Virante Link Analysis Tool

Came across a very interesting article today by Russ Jones, the CEO of Virante.  The article illustrates a possible example of how Google could be analyzing your link profile.

The Wikipedia Model

The Tool

I think what is most interesting to me is his thought process and the simple algorithm  he applied to analyzing the link profile.  Things like

• "we determined how many OTHER links occurred within 300 characters before or after that Wikipedia link on the page."

A simple yet effective way to look at where a link is on the page and helps determine if its in the body content or in a linked side bar.

And a final point "If you are manipulating the link graph, it is pretty easy to see it. If Virante can see it, so can Google."  Google has lots of engineers hard at work at this and they are a lot smarter at analyzing a web page then we give them credit.

I have been going through this study/slide presentation that Susan Weinschenk created. Its got a lot of great info on the psychology of why people do certain things and how it should affect your web design and strategy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/100-things-you-should-know-about-people-2010-11

I especially liked:

#1. You have Inattention Blindness
#10 You Want More Choices and Information Than You Can Actually Process
#33 Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best
#36 People are Inherently Lazy
#38 Even The Illusion Of Progress Is Motivating

Information Overload - Ecommerce

I came across this study on information overload recently and wanted to highlight a few points from it.

SOLVING THE INFORMATION OVERLOAD PROBLEM: THE
ROLE OF UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT IN ENHANCING ONLINE
PURCHASING DECISIONS

"This assumption implies that people who have made a good decision often experience a high level of satisfaction during and after the process. Thus, in this study it is reasonable for us to use satisfaction with the decision as our measure of decision quality."

"H1: When one is dealing with rich information, using unconscious thought results in better decision quality than using conscious thought."

"H2: When one is dealing with rich information, an increase in the total quality of the information leads to an increase in the quality of the decision."

"H3: When one is dealing with rich information, an increase of the quantity of the information results in a decrease in the quality of the decision."

"When the information supply exceeds the information processing capacity, an individual usually has difficulty in identifying the relevant information, becomes highly selective, ignores much of the information, and fails to reach a satisfying decision."

"H4b: When one is dealing with rich information using unconscious thought, the greater the quantity of information, the higher the quality of the decision."

Worth Reading - Burn The Ships and Hail Mary’s…

Just read this great blog post.

Burn The Ships and Hail Mary’s…


"Unless you’ve got the basics of food and shelter sorted and a break from the relentless calls of the credit card companies that gave you the easy credit in the first place…
You’re not in any state, to start a business."

SEO and its Hats.

Read two great post today on the effectiveness of White/Grey/Black hat SEO and what really does or doesn't work.

White Hat SEO is a Joke by Kris Roadruck
White Hat SEO: It F-ing Works by Rand Fishkin

Both have great points, but I think the best point was made in the comments of Rand's post by Ross Hudgens.

• I think it's important to not justify white hat SEO techniques (building really great content then spreading it), as white hat alone - often times - no, always - the most effective SEO in the world is extremely strong content and links that effectively "covers up" the grey hat techniques that large brands use to pick up exact anchor text citations. JCPenney didn't do this effectively - others, in verticals where links come in droves - it seems intelligent - and indescrinable - for them to blend in grey techniques, as it it extremely difficult to be picked up by a sniff test - and it is also the best way to pick up exact anchor citations. 

It may look white hat, but at the end of the day, all SEO is intended to boost/improve the rankings within the SERPs.  Whether or not its white or grey hat is just a matter of how the SEO technique is percieved.

Black Hat however, is another story and is outright deceptive and spammy and should be avoided.

Relevance and Spam

Spam is the opposite of relevance.  Spam is irrelevant and interuptive.  Its why spam simply doesn't work as a marketing tactic.  Spam is non targeted and simply sent out indiscriminately.

If we want our messages to reach our audience, they must be relevant.  And not just a little bit relevant.  If the message is only slightly relevant, its still probably spam.  It must be highly relevant if its going to reach the audience and cause them to take an action.

Squidoo Lenses | Too Long to be Useful

I have been looking at some of the top Squidoo lenses over the last week, and I have noticed that most, if not all are so long, they are almost not useful.  Which is kind of ironic considering that Seth Godin, as a blogging style, keeps most of his blog posts fairly short.

I know that Squidoo encourages people to write longer articles in order to make sure people aren't throwing up quick, spammy, one paragraph articles.  In fact, I think Squidoo rewards longer articles with higher initial rankings.  But somehow I think it has gotten out of balance.

Rather than creating quality, comprehensive articles, it seems that people are just stuffing in anything and everything they can think of on a subject in an effort to make the article longer and therefore rank higher initially.  So rather than being focused, informative articles worth reading, they become obese, spammy smorgasbords of blahness chuck full of so many bits of loosely connected info, you could never consume it all in one sitting.  And if you tried, it would make you sick.

Personally I prefer quality over quantity.  I think Seth needs to rethink his ranking algorithm and base it on some quality metric and leave quantity out of it.  In fact, discourage people from adding too much to an article.