Do You Need Google et al.? Hacker News Doesn’t Does
Hang around any industry conference, forum or blog long enough and you’ll find someone lamenting our dependence on Google, or search engines altogether. It’s absolutely true that we as webmasters and marketers need to diversify our traffic strategies (you know what they say about eggs and baskets)—but are you willing to take the step to block all search engines from your site?
Hacker News was—at least for a little while. At news.ycombinator.com recently, the robots.txt file was changed to disallow all crawling from search engines, as theNextWeb reports. However, Paul G. at Hacker News quickly explained:
Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn’t tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now.
There’s nothing wrong with that (though you’d hope you wouldn’t forget that kind of thing!). Rather than the User-agent: * Disallow: / theNextWeb spotted, Hacker News’s robots.txt now only disallows all user agents to five selected paths.
Can you ban all search engines (on purpose and for the long term)? Sure—that’s what robots.txt is for (I’m looking at you, newspaper sites who claim Google’s stealing your bacon content). Some people do it just to keep search engines out; others do it to force themselves to develop other traffic streams. But if you do it, be sure to actually work on those other traffic streams, and to have a good on-site search capability.
What do you think? Would you ever block all search engines, for any reason?
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Live Blogging SXSW: Can The Real Time Web Be Realized?
I’m here at SXSW waiting for the Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? panel to begin. I’ll be liveblogging what happens, so stay tuned.
Search engines have certainly jumped to add in ways to find real-time content. This panel features reps from three of them talking: Google, Microsoft and [...]
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Business Searchers Are Looking For….
Business buyers use search engines throughout the entire research and buying process. For this reason, most B2B marketers utilize search marketing as a cost-effective
way to build brand awareness, engage prospects, and generate leads. In terms of lead gen, a potential buyer is typically required to complete an online
registration form in exchange for… what?
The value vs. [...]
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A Guide To SXSW For Those Interested In Search Engines & Search Marketing
I’m attending South By Southwest for the first time, later this week. I have to say, already I find SXSW to be overwhelming — and I’m not even there yet! To get myself organized as to how to attack this monster, I starting making a list of search-related sessions. I thought it would be useful [...]
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Cup of Joe: 9 Steps To Go From Newbie To Guru
So you want to be a famous seo?
You want to be a Social Media guru?
Want to rock the socks off of affiliate marketers?
Awesome! Want a little tip on how to start?? Don’t start blogging! So you might be thinking What? Don’t blog? Are you crazy? (I am not sure) But, here’s the truth. Almost every “famous” or well respected person in their industry got to where they are by doing good work, not talking about it.
Nathan Hangen tells us that all you have to do is squelch your fear and step into your role. Sorry, Nathan but honestly there are a lot confident people that give bad information and lack real substance. As a result their confident facade looks fake and untrustworthy. You have to produce a good product and be confident in its delivery.
Blogging is good for many reasons. It can help build your personal brand. It can facilitate communication with your community. It can help you develop your ideas and become more well rounded. It can build relationships and partnerships that can have lasting impact.
But none of the above will happen if you don’t know what you are talking about. If you start blogging today about seo and you have never ranked a web site in search engines, then the industry elite will be able to tell by reading your blog. If you start blogging today about affiliate marketing and you have never made a dime, skilled affiliate marketers will read that in your words and not give you a second thought. You can’t get recognition from inexperience.
Inexperience stands out like a sore thumb. Inexperienced bloggers are unoriginal. They oftentimes spread inaccurate information. Their writing doesn’t fill a void in their niche. It becomes obvious that they are just talking for the sake of talking.
Experienced people write original content based on what they have done. Experienced people have developed intuition from having a firm grasp on a subject. Such intuition can help them predict trends and see the “big picture.” Experienced people are the ones that other industry gurus recommend (and link to).
Joe’s Power Plan For Becoming A Guru
- Setup a blog and leave it blank.
- Read blogs from industry gurus.
- Get out in the field and start applying what you have learned.
- Keep moving forward.
- Keep an offline journal and jot down everything that you are learning while in the field. Make notes of what works and what doesn’t.
- Research the ideas in your notes to see if others are experiencing the same thing.
- Compare other’s experiences with your own.
- Write your first post about your experiences. In the post compare other peoples experiences and highlight whats different about yours.
- Repeat steps 2 through 8 for your next post.
OK, so I know that there are a lot of steps above and all you want to do is get yourself out there and make a name for yourself. However, it’s a lot easier to make a name for yourself when you are providing top quality content and steps above will insure you do that. Bonus tip: Don’t rush into all of this. The longer you take to work in the field, gain experience, and develop an understanding of your subject, the better your content and exposure will be when you finally begin to blog!
Until next time, get to work and start becoming a guru today!
Bing, Yahoo Discussing Future Of Yahoo Site Explorer
One more piece of news from the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday: Yahoo and Bing are in the midst of discussions to decide the future of Yahoo’s popular Site Explorer seo tool.
Yahoo’s Arnab Bhattacharjee told conference attendees that the two companies are now going through discussions on how to transition [...]
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Google Spills its Secret Sauce (Well . . . Sorta)
So Google’s facing an inquiry from the European Commission after accusations of anti-trust. Naturally, Google’s not taking this lying down. On the European Public Policy blog, Matt Cutts responds to allegations of anti-competitive practices by sharing their secret sauce, PageRank. But are they transparent enough?
(Yeah, the link is just the original Stanford paper on Google that discusses the basic principles of PageRank as defined 10 years ago.)
Google outlines all its efforts to help webmasters and increase its transparency, including:
- “Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the “secret formulas” for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses.”
- “In 1999, Sergey Brin participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters.”
- “In 2001, Google became one of the first search engines to engage online at a publisher forum called WebmasterWorld. One representative (GoogleGuy) has posted over 2800 times, while another (AdWordsAdvisor) has posted almost 5000 times.”
- “Google now has over 70 official blogs, including an official webmaster blog specifically to help site owners understand how Google works and help them rank appropriately in our search results.”
- Live webmaster chats and in-person conferences
- Webmaster Tools
Although lots of lawsuits and disgruntled individuals claim that Google is an evil black box, the list of things they’ve done to reach out and help webmasters is impressive (even if a lot of webmasters don’t know about it)—and I just listed things till I got bored.
What do you think? Has Google made enough of an effort to be transparent and helpful? Is this an adequate defense against anti-trust allegations?
How Wikipedia Turned PPC / Paid Search Into SEM
What’s search engine marketing? If you ask Wikipedia, it’s currently defined as the act of buying listings on search engines. That’s not how SEM started out being defined. It’s still not how I define it, though that might change, as my Does SEM = seo + CPC Still Add Up? article explains. But in [...]
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Local Search Complexity = SMB Frustration
In my role as president at GetListed.org, I sometimes receive emails from users asking why one local search engine or another is displaying an old location for their business, or why the search engines still aren’t showing their new website address, or why the phone number listed for their retail location is actually the one [...]
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Worthy Alternatives To The Useless SEO Data Provided By Search Engines
The data classically used in search engine optimization (seo) to benchmark sites and track performance is all but useless today. Ranking reports, still a necessary evil in seo reporting, have been unreliable (at best) for at least 3 years. Their validity has been further marginalized over the last 24 months by way of Google’s increased [...]
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