoying hassles.

But is privacy really even possible on the internet? Is there really any way to patch all the holes, and protect yourself from every potential risk? The unfortunate truth is, probably not. An intelligent and malicious hacker will almost always manage to penetrate your defenses, particularly if you are a private citizen, whose computer is not protected behind the massive firewalls of the major corporations (which are by no means impenetrable). Almost everyone has been on the receiving end of virus attacks, and many people have found spyware on their computers when a more-knowledgeable friend suggested they run a check. Most of the spyware is neither harmful nor malicious, but it sill comes as a shock if you don't know it's there. I am an internet professional, and my home computer is guarded by several layers of firewalls and protection software -- yet last night, with one careless mouse-click, I got my browser hijacked, my anti-virus shut down, and bought myself almost 3 hours of computer cleansing before I got rid of it all.

In an imperfect world, the solution is to protect yourself as best you can by being proactive. Just as those who don't want their emails saved indefinitely should probably not use Gmail, there are other things you can do to protect yourself:

1. Don't have your passwords and PIN numbers saved on your computer, no matter how well-protected you think it is. It's better to take the time to type in the password every time than to have some stranger with bad intentions getting into your bank account (besides, that way you won't forget it!).

2. Don't use the same password for everything either, and don't write them down where they can be found.

3. Make sure any site you are going to purchase from has clearly posted privacy policies, and read them. Otherwise, you might find yourself on an unwanted mailing list faster than you can hit "send".

4. Don't save personal financial information or credit card information on your computer.

5. Never, ever, place orders through unsecured websites, from companies that you have not heard of.

6. If you have any reason to believe that your computer has been compromised, immediately change any and all passwords, both locally, and online. Do it IMMEDIATELY. Don't wait. And keep a close eye on all of your credit cards and bank accounts for the next few weeks.

7. If you're a business, make your site as secure as possible, including using secure servers and certificates, and encryption. If you are made aware of a violation, take immediate and aggressive action to combat it.

Protect yourself and your customers as best you can, but be aware that at some point, you too will probably be a victim of some sort of internet privacy violation.

Internet Issues, Close to Home and Far Away

Today just proves that the issues facing an internet marketer can be very diverse!

Google has once again set tongues a-waggin' in the internet industry with the announcement of their proposed new free email service, Gmail. Now first of all, the announcement came on April Fool's Day, so not a few people thought it was some kind of joke. Considering that Google further stated that each user would get 1GB of storage space, and that emails would never be deleted. They also stated that all messages would be scanned, and appropriate advertisements inserted. The same press release mentioned applying for jobs on the moon...

Except for the lunar outpost, everything was, in fact, actual fact. Google really is debuting a new free email service to a select group of users, and it does indeed have all of the features mentioned above. This has created a veritable firestorm of posts on forums and blogs throughout the industry, along with an instant condemnation by privacy advocates. Issue #1 is the "forever" aspect of your emails: If they are never deleted, then personal messages will always be available somewhere, for prying eyes to see. Whether or not this is likely, it IS possible, and reaction ranges from disapproval to outright fear. Issue #2 is the ads being placed into the emails. Many people feel that humans will be reading their emails, even though Google insists it is just their spiders that will do the reading. Even so, do we really want to see our personal messages peppered with paid advertisements? Google says this very advertising is necessary to pay for the service. I will say only this: Extra storage space is nice, but this "free" email service seems to charge a high price in return. If you have any privacy issues at all, or if you are already turned off by the advertising that has permeated every corner of the web, then this service is probably not for you.

On another front, we have found yet another case of someone basically stealing one of our websites. In this case, they replaced virtually every word on the site with "pancake". Not every word, though, and using the company name was enough of a coattail to ride on, to get them a nice high Google ranking under one search term we tried. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then our ears are certainly burning over here. Much more flattery of this nature, and we may start changing our websites every single day!

Finally, we have been having internet issues. Specifically, bandwidth and connection issues. This is not a good situation for an internet marketing company. At certain times of the day, our connection speeds were getting extremely slow, and when we added two more users, we even started getting service interruptions. A review of our DSL contract showed that we should be getting 1Mb, more than enough for our needs. Investigation showed we were getting more like 256K, and discussions with our provider were unhelpful, to say the least. Accordingly, we investigated alternate internet providers, and have hooked up our cable internet today on a test basis. So far, it's about six times faster.

There are business lessons to be learned from this experience, which carry through to all types of businesses, in all circumstances. The first thing is to watch where your money goes and make sure you're getting what you pay for. If we hadn't added the two extra users, we would never have investigated the DSL service, and never would have found out that we were, essentially, getting cheated. This just proves, again, that it's worth following up on things that seem wrong. As an internet-based company, we should have known better.

The other thing is the policy of keeping good business relationships. Our former internet provider has lost not only a client, but a company that referred business to them. This is a direct result of how they chose to address the situation of of promising us 1Mb when they in fact only delivered 256K. Instead of trying to make good, they instead basically claimed that we should be happy with what we were getting, which was substandard service, and refused to promise that it would improve in the future.

April 15th -- The Deadline Looms

April 15th looms on the horizon, and while for many Americans that means the dreaded tax deadline, it's a deadline of a different sort in the internet world. Here in cyberspace, we are waiting to see what happens when Yahoo! officially quits using the Inktomi database, due to occur on April 15th.

On that date, presumably, Yahoo! will officially start using the database for Overture Site Match. The interesting thing is that Inktomi sites are supposed to be grandfathered into Site Match until their official expiration date, but Yahoo! has made it clear that those sites will not be favored with a Yahoo! listing, unless they happen to be picked up by the free spider. Unless you've upgraded to Site Match, you're out of luck when it comes to a guaranteed listing. It remains to be seen just how and where those listings will show up in the Yahoo! search results. The fate of the Yahoo! Directory, with its $299 annual submission fee, is even more unclear. The Directory will probably continue to exist, but is it really doing anyone enough good to warrant the investment? Unless that too is somehow integrated into the new web search results, the answer is probably no.

Some sites which had good listings in Inktomi, but indifferent or poor listings elsewhere, have enjoyed a month of sales growth and strong rankings as a result of their temporary Yahoo! prominence. Those sites will be hit hardest by the imminent shake-up, taking away their day in the sun. Although they still have the chance of MSN listings through Inktomi, that too has a finite life span, lasting only until MSN debuts their own crawler and database later this year.

Other sites, those with strong Google rankings for example, will notice the change less. Although they will miss any traffic they might have gotten through an Inktomi listing, their own more solid rankings across the board will work in their favor to keep traffic levels more steady. Although they will be curious to see what the new crawlers from Yahoo! and MSN can offer, they don't have as much to lose. They'll mostly be watching to see if their sites rank well there too, so they can benefit from even more exposure.

Those who have paid for Overture Site Match will probably be the ones watching Yahoo! most closely in the coming weeks. Although Site Match's flat-fee per-click service can be considerably less expensive than other PPC options for competitive keywords, it does not come cheap, as many people discovered when they subscribed to LookSmart's almost-identical service over the course of 2003. Costs can mount rapidly, and it remains to be seen whether or not the traffic bought is worth the price. For many smaller businesses, the answer, again, is probably no.

Site Match customers, not surprisingly, will be hoping that their listings rank highest in Yahoo!'s search results, a reward for their investment. Smaller businesses, unable to afford Site Match, are hoping hard that free search listings still have the opportunity for favorable rankings -- as are the internet purists, who hate to see every search engine overtaken by paid listings. Inktomi subscribers are crossing their fingers that MSN will continue using Inktomi's old database and sending them traffic for as long as possible, and additionally hoping that losing their Yahoo! rankings will not damage business too badly. They are also hoping that the new free crawlers from Yahoo! and MSN will look kindly on their websites,.

We have customers who fit into all of the above categories, and we will be watching their campaigns closely in the coming weeks, to see what is the best search engine strategy to pursue at this time. In a year of almost-constant search engine shake-ups, this is just the latest in a long line of challenges for internet professionals and their clients.

And that's what keeps us on our toes!

InsyncSoft, Doteasy, and Plagiarism

I am sad to report that the hosting company Doteasy does not abide by their own posted policies, but instead permits websites to remain live that contain plagiarized materials, which futhermore are using those plagiarized materials to commit fraud.

Doteasy is the hosting company for InsyncSoft, the company I exposed in an earlier post as an internet scam artist committing fraud, who openly plagiarized 4 pages of their website from our SharpSoft website. Doteasy was notified by email not once but twice last week that their client was in abuse of their own policy against "Content that infringes or violates any copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, trade name, trade secret, or other intellectual property right of any third party." (from the Doteasy website, under "Service Terms & Conditions", item #13). We not only informed them of the copyright violations, but I personally supplied them with links to every page on the InsyncSoft site that was in violation, along with a link to our website. We requested that they abide by their stated terms and conditions, and pull the website immediately.

So far, we have received no response whatsoever from Doteasy, and the InsyncSoft site, full of pirated web copy and perpetrating fraud, is still live.

It's bad enough that there are so many dishonest people out there, who are willing to steal what is not theirs, and are willing to use the stolen material to commit fraud and theft on a grand scale. It tarnishes internet commerce, and makes it that much harder for legitimate businesses to gain the trust of the consumer.

How much worse is it that hosting companies and providers refuse to enforce their own policies, and apparently do not care that they are aiding and abetting in such theft and fraud?