If you’re in Seattle and want to work for the biggest e-tailer around, Amazon.com is hiring right now for a “Manager, Search Engine Optimization”. The required qualifications are actually somewhat reasonable, and I don’t doubt that the pay is great. Let’s just hope they don’t hire someone too good at their job and put all the affiliates out of business.

With Amazon’s link popularity, my guess would be that a few technical tweaks and some promotional campaigns for their highest revenue products would be all that’s neccessary to bring Amazon into top 5 positions for tens of thousands of high-traffic searches.

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Bill Slawski was kind enough to point me over to a newly released patent application from several Googlers focusing on how paid ads might be served, including the order of the ad results and the inputs used to determine relevancy and scoring.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the patent, as I don’t have time to give it a full review:

How to accept ads and determine the concept associated with each including:
Using keyword targeting information
Determining similiarity between ads
Using 4 items to determine a score for ads
Ad performance information
Advertiser quality information (where do they get this?)
Ad price information
An Information Retrieval score (could this come from Google’s normal index scoring of the sites?)
Relative preference figuring into scores
Triggering ads based on concepts using:
Concept vectors and the “dot product” of the concepts in the search request (basically a way of examining if the query is relevant to the ad)
Figuring historical performance information into the trigger to determine if the ad is worth showing
Measuring an ad against other similiar ads from the past to see if it is likely to be relevant
Methods for determing “concepts of requests” (by requests, I believe they mean search queries) including:
“no concept” requests
performance information based on “advertisement selection” information
performance information based on conversion information
Matching ads to documents based on extracted concepts (as well as search results using:
Relative preference for certain ads with certain concepts
Use of prior search query information to determine which ads to serve

The patent also says it will be:

“increasing the score if the tracked performance information is above a threshold performance level” and
“decreasing the score if the tracked performance information is below a threshold performance level”

I’d be on the lookout for new types of Adwords and Adsense services in the near future based on this document.

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Yahoo! released a product today called MindSet. It offers searchers a sliding bar to re-order the results based on whether they are in an “information-seeking” stage or a “shopping/purchasing” stage. The technology is really quite phenomenal and effective. I tried several different searches and all had the expected results as I slid the bar from shopping to research.

Barry’s got great coverage here and Donna’s covering it well here, so this post is more of a “don’t miss it” than a full explanation.

One thing I will say – if this takes off, SEOs may have to seriously re-consider how they go about getting traffic. The number 1 research spot vs. the number 1 shopping spot vs. the number 1 right-in-the-middle spot will become a very big deal.

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Glengara posted at SEW asking whether Fantomaster’s suggestion that on-page SEO was being ignored, to the detriment of rankings, was accurate. Several good responses illicited even more questions on the subject.

I, Brian in particular raised two excellent points:

Google has repeatedly tried to raise the bar on the worth of links, particularly by the creation of a core group of documents regarded as of especial importance, with all other recommendations following from them. Hilltop, LocalRank, and Trustrank, are all famous Google algorithms founded on this key issue of determining links of most worth from the rest…

Certainly it would be unwise to ignore on-page factors. While links can be essential for targeting competitive rankings, the overall aim of any SEO method is to capture targeted traffic.

AndrewGoodman also contributed brilliantly:

There seem to be several on-page and off-page factors alike that seem to be under-discussed on these forums, maybe because people like to believe in old myths (Google’s algo is mostly about PageRank and always will be), and because many SEO’s are overconfident in what they already know and are afraid to admit want they don’t know or can’t control.

Google is, as Brian notes, a link-based search engine, and the other major search engines have largely followed suit. While on-page optimization is typically regarded as important, it doesn’t get nearly the attention in the SEO world that links do.

Perhaps, as Andrew suggests, the pendulum is swinging away from link based algorithms somewhat. Certainly the recent advancements in processing power would suggest that text analysis for both quality and relevance could have dramatically improved in the last 2 years. It’s possible that 3-5 years from now, links will be only a small part of the ranking algos, as the “highest quality” writing on a particular search subject is rewarded with top positions.

Right now, I’m picturing thousands of SEOs signing up for expository and technical writing courses around the world.

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Glengara posted at SEW asking whether Fantomaster’s suggestion that on-page SEO was being ignored, to the detriment of rankings, was accurate. Several good responses illicited even more questions on the subject.

I, Brian in particular raised two excellent points:

Google has repeatedly tried to raise the bar on the worth of links, particularly by the creation of a core group of documents regarded as of especial importance, with all other recommendations following from them. Hilltop, LocalRank, and Trustrank, are all famous Google algorithms founded on this key issue of determining links of most worth from the rest…

Certainly it would be unwise to ignore on-page factors. While links can be essential for targeting competitive rankings, the overall aim of any SEO method is to capture targeted traffic.

AndrewGoodman also contributed brilliantly:

There seem to be several on-page and off-page factors alike that seem to be under-discussed on these forums, maybe because people like to believe in old myths (Google’s algo is mostly about PageRank and always will be), and because many SEO’s are overconfident in what they already know and are afraid to admit want they don’t know or can’t control.

Google is, as Brian notes, a link-based search engine, and the other major search engines have largely followed suit. While on-page optimization is typically regarded as important, it doesn’t get nearly the attention in the SEO world that links do.

Perhaps, as Andrew suggests, the pendulum is swinging away from link based algorithms somewhat. Certainly the recent advancements in processing power would suggest that text analysis for both quality and relevance could have dramatically improved in the last 2 years. It’s possible that 3-5 years from now, links will be only a small part of the ranking algos, as the “highest quality” writing on a particular search subject is rewarded with top positions.

Right now, I’m picturing thousands of SEOs signing up for expository and technical writing courses around the world.

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With PageRank “all greyed out”, many of the tools aren’t working correctly. If it doesn’t go back online by Tuesday or Wednesday, I’ll probably start re-designing what the tools measure. Sorry for the inconvenience – such is the way when you rely on unreliable companies like Google

John Battelle has posted a little commentary on the subject of Google’s new mural to be commissioned. I’m making this post simply because I feel it’s so worthwhile to show this picture around – it has both the innocence of youth and the sophistication/passion of a truly angry SEO. Surely we can all relate to these emotions.

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I posted a poll on SEOChat asking users to vote on their favorite SEO blog. Purposely excluded was this particular blog, but lots of other great ones are on the list, including:

SEO-Scoop.com – Donna Fontenot’s daily look into SEO culture, news and tips
SearchEngineLowdown.com – Andy Beal’s take on the search engine industry
SERoundTable.com – Barry Schwartz’s respected source for SEO forum news and SEO content
Threadwatch.org – Nick Wilson’s popular gray-hat blog
Cre8pc Blog – Kim Krause Berg’s personal SEO and search industry stories
BattelleMedia.com – John Battelle’s SearchBlog; focusing on the search engine industry
SEOBook.com – Aaron Wall’s daily take on search engine news, the SEO industry and individuals, sites and events
TopRank.Blogspot.com – Lee Odden’s SEO/SEM blog

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Exalead is a relative unknown in the web search market here in the US, but they have a much greater following in France and the EU, the target market for the product. Exalead is doing a fantastic job with search results and clustering, offering a vast number of choices to help users narrow down their search, providing search results in a variety of ways (including a fantastic visual representation that seems to be created as the engine caches the page).

The visual attributes and attention to detail, including a very high quality index (I conducted 10-12 searches and saw only a single blatant spam result) suggest that Exalead has a bright future ahead of them. It would certainly be nice to see a newcomer from Europe challenge the US leaders in search – diversity in knowledge is always a good thing.

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A fantastic thread at Cre8asite focuses on the new role played by SEO/SEMs in website development and management. Although we have a very tight-knit and well organized online community (between all the popular SEO forums, blogs, etc.), SEO is becoming less and less of an individualized specialty and more a field that demands attention to all of the attributes of web development and management.

One of the best quotes came from sanity:

Personally I saw the writing on the wall for pure organic optimisers a long time ago. When clients stopped worrying about where they ranked but how they were converting SEM’s needed to bring something more to the table. All the top SEM’s I know at least understand about design, usability, marketing and sales. You can’t do SEM in a vacuum.

Adrian, who started the thread notes:

Does it show a maturing of the industry as a whole (continual ethics arguments aside) in that the focus is shifting (I say shifting rather than shifted, because I think there’s a lot that still don’t really get it) from a pure “must drive traffic” to a more progressive, rounded approach designed to make successful business.(sic)

I’m happy to finally move away from an argument about tactics and towards one that focuses on the goals of a professional SEO/SEM. Look  for this to be a continuing trend in the industry – no SEO is an island.

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Dr. Garcia, known on the forums as Orion, has written what will surely become one of the most linked to documents in the SEO world over the next few days. The article -  Fractals, L-Systems and Semantics – explains how and why the structures of sentences and therefore documents can be reduced to their fractal nature via analysis.

This “fractal nature” would help to confirm many SEO’s suspicions about the ability of search engines in the future to use greater on-page analysis techniques to rank documents. The search engines’ implementation of fractal text analysis could help to further eliminate spam and auto-generated content form the SERPs, as well as give higher rankings to exceptional or particularly relevant content (as opposed to the current heavy reliance on link data).

Orion has opened a thread at SEW to discuss the paper.

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