Last month, we reported that SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin issued a negative SEO challenge. He challenged people to take down SEOmoz or RandFishkin.com using negative SEO tactics. “I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin told us at the time. He is confident enough in his sites’ link profiles and reputation. He also said, “I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.” We had a conversation with Fishkin today about the Penguin update, and about a new SEOmoz project related to webspam. We also asked for an update on how the challenge is going, and he said, “On the negative SEO front – I did notice that my personal blog had ~40,000 more links (from some very questionable new sources) as of last week. It’s still ranking well, though!” It sounds like the the challenge is working out so far, which certainly looks good on Google’s part, especially in light of the Penguin update, and the opinions flying around about negative SEO. Just peruse any comment thread or discussion forum on the topic and there’s a good chance you’ll run into some of this discussion. I’m guessing the challenge is still on the table, but so far, Fishkin doesn’t seem top be having any problems. Of course, most people don’t have the link profile or reputation that Fishkin has established, but that also speaks to the need for content producers to work on building both.

There’s been a great deal of talk about the Google Penguin update since it launched last month, and a lot of webmasters are still trying to sift through the rubble and determine if their sites were even impacted by Penguin or some other Google algorithm change. In addition to Penguin, there were two Panda refreshes last month, and over 50 other changes, which Google finally listed on Friday. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin tells WebProNews, “It’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).” SEOmoz, by the way, has launched an interesting project aimed at tackling Webpsam on its own. Fishkin actually posted a new video discussing the Penguin update today, which is worth the watch, particularly if you’ve been affected. There are six main points he discusses, but one in particular that I found interesting is that there are a lot of sites in the marketing industry that appear to have been hit. Fishkin says, “There appears to be a very disproportionate level of sites in the marketing/services field affected by this. What I mean is, we have seen more people write in about keywords like, ‘seo services,’ ‘seo company, you know, some particular city name’, or ‘web design services, some particular city name’. Those types of results seem to be hit heavily.” “Now, I’m gonna throw out to things I think may be to blame here,” he continues. “One is: a lot of people who operate in these marketing services fields are also likely to have a lot of correlation with the people who are potentially getting the kinds of link spam to their web pages that Google hit in this update. So, it’s not necessarily [that] Google focused on these. It could be the types of spam they focused on and the types of links that these people had just happened to be correlated and connected. The other things is, this could merely a leading indicator…we’re obviously in the marketing and SEO field, and so it could be that we’re just getting a disproportionate number of those types of folks talking about it in Q&A, emailing, tweeting at us…all those kinds of things.” “That’s also possible, though usually we see more balance across the board, typically,” he notes. Beyond the obviously spam-heavy topics, like making money online and pharmaceuticals, we’d be interested to hear more about what kinds of sites have been impacted most by Penguin. Do you believe you were hit by Penguin? What industry is your site part of?

SEOmoz is working on a new spam research project aimed at classifying, identifying and removing (or at least limiting) the link juice that spam pages and sites can pass – a pretty ambitious goal, to say the least. Can SEOmoz do this better than Google itself? CEO Rand Fishkin announced the project on Google+ Monday evening, acknowledging that his company is “certainly not going to be as good at it or as scaled as Google,” but that it’s making for interesting research. Fishkin tells WebProNews that Google’s Penguin update was not the motivator behind the project, though he did have this to say about the update: “In terms of Penguin – it’s done a nice job of waking up a lot of folks who never thought Google would take this type of aggressive, anti-manipulative action, but I think the execution’s actually somewhat less high quality than what Google usually rolls out (lots of search results that look very strange or clearly got worse, and plenty of sites that probably shouldn’t have been hit).” You can read more about Penguin via our various articles on the topic here. “We’ve been wanting to work on this for a long time, but our data scientist was previously tied up on other items (and we’ve just hired a research assistant for the project),” Fishkin tells us. “The original catalyst was the vast quantity of emails and questions we get about whether a page/site is ‘safe’ to acquire links from, or whether certain offers (you know the kind – ‘$100 for 50 permanent text links guaranteed to boost your Google rankings!’) were worthwhile.” “Tragically, there’s a lot of money flowing from people who can barely afford it, but don’t know better to spammers who know that what they’re building could hurt their customers, and Google refuses to take action to show which spam they know about,” he continues. “Our eventual goal is to build a metric marketers and site owners can use to get a rough sense of a site’s potential spamminess in comparison to others.” “A score (or scores) of some kind would (eventually, assuming the project goes well) be included in Mozscape/OSE showing the spamminess of inlinks/outlinks,” he explained in the Google+ announcement. According to Fishkin, the SEOmoz algorithms will be conservative and focus on the most obvious and manipulative forms of spam. “For example, we’d probably catch a lot of very obvious/bad link farms, but not necessarily many private blog networks or paid links from reputable sites,” he said in response to a comment on his Google+ post. Also in the comments, Fishkin indicated that data would be presented in a ‘matches patterns of sites we’ve seen Google penalize/ban” kind of way than a “‘you are definitely webspam’ type of thing.” The data scientist Fishkin spoke of will present the findings at the company’s Mozcon event in July. Fishin expects an actual product launch late this year or early next year. Earlier this month, the company announced that it has raised $18 million in VC funding.

Rand Fishkin, the well known SEO expert and Founder/CEO of SEOmoz, has challenged the web to see if anyone can take down his sites’ rankings in Google by way of negative SEO – the practice of implementing tactics specifically aimed at hurting competitors in search, as opposed to improving the rankings of one’s own site. Fishkin tells WebProNews about why he’s made such a challenge. Do you think negative SEO practices can be effective in hurting a competitors’ rankings, even if that competitor is playing by all of Google’s rules and has a squeaky clean reputation? Let us know what you think. First, you’ll need a little background. There’s a thread in the forum Traffic Planet started by member Jammy (hat tip to Barry Schwartz), who talks about an experiment run with the cooperation of another member in which they were successfully able to have a hugely negative impact on two sites. “We carried out a massive scrapebox blast on two sites to ensure an accurate result,” Jammy writes. I’m not going to get into all of the details about why they targeted specific sites or even the sites themselves here. You can read the lengthy forum thread if you want to go through all of that. The important thing to note, however, is that the experiment apparently worked. BUT, Fishkin maintains that the sites in question weren’t necessarily in the best situations to begin with. “In terms of negative SEO on the whole – I think it’s terrible that it could hurt a site’s rankings,” Fishkin said in the forum thread. “That creates an entire industry and practice that no one (not engines, not marketers, not brands) benefits from. Only the spammers and link network owners win, and that’s exactly the opposite of what every legitimate player in the field wants. Thus, I’m wholeheartedly behind identifying and exposing whether Google or Bing are wrongly penalizing sites rather than merely removing the value passed by spam links. If we can remove that fear and that process, we’ve done the entire marketing and web world a huge favor.” “I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin tells WebProNews, regarding negative SEO. He says the examples from the forum “all had some slightly-seriously suspicious characteristics and not wholly clean link profiles already, and it’s hard to know whether the bad links hurt them or whether they merely triggered a review or algorithm that said ‘this site doesn’t deserve to rank.’” “If negative SEO can take down 100% clean sites that have never done anything untoward and that have built up a good reputation on the web, it’s more concerning and something Google’s search quality engineers would need to address immediately (or risk a shadow industry of spammers popping up to do website takedowns),” he adds. When asked why he would antagonize those who disagree with his view by offering his own sites as targets, Fishkin says, “Two things – one, I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.” Perhaps there should be a Good Guy Rand meme. “Two – if this is indeed possible, it’s important for someone who can warn the search/marketing industry to have evidence and be aware of it,” says Fishkin. “Since we carefully monitor our metrics/analytics, haven’t ever engaged in any spam and have lines over to some folks who could help, we’re a good early warning system.” So what happens if challengers are successful at taking down either SEOmoz or RandFishkin.com? “SEOmoz gets ~20% of its traffic from non-branded Google searches, so worst case, we’d see a 20-25% hit for a few days or a few weeks,” Fishkin tells WebProNews. “That’s survivable and it’s worth the price to uncover whether the practice is a problem. Our core values (TAGFEE) dictate that this is precisely the kind of area where we’d be willing to take some pain in order to prevent harm to others.” When asked if he’s confident that Google will correct the problem in a timely fashion if he’s proven wrong, Fishkin says, “Fairly confident, though not 100%. I have my fingers crossed it won’t get too messy for too long, but my COO and community manager are a little nervous.” Fishkin concludes our conversation with: “I’d say that the evidence on the Traffic Power thread is strong that if a site already has some questionable elements, a takedown is possible. But, it’s not yet proven whether wholly clean sites can be brought down with negative SEO. I hope that’s not the case, but I suspect the hornet’s nest I kicked up will probably answer that for us in the next month or two.” Word around the industry is that Google is making SEO matter less, in terms of over-optimization. Google’s Matt Cutts talked about this last month at SXSW, and that discussion had led to a great deal of discussion and speculation as to just what this would entail. “The idea,” he said, “is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.” One thing’s for sure though: If negative SEO can truly impact clean sites, that’s not quite the level playing field Google is aspiring to create. Fishkin’s experiment is going to be an interesting one to keep an eye on. If SEOmoz can be severely impacted from this, who’s to say your site can’t? Do you think it’s possible? Tell us in the comments.

It hurts to get close to something that you want and then not get it, doesn’t it? When we’re talking about money and business, this situation is even more painful. Furthermore, talking about the situation does nothing but add more grief to an already complicated situation. Unfortunately, this is exactly the scenario that our friend Rand Fishkin, the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, found himself in not long ago. In 2007, the company received venture capital funding from investment firm Ignition, and earlier this year, was approached by a number of firms interested in investing further. Fishkin told us that the company had not planned on raising funding but that it began to get excited about the potential opportunity. During the bidding process, there was clearly one firm that stood out. Fishkin said it made them a good offer and the companies signed a term sheet. As he explained, this is “usually a done deal unless the investment firm finds fraud of some kind.” However, three weeks after the signing, the investment firm pulled out. Aside from the fact that SEOmoz did not receive the funding, he said it was also hard to understand why it happened since the firm did not give a clear reason for its action. “That experience was new for us,” said Fishkin. “I think folks tend not to write about the fact that even after a term sheet is signed, the investor can still pull out.” Because he has always been very open about all things SEOmoz, Fishkin wrote a very detailed post, within legal bounds of course, about the entire experience. WebProNews asked Fishkin about why he felt so compelled to be open since most companies would not go to the extreme to find out what they could actually disclose. He told us that transparency has always been a core value of SEOmoz and always would be. He believes that this includes both the good times and the bad times. “There’s nothing up my sleeve,” said Fishkin. “It’s all out there.” Is it possible for a business to be too transparent? What do you think? Fishkin and SEOmoz take transparency very seriously and believe in being upfront about all matters, even when they involve finances and legalities that aren’t flattering. “It’s one of the qualities that consumers and business customers appreciate so tremendously much these days,” pointed out Fishkin. “We’re getting a culture, it’s particularly in the technology world, that anticipates, loves, and rewards transparency.” With this transparency, there is also a risk since investors may avoid SEOmoz in the future out of fear of being the subject of a blog post. Fishkin admits that this is a very real concern but said it was one that he was willing to take. “It’s a risk that we feel comfortable with,” he said. “I would rather say I’m going to commit to our core values, we’re going to do it 100%, we will be transparent no matter the costs, rather than say… we’re transparent but only when it’s convenient for us.” Even though SEOmoz didn’t receive the funding, no one can say that the company doesn’t stick by its values. The experience, however, has made the company hesitant about raising capital in the future. “We’re going to go back to our original mission of not raising capital,” said Fishkin. “Maybe we’ll think about it again next year, but I sort of hope we don’t.” “I’d prefer not to go through that process,” he added. “It takes a lot of time and energy away from running the business.” If the opportunity were to come up again, Fishkin told us that he would like his company to be in a position in which it doesn’t need the funding, so that it could walk away if it wanted. Since most startups that are covered by the Silicon Valley media receive funding, he also said that he would try to create buzz around his company before he attempted another VC round. Although the experience was difficult, Fishkin and SEOmoz have received a lot of praise and support for being transparent. Fishkin told us the praise is a “good consolation prize” but that it was a little “bittersweet.” Going forward, he hopes that startups will be more aware of potential issues and that investors will be more cautious.

Search has been evolving for years, and it looks as though its really starting to enter a new era entirely. While search and social media may be two different animals, it is becoming more clear that they’re directly related, and will continue to be more mixed into one another. We’re already seeing search engines attempt to place some kind of ranking on social updates. For example, we’ve already know that search engines take things like follower quality into account in how they rank tweets (see more on that from Google and Bing). There has been a lot of talk of Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets taking the place of links. Nobody’s saying that links are dying exactly. There is obviously plenty of room for link sharing on either of these services, but in some ways these kinds of sharing are replacing links in many cases. Before Facebook even announced its plans to take over the web, WebProNews talked with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz about how Twitter is "cannibalizing the Web’s link graph": More WebProNews Videos Now that Facebook’s Open Graph and social plugins are devouring the web, suddenly liking is taking the place of linking in some speculative scenarios. We talked about some implications Facebook’s initiatve has for search in a recent article. While I dont’ think anyone specifically saw the Open Graph stuff coming too long before it was announced (maybe somewhat in the days leading up to it), it’s really still reflective of what we’ve known for some time. The way people are obtaining information online is diversifying. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse (as I’ve written about his repeatedly, but it’s just what the big picture is about. Google’s real competition isn’t coming from other search engines. It’s coming from different avenues of information access. The biggest threat to Google the search engine (as opposed to the company, which offers a lot more) is people not having to rely on the traditonal search engine. While I don’t think Google has anything to truly worry about in terms of losing users, it has to worry more about users just not using it as often, because they’re getting their information from apps…from friends via social networks…even when they’re not necessarily at Facebook.com itself, but on any given site or app, via things like social plugins (Twitter has its own @anywhere platform, and we’ll probably see more ways networks are penetrating sites. Hell, Google already has its Friend Connect and Buzz…I would not count the company out in expanding into more of this kind of stuff). Style Coalition CEO Yuli Ziv has an interesting article at Mashable about "5 reasons Google and Search wont’ Dominate the Next Decade". Her reasons include: 1. The search process is inefficient 2. Mobile GPS Eliminates the need for location-based search 3. Social Matching Could Create Valuable Connections 4. Content Recommendations to Replace Search 5. Suggestions Will Be the Core of Our Shopping Experience She elaboraates on each of these of course, and some of them are debatable, but really, the diversification of how people obtain information has already begun. Facebook likes may not translate to better Google rankings, but so what? They may translate to a better Facebook ranking. After all, the more people that "like" you brand, the greater the visibility within Facebook. With over 400 million users and counting, and Facebook expanding its presence, that means more visibility period, and at a more meaningful level of personalization. It’s not about choosing between likes and links. Both are ideal. WebProNews recently stopped by comScore’s New York offices, and had a chat with search evangelist Eli Goodman who made some good points about where search is headed, and how not only the technology of search engines changes over time, but the habits of users, and the relationship between the two. More WebProNews Videos As far as optimizing for search, it seems pretty clear that social and mobile will continue to play larger roles. It also seems clear that if you want social success, you need to work at your relationships with others within your networks. Look at Twitter’s Promoted Tweets strategy around "resonance." Look at tools like Trst.me, which uses a PageRank-like strategy to score Twitter users. Look at the implications of Facebook likes. Regardless of what Facebook chooses to do with this data itself, they’re already being utilized in other places, like in search via OneRiot. The whole point of Facebook’s Open Graph is to connect the web. It stands to reason that Facebook likes will be of influence in plenty more places. The point of all of this is, it’s not just about getting links anymore. Links will always be of use, but social interactions may equal them in importance, and in some cases may be of greater use to your visibility, and ultimately getting people to your site, your content, your store, or your shopping cart.

Search Engine Marketing and SEO have always been very dynamic fields.  Search engines make changes all of the time.  Sometime they announce their changes, sometimes we are left to guess at them.  In either event, more often than not, we are left  largely to our own devices in terms of assessing the impact of these changes and what to do about them – if anything. More WebProNews Videos This makes sessions related to ranking factors pretty popular at shows like SMX Advanced.  This year was no exception and I was able to get a few minutes with one of this years speakers, Rand Fishkin, to chat about the state of SEO ranking factors. One of the more interesting things Rand and I agreed on was the fact that it’s 2009 and a lot of today’s fundamental ranking factors, are very similar to the same stuff that worked in 2005, 2006, 2007 and so on.  In other words, a lot of the basic things have been pretty consistent. That said, I thought it might be useful to run down a quick list of some of the things that matter most and least in terms of ranking in 2009.  We’ll start with the Important Things: Title tags  – This one is a no brainer.  Good title tags have long been recognized as one of the single most important on page SEO elements of any web page.  What makes a good title tag?  A good title tag specific to each individual page is absolutely essential.  Beyond that, as Rand pointed out, having your ‘important terms’ appear early in your title tag also has a significant impact. Anchor Text - Anchor text is the visible text of a link.  Having inbound links is the overriding number one search factor but not all links are created equally.  Say you have people linking to your page about blue widgets.  If the text in their content reads “Fantastic Blue Widgets can be found here!” it makes a big difference in which words they link to your page.  If they link the words ‘Blue Widgets’, it’s going to do you a lot more good than if they just link the word ‘here’.  This is important to keep in mind with your own internal linking too.  Avoid using generic, nondescript terms like ‘home’ and ‘here’ and ‘main’ when you link to your own pages. Quantity of Domains Linking -  This one is interesting.  if you have 10,000 inbound links and your competitor only has 7,000 inbound links but still seems to outrank you consistently, this could be the reason.  Number of links is important, but the number of unique domains those links are coming from is also very important.  You may have 10,000 inbound links but maybe your links all come from 5,000 unique, separate domains.  Your competitor may only have 7,000 inbound links but if they have 6,000 coming in from separate domains… they will get you most every time. Social Media/Mobile -  we talked a little bit about social and mobile.  Social and to some extent mobile too can be hard to quantify.  The fact of the matter is though, these are absolutely 2 hugely explosive categories.  Facebook, Twitter and other social giants are continuing to grow in users and usage.  Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic.  Those are a few ranking factors Rand and I discussed as important, so what are some things people might be spending too much time worrying about?  Here are some of the things we talked about in terms of being ‘not so important’: H1 Tags -  A couple of years ago, making use of H1 and H2 tags on selected areas of your HTML code kind of came into vogue. The rationale was the search engine spiders interpreted H1 tags as a signal that ‘hey, this text is important because it’s bigger’.  Of course the proliferation of .css meant that you could throw H1 tags pretty much anywhere and everywhere on your page and just take care of how things looked to people with stylesheets. That this was ever an effective ranking tactic or strategy is somewhat debatable.  However, currently, while H1 tags aren’t going to hurt you, they don’t seem to be much of a factor. Keyword Density – This one might surprise you a little bit.  Keyword density is kind of a joke.  It is in fact NOT desirable to work 500 instances of your target keyphrase into the text of your target page.  I know this seems counter intuitive to some, but I for one was very glad to see this claim supported by some data in the Ranking Factors session. If your page is about Blue Beach Widgets, you have Blue Beach Widgets in your title and you have pages linking to your blue beach widgets page with the terms ‘blue beach widgets’ in the anchor text THAT is good.  You do NOT have to whore out the content of your page to have ‘blue beach widgets’ repeated 50 times in the description.  I know you have seen these pages…  they look like: “Bob’s Blue Beach Widget Emporium has the finest selection of blue beach widgets on the web.  Our blue beach widgets are so much better than our competitor’s blue beach widgets, that all of our blue beach widget customers all think our blue beach widgets are the best blue beach widgets ever. So if you need a blue beach widget, or have a friend that needs a blue beach widget, tell them to visit the blue beach widget emporium to find the best blue beach widgets in the blue beach widget business” This has to stop people. It makes your site read like a bad skit on the Muppet Show. This kind of thing makes me cringe, and it’s ruining the Internet.  Well maybe it isn’t ruining the Internet like MTV ruined America, but it does make for some horrible web pages.  I still hear SEOs talking keyword density to site owners.  If you are a site owner and some SEO comes talking to you about increasing your keyword density, do everybody a big favor and throw something at them.  Please. W3C Validation -  Ah, my old arch nemesis W3C Validation.  If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times… but I’ll say it again: if you want your site to validate W3C, by all means… do that.  If having code that passes W3C validation makes you sleep well at night, then, my friend…  you go get that done.  I am all for people having W3C valid code, if that’s what they want. That said….  in terms of SEO and search engine ranking, the simple reality is: IT DOESN’T MATTER.  It never has mattered and I daresay it never will matter.  Can it hurt you to have valid code?  Certainly not.  Should you pay a designer and extra 30% to design your webpage to be 100% W3C compliant and valid? That’s up to you. But before you do, consider this: of the top 100 websites online, MAYBE 8 (and I am being exorbitant in that estimate) of them pass W3C validation.  Amazon doesn’t pass, eBay doesn’t pass, Twitter doesn’t pass, heck neither do Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft’s new Bing. If your page renders in all the browsers, if you don’t have a bunch of broken links, in other words if your webpage looks like a webpage and can be read… that’s all you need here folks.  Search engines could not possibly care less, in other words if “document type does not allow element "div" here”.  They just don’t.  They never will.  W3C might help get you listed in some directories (maybe?), it has some practical applications in terms of accessibility, and you could maybe argue that it can help you diagnose some page render/load time issues.  Personally I think it’s most common application however is to inflate the bottom line estimate for web designers that can talk you into a cup of the W3C Validation Kool Aid. So there are a few things Rand and I discussed that matter more and matter less in regard to search ranking factors in 2009.  I’m sure we left plenty of things out, so if you want to add your opinion to either list, feel free to do so in the comments section.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz has a fascinating (and probably startling to some) post up discussing some new guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding online marketing. The post stems from SEOmoz’s COO Sarah Bird, who is an expert on legal matters pertaining to marketing, and some things she revealed in a recent interview. WebProNews readers will recognize her from these WPN videos on various legal topics. I will not regurgitate Fishkin’s post here, but if you’re concerned about laws pertaining to disclosure of paid endorsements, it’s a must-read. He does offer the following takeaways to sum it up: 1. Most social media marketing is legal without disclosure. 2. Link builders don’t have to disclose their relationships. 3. Google & the FTC have very different requirements about paid links. 4.  Linkbait, viral content and microsites don’t require disclosure (most of the time). In the online marketing world, does not always cross our minds that there are legal boundaries that are being stepped on or even crossed in some cases. For the protection of your business, it is really an important thing to make sure you are abiding by federal regulations. These are only US guidelines though, so if you live in a different country, you will probably want to do some digging of your own to find out what the regulations are in your own government. Read the FTC’s guidelines here.

Has Google’s model of spidering and indexing web pages in an ordered list become obsolete? Is the old static model of search about to be replaced? Does a real-time online conversation (a la Twitter) make for a more relevant and compelling search experience? These are the questions that I recently posed to a group of search and Internet experts. To say that these guys know their stuff would be a complete understatement. It’s more like these are the professionals that have defined the modern science of search and search marketing. You’ll see what I mean when you read the quotes below. My premise started when I read a UK Techcrunch story about a Google / Twitter mashup. This was in February and there was a major snow event blanketing the UK. But if you were to try to get a satellite image of the snowfall in real time, you couldn’t. That’s because the cloud cover prevents the satellite from seeing the ground. So this genius named Ben Marsh comes up with the mashup. In brief, the idea was to get the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents reported their postcode and then selected a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. Ben’s mashup then graphically displayed the results on a UK Google map. Then it hit me – this Twitter data is yielding superior search results for the amount of snowfall in the UK than any other source. So will this type of real-time data stream become a rival to Google in search? Daniel Foster is the co-founder of 34SP.com – the website hosting service that kept Ben Marsh’s mashup online during peak bandwidth usage during the February snowstorm. I asked Mr. Foster if he thought that Twitter could overtake Google in search, based on his experience with the Ben Marsh mashup site. Mr. Foster replied, "While this use of Twitter was certainly unique at the time and created a superior data set for UK snowfall for that time period, it is still a long way from a true search product. Google clearly has a corporate mission that drives search-related activities. Twitter just asks "What are you doing?". I don’t see Twitter search overtaking Google unless the business directives change." Here is what a few of the other Internet and search experts I contacted had to say in answer to the question: "Will Twitter Replace Google in Search?". Rand Fishkin is a legend in search marketing. As the founder and CEO of SEOmoz.com, Mr. Fishkin was recently included in Newsweek’s list of Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009. His involvement in search marketing began in high school, and he is now generally regarded as one of the world’s authorities in search. Mr. Fishkin commented, "No. Twitter is not a search engine and cannot answer the vast majority of queries sent to an engine like Google, Yahoo! or Live. Twitter searches a single stream of user created data in 140 character slices. While searching this database of information can be fascinating and even relevant (particularly for those who are interested in what Twitter users are saying about a particular topic or person), it is not even an attempt to replicate the functionality or application Google provides. Google answers an inherent need that has existed since the web’s inception: users must navigate to web sites and pages that contain desired information. Twitter cannot achieve this function and therefore cannot be a replacement for Google in search." Michael Gray is President of Atlas Web Service, a full service website and Internet marketing company. Michael has worked in website development and marketing for over 10 years, and shares his thoughts regularly on Graywolf’s SEO Blog. Mr. Gray opined, "Twitter is never going to replace Google for searches there simply isn’t the breadth of information available there. For example say you need to know: "Who was the 3rd Vice President of the United States?". Unless you happen to have a history buff in your stream – very few people are going to know it’s Aaron Burr off the top of their heads. It’s simple and easier for you and everyone else to type the question into Google and have it spit back the answer. However, if I have a tech related search like: "How do I backup my Firefox profile?" chances are I’ll get a few answers from my users. One way that Twitter is better than Google is if I know my followers and trust them. I might not trust Yelp or CitySearch when they tell me what a good seafood restaurant in San Francisco, but if someone who follows me gives me a recomendation, if I know who they are, I’m much more likely to trust their response. The one caveat is the trusted relationship of the person giving the response. 20 people I don’t know telling me someplace is good is never going to outweigh the 1 person I really trust telling me it’s bad." Danny Sullivan is often regarded as a true pioneer in search. His seminal 1995 work published as "A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines" laid the groundwork for his career as an often cited expert in search. Mr. Sullivan he has been quoted in all the major media outlets such as The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Here are Mr. Sullivan’s comments, "No, Twitter won’t replace Google search because it simply doesn’t cover enough of the topics out there. It can be used for question answering, but that’s largely limited to the number and quality of your followers. I do think it’s an excellent additional search tool, however, http://searchengineland.com/how-we-search-with-twitter-16920 has much more on this." Andy Beal is an online reputation management consultant, award-winning blogger, and professional speaker. Mr. Beal shares his expertise via his blog at www.andybeal.com, and he is also the founder and editor of Marketing Pilgrim, an award winning news publication that covers internet marketing news and trends. Mr. Beal added, "Twitter’s real time data certainly compliments Google’s search results, but I don’t see it ever replacing it. Twitter’s data stream should be looked at in the same way as Google News or Google Blog Search. There’s tremendous value in tapping into a fresh, up to the minute content, but people still rely on the structured, ranked data that Google’s web index provides." Neil Patel’s email identifies him as a ‘professional web surfer’. I know him as an incredibly charismatic, smart and friendly Internet, social marketing and search expert. He has also been named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, and was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. His current company is KISSmetrics, and Mr. Patel shares his insights in his blog – QuickSprout. Mr. Patel offered these thoughts on Twitter overtaking Google in search, "Twitter will not replace Google in search. You can use Twitter to find up to date information, but I doubt you will ever use Twitter to find products to buy or figure out how to fix a technical problem. Just the other day I had to search Google on how to program my router. I don’t think I will ever be able to do that on Twitter." Todd Malicoat is a Marketing Consultant and on the SEO Faculty at MarketMotive.com. Mr. Malicoat is an Internet entrepreneur who has spent "near obsessive amounts of time on Webmasterworld.com, and Threadwatch.org. Here is Mr. Malicoat’s response, "I think Twitter definitely has an opportunity to swipe a bit of market share from Google on certain TYPES of terms. Anything very time sensitive, Twitter gives very good results for. I think Google will likely be a suitor, but they likely don’t want another youtube over-valuation debacle. Twitter has definitely raised some eyebrows, and what it does do is fill the need for ‘guided search’ that several companies including trexy.com, mahalo, and even yahoo answers (to an extent), and many others have been trying to do for years. Twitter has done this with a different model of getting the guides first with the critical mass of people, and the organization will come later. Most search results, however, don’t NEED a search guide or expert, so for now, Google is perfectly safe, but has the potential to lose out on some niche expert traffic to the new kid on the block." By way of fairness, I did contact the PR department at Google requesting a comment for this piece. As of the writing of this article, they have not responded. So there you have it. Practically no one thinks that Twitter will overtake Google in search. At best, in very time sensitive events – perhaps Twitter can be a good companion reference to Google. Of course things can change quickly – and if they do, I’m sure we can all check in with Twitter to learn about them. My thanks to all the experts who participated in this article.

SEOmoz has a couple of very interesting charts showing the top 500 domains and the top 500 pages being linked to from different places. This paints a pretty good picture of what sites are held in the highest regards by content producers. "The sorting is done in order, not of raw link counts, but of linking root domains – a metric that we’ve found incredibly valuable both for identifying broad popularity (vs. sites that simply earn lots of links from a few sites with many pages) as well as filtering spam (it’s easy to get lots of pages linking to you, and even easy to get lots of subdomains linking to you, but getting a diverse set of root domains is considerably harder)," explains Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. I’m not going to replicate both lists of 500 here. You can view them at SEOmoz, but I will provide a quick glance at the top ten of each: Top Domains 1. Google.com 2. Yahoo.com 3. Blogspot.com 4. Adobe.com 5. Wikipedia.org 6. YouTube.com 7. W3.org 8. MySpace.com 9. WordPress.org 10. Microsoft.com Top Pages 1. Woredpress.org 2. Google.com 3. adobe/products/acrobat/r… 4. miibeian.gov.cn/ 5. validator.w3.org/check/referer 6. statcounter.com 7. jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/chec… 8. phpbb.com 9. del.icio.us/post 10. yahoo.com Graph by SEOmoz You can get a look at all of the stats like linking root domain count, external link count, mozRank, mozTrust, PageRank, and change on the charts. Fishkin also provides some interesting highlights from the lists like top gainers and losers here.