re: [useit.com...]

Dear Mr. Neilsen:

I apologize for losing the faith. I had gotten sucked into the mindset that you were a bit out of touch with web realty lately. Just when I had found comfort in that wayward thinking, you come back with with of your most insightful and “dead solid center” articles I have ever seen from such a well known web guru as yourself. It not only took a quantum leap of insight to come to the conclusions you made in this latest column, it was also – BRAVE.

You see, for about 9 years, we have being standing on the position that there must be life after the engines. That the engines were just the onramp to your site and that your site must stand on it’s own two legs at some point. In order to make that happen, an alternative method of promotion must be at work. We came up with a list of alternative traffic sources:

[webmasterworld.com...]

We stumbled into a test in November as a result of the every widening and ever-deeping issue of problem robots. Like SiliconValley, we have had an ongoing issue with rogue robots and site scrapers:

[siliconvalleywatcher.com...]

We have also had a long time desire to see if we could live without the low roi search traffic. Those two desires ran into each other in November.

[webmasterworld.com...]

To partly test out the theory that a community site could liberate itself from search engine dependence (and the every annoying rogue bots), we tried a test in November. We experimented with turning off the bots/search engines and requiring cookie support from all visitor (hense:

[webmasterworld.com...]

We found many interesting things out during that time. Banning the ‘bots’, was the most enjoyable thing I think I have done in 10 years of web work:

• the server was faster
• there were fewer scraped copies of the site out there
• less spam and we had fewer problems with members
• the quality of posting went up
• we used less bandwidth

All-n-all, it was highly successful in those regards and business wise it was positive too.

Unfortunately, the engines provide us with one service that we have been unable to match: a quality site search. Having been through every major public and private site search engine, it is clear there is a lack of quality site search engines out there for ultra large (2 million+ pages) sites. So, we had to flip back on selected engines and stop requiring cookies.

It is nice to know we can clearly live without them. Ultimately, it has made us refocus on those top alternative traffic sources from the engines.

Aside from the fact your article mixed apples and oranges (paid advertising and search), you brought up some excellent points.

This all leads me to a challenge Jacob, and that is, to block the search engines for 90 days to Useit.com and report your findings. As they say — No guts, No Glory.

Brett Tabke

… Hermits have no peer pressure. – Stephen Wright

Bob is reporting on his blog, that Chris says on his blog, that he over heard a conversation between Barry, Bob, Darren, and Fred that said Greg read Matts blog about a blog by a guy at Google who used to work at Microsoft who reported on his blog that Bill Gates might say something later today. You heard it here first folks!

please note, that we were tipped off on this story by George and his personal blog about Spot his dog.

…Hey, it’s no dumber than the blog aggregators about blog aggregators.

There you have it – a perfect text book example of satire.

Seriously – hasn’t a great deal of blogging become redundant? Seriously – hasn’t a great deal of blogging become redundant?

-bt

Remember “Punch The Monkey”? Oh how I loved to punch that flashing, annoying, seizure inducing ad! I would imagine it was actually the graphic designer who came up with that ad on the receiving end of the punch. There isn’t much I hate in life, but I hate annoying web page spam!

A definition: Web Spam

So much graphical and textual noise that you can’t determine whether you are clicking on a paid advertisement or an actual old-fashioned honest link. When ads are so thick, that you must study the page carefully to determine where the content is at.

There is a point where ads become so pervasive, that they over power the content and hurt the credibility of a site. If you have a authoritarian site, then that point is much higher than most would believe. I know of one site that has over 25 ads on the page right now and is still considered a top site in it’s field. Other lesser sites, we wouldn’t give two seconds to in order to find our content.

Whatever the level, I think we can all agree that web spam quietly took a huge jump last year. To the point, that I have stopped visiting some regular sites because the ads are so thick.

Pet Peeve 2: links that are not underlined. ’nuff said.

-bt

… “I have an answering machine in my car. It says, “I’m home now, but leave a message and I’ll call when I’m out.” – Stephen Wright

I have had a strange running bet with an old SEO friend of mine. I bet him $50, that the person known as Larry Page does not actually exist. That he was just a figment of Sergeys fertile imagination.

Ever notice that Larry rarely talks? Or that the only time we see him is on TV? hmmm. LOL – I really just caulk it up to Larry and Sergey doing their best Penn and Teller bit. (teller never talks) [pennandteller.com...]

I guess we find out Friday in Vegas as Larry is scheduled to talk at the CES show. As far as I know, this is Larrys first big tech conference speech. Up-to-now, Sergey has always been the spokesmen for the dynamic duo.

I just read down my rss aggregator list. Of the top 50 stories, Google is mentioned in 41 of them. Wow!

Saturation. What will Google do? Is it any wonder that they have had Larry and Sergey in the proverbial mayonnaise jar on the front porch of Funk & Wagnalls since August of 2004?

Dear Mrs Google; Can Larry and Sergey come out and play?

-bt

post note: 1/7/2006: due to a family matter that came up, I was unable to get to Vegas to see Larrys Keynote at CES. Special thanks to GoogleGuy, and Google PR for your efforts to get me tickets. -bt

Forbes called it, “Attack of the Blogs”.

[forbes.com...]

Forbes Writes:

“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.”

At first glance I wrote this all off to a “refer madness” like scare mongering by someone who got vetted or outed by a blog. The allegations are so strong that I am outraged that Forbes could publish something so transparently vindictive against an alternative publishing medium. I really thought this was another case of a competitor fearing the loss of it’s personal power platform. After all, if blogs give us what we need, then who needs a forest killing dinosaur like Forbes magazine?

I read, reread, and even posted about the article published by Forbes. Then something weird happened – my thinking took one of those nerve rattling fundamental shifts.

Have you ever found yourself suddenly on the other side of a very popular issue? You feel a little bit diseased – like there is something wrong with you for thinking it? I bet Newton felt that way when he told the world that the earth revolved around the sun.

You see, I tried and tried to find some truth to the Forbes statement. Other than a couple of isolated incidents, surely blogs are not a “online lynch mob”.

Then I remembered one of the simplest declarations I have ever heard about blogs. It sparked a heated debate about the freedom of speech and the internet. It came from a Wall Street Journal article that ended up on /. a few months ago:

“The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people”

[yro.slashdot.org...]

Just as I was throwing that quote into Google to see what popped up – it hit me that the statement was said in a story in our very own space. It was a story about search, forums, SEO, and blogs – it was the Traffic-Power story. This wasn’t an abstract statement about our space by some New York publisher trying to protect his falling margins – this was about – and by – US.

No matter what you feel or have read about the Traffic Power story, I think it is suffice to say that there was a bit of an “all out pile on” action. I really don’t have an opinion about the whole story myself. This is one we need to let the courts work through.

The fact that this type of incident could occur in our space, pretty much proves Forbes general premise that blogs can and do hurt people some of the time. It also proves my point to judge your information sources very carefully.

-bt

…”Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.” – Stephen Wright