Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.

Some of my favourite selections, and their translations:

Eric: “Microsoft’s Bing launched in June 2009 and has grown so rapidly that some commentators have speculated that it could overtake Google as early as 2012.”

Translation: Some commentators said idiotic things, and I hope you’ll take believe my tongue in cheek reference to said foolishness seriously. In other news, the sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Eric: “For current events, news-seekers can visit the websites of major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.”

Translation: “We’re shaking in our boots due to the stiff competition for non-commercial pageviews by bankrupt companies sailing a sinking business model.”

Eric: “From an advertising perspective, Google’s search advertising tools compete for ad dollars every day against other forms of advertising including, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, direct mail and banner ads.”

Translation: “You have no clue about direct response advertising on a small-scale or for niche markets and I’d like you to be gullible enough to believe someone selling SEO services is going to advertise on the TV or the radio or the newspaper.’

Eric: “Advertisers know that they have other options and they can and do turn off their Google ad campaign whenever they want.”

Translation: “If advertisers don’t like us arbitrarily increasing click costs to meet our predictions for Wall Street, they can spend their money on TV, or get the massive volume available [at the rapidly growing] Bing. *snicker*”

Eric: “Our business principles that have guided us from the beginning include

- “Transparency. We give advertisers detailed information about the ad auction, including their ad quality score.”

Translation: “We tell advertisers explicitly when we’re going to charge them more money ‘cuz we feel like it.” (See Google charging Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com $2 CPC for the term SEO Book. )

- “Loyalty, not Lock-In. As much as we would like users to stay with Google, if consumers don’t like the answers that Google Search provides, they can switch.”

Translation: “You can switch to Google Product Search, Youtube, Google Mortgage Comparisons, Google Travel Search… All with one click [from our search results].

You should also be loyal to Google search to buy ads not just on generic queries but on brand keywords.”

As Aaron Wall writes, “The whole point of building a brand is increased affinity with users & not needing to pay for incremental distribution driven by brand demand. To spend money to build brand only to have to keep rebuying the existing brand equity is quite a futile exercise. ”

- “Be Open Not Closed. [Insert rest of quote]

Translation: “We openly explained to our Android partners that they could comply or get lost. We are using compatibility as a club.”

- “Label Ads Clearly.”

Translation: “We’ll label them clearly as Sponsored Links… in the upper right hand corner so you have a good user experience and don’t think to ignore the ads. That’s because in the upper right, you’re unlikely to pay attention, given the Western reading pattern to start in the upper left and move diagonally down to the right.”

…

Do you have a positive view on Google? Am I wrong on these things… feel free to pipe in and comment, even and especially if you disagree or have something more to add!

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Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO

Fastcase is a new legal research tool that is bringing cool lateral thinking to the traditional problem of serving up legal search results. The results are some highly impressive innovations both in the algorithms that sort and rank the results, as well as in how the results are presented.

Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, gave me an interview to describe their process.

1) You found that legal research has a three way tension between cases with the most citations, cases from the highest courts, and recency of the decision. How does your algorithm solve that problem?

For me, the problem with traditional approaches has been almost the opposite – there was no tension in results. They were always served up in a one-size-fits-all order, usually highest court first, then most recent case to oldest. That ordering makes sense sometimes, but more often it doesn’t. One size fits almost nobody.

So we did two things. First, starting way back in 2003, we gave users the tools to order results in the way that was most useful to them – more than a dozen options. We don’t resolve the tension, we let users resolve it for themselves, depending on the type of research they’re doing. We’re big believers in empowering people with smarter tools.

And some of these options were the first of their kind – like integrated citation analysis. We show the number of citations to each case in the search results – it’s like Shepardizing each case automatically, and no other service does that, even today. You can sort the most cited case to the top, and when the first case has been cited 4,000 times and the second has been cited 8 times, that tells you something very important that you wouldn’t know without Shepardizing every case in the list.

Second, we resolved the tension by building an Interactive Timeline view of results – a 4D map of all of the results plotted over time. You can see at a glance how the results plot over time, which ones are the most relevant, decided by the highest court, most cited anywhere else.

You have to see it to believe it – when you see search results represented graphically, you can see how they score on each metric instantly [emphasis added] – so the tension between the different measures is resolved, and the right answer literally jumps off the page.

2) The idea of using citations the same way search engines use links – as a key ranking factor – is simple, yet the devil with any programming project is always in the details. What obstacles have you overcome so far in developing the software?

One of the biggest challenges was to give context and meaning to the citation analysis. When you run a search about a standard of review, you might get a case like Brown v. Board of Education in the search results, and if you sort by how often cases are cited, Brown would be at the top of the list. But Brown is a desegregation case, not a case about the standard of review.

So we built a tool that shows how many times each case has been cited only within the set of super-relevant search results. “Cited Within” shows with a click which case is most cited within your specific topic (and on your point of law). Again, this kind of citation analysis is only available on Fastcase.

The super-relevant set of results is basically the search results returned by the user’s search. When the user runs a keyword search, he or she gets back a set of search results (say, for example, 408 cases). We show how many times those 408 cases are cited anywhere else in the database in general – but some of those cases may be frequently cited for a different point of law. (Therefore) We also show how many times they’ve been cited by the other 407 search results – and most often that’s what the user cares about.

It’s a heuristic – that tells you not only which case has been cited most, but also which case has been cited most by the other cases you care about. And it’s custom-built into each search.

3) How do your visual search results make life easier for researchers?

Fastcase logo

Some people are just visual learners – for them, long lists of text results don’t tell the same story that an elegant data visualization does. Instead of viewing 20 or 100 results at a time, you can see all of the results on a single map that you can customize, zoom, and craft.

It’s beautiful – it’s also a ruthlessly efficient way to find what’s most important. For a visual learner, there’s really no way to be happy with text-based search results after viewing results on a visualized Interactive Timeline map.

4) Free legal research sites like CanLII give you the option to sort by most-cited or most recent. How does your search engine provide greater value (imagining you offered it in Canada)?

I love CanLII and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute – they’re terrific services and leaders in the field. We share a common goal of democratizing the law. But where the goal of an LII is to make the law accessible to everyone, at Fastcase we’re really trying to build the smartest, most powerful tools for lawyers (although there are nonlawyer subscribers, the vast majority of our more than 500,000 paid subscribers are lawyers).

So we focus on things that are more important to lawyers, like our Authority Check that shows later-citing cases, powerful search syntax that works whether you use traditional Boolean-style keywords or free-form Google-like searches. We focus on things like dual-column printing in PDF, Rich Text Format, and Word *.doc format, batch printing for multiple documents at once, customizable search histories and libraries for saving documents, and of course, data visualization and integrated citation analysis.

I’m really excited about Forecite, a feature we just rolled out, as an example of smarter tools for research. When you run a search, Forecite automatically reads all the cases in a search result and builds a table of all the cases that are cited. If a case is frequently cited by the search results – but doesn’t appear in the search results – Forecite automatically suggests it.

Forecite only suggests additional resources where the citation analysis says there’s something important that you’d otherwise miss – but you’d be surprised at how often that happens. If the seminal case is outside your jurisdiction, or uses older terminology than your more modern keyword search, Forecite acts as a safety net and delivers the seminal case you’d otherwise miss. It’s like magic – you can see more at www.fastcase.com/forecite.

5) When you started the company, how did you keep up your motivation? What were the hardest parts of building the business?

The biggest challenge has been assembling the legal information – from thousands of sources in many different formats. That’s why we’ve worked hard in the Law.gov effort, working in 2008 with Public.Resource.org to create the world’s first public archive of U.S. Supreme Court cases and cases from the Circuit Courts of Appeal. In 2011, we’ll launch the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) with Public Resource, which is a weekly collection of cases decided in federal and state Supreme Courts and Courts of Appeal.

Getting access to public domain law shouldn’t be the hard part of this process – everyone should have that. Publishers should be competing on who can build the smartest tools, deliver the best service, and at the highest value. That’s a competition that we’ve geared up to win, and we’re proud to work with the Law.gov effort to make that a reality.

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It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest.

1 – Ever heard of “PPV”? Aka pay-per-view? I wish I was talking about boxing matches on TV. No, the larger ROI-centric affiliates are tending to move into “PPV” or “CPV” traffic, which many of you might know under its non-euphemism name, pop-ups.

The funny thing to me is that the dirtier you’re willing to play, the dirtier others are willing to play back. I was watching a TV show I like, and the site hosting it sells PPV traffic. Here’s an indication on traffic quality: the new ad page opens when you click play the first time. Yeah, totally what the visitor intended.

Bottom line is that PPV is the talk of the town in ROI-driven affiliate circles, and that’s a sad thing.

2 – The blackhat SEOs are tending increasingly towards the hacking side of things. In an SEO-driven version of a common scam, interruption marketing is used to make you think your website has bugs and you need to buy the virus “anti-virus” these helpful ‘warning’ providers are offering.

I’m trying to find the right reference on Ben Edelman‘s site, but it’s not surfacing.

Coincidentally, what does show up the overlap in adware makers [which serve to generate popup "traffic"] and phony anti-virus scams. All of which dovetail with Zango‘s jolly products.

3 – Annoying people and slowing their computers with your crummy software, plus hacking their sites … don’t think it doesn’t get better! Indeed it does. Phishers are going for AdWords accounts. Probably for the credit card info, firstly (the fastest cash), but I’m sure the campaign data can’t be something they’re possibly ignoring.

4 – Facebook application providers drive useless incentivized traffic. A whole lot of scaffiliates were pissed when Dennis Yu outed them on TechCrunch, but I’ve yet to hear them complaining about Farmville sending junk traffic to advertisers who will lower their payouts accordingly.

That’s what happened with cookie stuffing and other crap at eBay, until they dug into the data, booted the thieves and switched to CPC pricing based on quality. The good affiliates got paid more and the riff raff got the door.

We really, really need consumer advocacy organizations and Attorneys General to sue more of the big-time jokers for the benefit of the industry. Just a shame they can’t sue certain goons in the Kremlin who profit from this. Or, more optimistically, there are market solutions, as per Alex Rampel of TrialPay.

p.s. While I’ve almost never answered her [mostly unsolicited] emails, this interview with Emma Kupiak makes Neverblue sound like a good network to run traffic with. Almost – they still run the scammy junk like the rest of them… But at least Emma makes a good case about them being helpful to affiliates who want to be scammy! …

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I got the question recently from a friend at a big corporation, in the context of buying reviews. Of course, Google does not make the law (yet), but there are laws restricting misleading marketing.

In Canada, the main law in this field would be the Competition Act, whose sections 52 and 74 (or is that 54 and 72?) deal with misleading advertising.

The law was revised in March 2009 to, amongst other things, raise fines for criminal prosecutions under the Act. Which is awesome!

Fines were at $50,000 to $100,000 penalties for individuals, and $100,000 to $200,000 for companies.

Today they’re at $750,000 to $1M for individuals, and $15M to $20M for companies. A considerably greater dissuasive force, imho .

You can find my more eloquent and detailed post on this, in French, at Blogue Marketing Interactif. (I guest-write for the Montreal Marketing Association.)

p.s. What does this tell you about flogs?

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One is at Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-mythbusters-content/12810/

The other is at Blogue Marketing Interactif: http://www.bloguemarketinginteractif.com/flogue-collette-judy/ (in French)

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While reading Canada’s Trade-marks Act (IDK why it’s not spelled Trademarks, but anyways…), I found the following interesting nugget. Sounds similar to some domaining practices, and may have value for offline businesses:

Exception for disuse

11.18 (1) Notwithstanding sections 11.14 and 11.15 and paragraphs 12(1)(g) and (h), nothing in any of those provisions prevents the adoption, use or registration as a trade-mark or otherwise, in connection with a business, of a protected geographical indication identifying a wine or spirit if the indication has ceased to be protected by the laws applicable to the WTO Member for which the indication is protected, or has fallen into disuse in that Member.

Source

What would you guys do with this, if you were in the wine/spirits business?

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The scams described in the video below have a lot in common with the Google cash, Google Money and other similar scams prominently found all around the internet.

FYI to affiliates promoting these things in Canada: You’re asking for jail time. Read the Competition Act.

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Malware is the music industry’s saviour. I’ve just had an epiphany.

My laptop is in for repairs for the second time in three years. Both times I’ve had intensive malware presence on the computer – it took computer repair specialist Adam Blechman hours to get rid of all the viruses the first time, and this time he apparently almost had them infect his own computer! It cost me $300 to get things fixed the first time and I’m probably looking at a similar bill on this go-round.

While I can’t remember the circumstances of the first viruses getting on my computer, I’m 99% certain that peer-to-peer downloading caused the most recent flare-up. I wanted to watch episodes of Greek immediately, telling myself I would buy the season DVD later. Turns out those .rar files packed a [spiked] punch and I invited a bunch of viruses, trojans etc onto my computer.

You probably see where I’m going with this… By imposing friction and a measurable financial cost on people who use peer-to-peer downloading software, malware creators solve the music, movie and tv industry’s woes [at least, those due to peer-to-peer downloading].

One of three solutions seem possible:

• There should be a greater willingness to pay for the authentic version from a reliable store like iTunes.
• People who prefer to run the risk of getting viruses should be more likely to buy anti-virus software. These sales can be taxed and the taxes redistributed to the music biz, in the same way Canada has long had a tax on 8-inch tapes. Those taxes were imposed because people could record songs off the radio onto the tapes.
• Folks who download P2P but refuse to get anti-virus and other security software will see their computers slow down into oblivion. They will then need to buy new computers, which can be taxed.

The last solution sucks for people who are already paying for anti-viruses and/or authentic songs (since they’re already paying for real songs or taxes on anti-virus software). But they’ll still pay this tax less often than people who keep destroying their computers with malware.

I find it interesting that this situation is the culmination of a “tragedy of the commons” type of situation. The free public resource that is P2P networking got leaned on by so many people that it became an attractive target for malware writers, who seek to build botnets on tens of thousands of computers. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more on that in the near future.

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Are domain names the internet’s real estate? Can keyword research be considered intellectual property? I put these and other questions to Eric Goldman and Mark J Rosenberg, both of whom are speaking on SES San Jose’s legal panel. (Clarification: This is an interview, not coverage of an SES session.)


(Image: Jason Burrows)

Note: This post only offers information. It does not offer legal advice, counsel or opinion, and should not be relied upon for such. Speak to a lawyer who is a member of your local bar if you need counsel.

1) Are domains really an equivalent to real estate? I asked my real estate prof that and he highlighted a variety of reasons why they aren’t. Ex.: No rights-of-way, usufruct, and other such items.

Eric Goldman (EG): No, domain names are not virtual real estate, and I always chuckle when I see the domainers bloviate about this analogy. Personally, in almost all cases, I’d rather own the top spot on Google for a keyword than to own the keyword.com. I expand on this point more in this lengthy article: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=635803 [Requires some kind of subscription; password confirmation email not hitting my inbox so I'm not linking to them. Talk about SE friendlines... Abstract looks interesting though!]

Mark J. Rosenberg: He [your prof] is right. Domains are like any other personal property. No different than a baseball bat. They can be bought and sold without any special terms and conditions. If used incorrectly, they can cause damage.

2) Can SEOs be considered fiduciaries/trustees for their clients, at least with respect to the site? What criteria would militate in favour and what criteria would oppose such a characterization? Is implementing non-best practices a breach of trust that can constitute a cause of action?

EG: No, I think the analogy to fiduciaries or trustees is way too strong in most cases. In some cases, SEOs can be “agents” of their clients and have the power to bind their clients to legal commitments, but this is probably not the case with the standard SEO-client relationship.

EG: However, like any professional service provider, SEOs could face malpractice or related claims for botching their jobs. I’ve never seen an SEO malpractice claim but I suspect they will come in the future. Even then, the standard for malpractice will be loose (i.e., general incompetence will probably not be deemed malpractice; it will take a higher degree of incompetence to be actionable).

EG: In all cases, an SEO who does a lousy job will develop a poor reputation and suffer some economic consequence accordingly. Also, this issue becomes less important to the extent clients are paying performance bonuses or other compensation tied to results.

MJR: [Whether the SEO is a trustee or not] is most likely a contract specific issue. Unless specified in the contract and/or SEO given special responsibilities, the answer should be no.

MJR: Some of the criteria that would militate in favour are handling money, extensive control and/or operation of site including content. Those that would oppose such a characterization include an SEO acting as a consultant merely providing advice, and having limited or no control over site or its operation.

MJR: [As to breaching a trust by forgoing to implement best practices,] This is case specific. For example, in some situations, there may be a legitimate reason for not implementing a best practice. Otherwise, I would say that depending on the extent of the violation, there may be a claim for breach of contract.

3) Keyword research – can it be considered as intellectual property? If an affiliate manager gives yours away, or a search engine does… are they violating your rights?

EG: It’s possible for the insights derived from researching keywords to be protected under IP. Most likely it would qualify as a trade secret (if it qualifies as IP at all). In order to remain a trade secret, the SEO would have to require everyone who has access to those insights to agree in writing to protect their confidentiality. This can be tricky–especially with the search engines, who aren’t promising anything!

EG: Note, however, that depending on an SEO’s contract with its client, the contract may transfer ownership of the SEO’s work (including their keyword research) to the client. Clients are often as concerned about confidentiality as the SEO, so this can set up some conflict during the contract negotiations. SEOs really interested in protecting their work product, including their keyword research, need to retain an attorney to help them build the proper legal
protections into their contracts and operations.

MJR: It can be considered a trade secret if it is treated as such. If given away without permission, there is a definite violation, provided that it was a trade secret in the first place.

4) What is the standard of care SEOs need to employ in carrying out work for their clients ?

EG: As I mentioned, I don’t think the standard of care has been defined in the courts, and I expect it will take some time before it is. In all cases, the legally defined standard of care will be less rigorous than the marketplace expectations of SEOs’ ability to deliver results. Add value to your clients, and you will be richly rewarded. Chunk it, and your phone will stop ringing.

MJR: There is no special standard. It is to abide by contract terms to the best of their ability while governed by the usual implied covenants and standards under the UCC [Uniform Commercial Code, a US inter-state legal convention aiming to harmonize signatory].

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At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”…

Update: Apparently this treatment is reserved for sites that also change topics. The technique thus remains useful, but obviously the problem it resolves is narrowed to particular situations. Hat tip to Gustavo Cardial for pointing out the error.

Lady Justice, blindfolded with scales and sword by California Criminal Defense Lawyer Rob Miller.

In an effort to balance out the scales, I’m sharing a legal technique called “the trust.” My hope is that it will enable webmasters to buy sites and sell them without fear that their hard SEO work will go to naught.

Disclaimer: As I’m just a law student and not a lawyer, let alone an expert on trusts, please only take this as information, not legal advice, and please correct any errors you find.

What is a trust?

Trusts evolved through the [feudal] tax-evasion efforts of commoners and low-level knights in the Middle Ages. Before running off to rape and pillage in the Crusades, a person (“A”) would leave their property with a trusted friend (B) – who thus acquired legal title through an inter-vivos transfer – to the use of A’s family or kids.

(The reason this was tax-evasion was that higher up lords or the King would perceive taxes if property was transferred in a will. By transferring inter-vivos, you had no taxes to pay.)

Problems arose where the “trusted” friend tried to claim the property for his own use rather than be its custodian for A’s family. The courts of equity resolved them by holding that the “cestui que trust” (today known as the trustee) was bound to hold the property for the benefit of A’s family. A’s family thus had what is known as “beneficial title.”

The difference between beneficial title and legal title is that the former was created and enforced by the courts of equity (whose jurisdiction was more about morality) while the latter was enforced by the courts of common law. Today both courts are merged. But for reasons of history and lawyers having fun finding new uses for outdated legal mechanisms, the trust (the “use” ‘s modern cousin) is still around.

So the trust is by definition a devise of property to another party for the benefit of a third party. The devise, aka settlement, is made by the settlor (A). The person receiving the property is known as the trustee (B), and he holds legal title. B holds the property in trust for C, the third party designated by the settlor. C has the beneficial title and is thus known as the beneficiary. (A is left with nothing, though if a court finds that the trust “failed,” the property will usually return to him.)

Note: You can have trusts created by wills nowadays. It need not be an inter-vivos transfer. Which makes sense, since we no longer have the feudal tax system.

Why should webmasters who want to buy or sell websites care?

The reason I shared the history lesson was to make clear the distinction between legal and beneficial title. By taking advantage of that distinction, webmasters should be able to write contracts that transfer control of a site without getting it shot down by Google.

In essence, the contract simply states that the site’s seller is creating a trust in favour of the buyer, with the seller as trustee. The property in question would be specified as being the website.

The Result of Using a Trust?

The Whois record for the site’s domain will read that the property is still owned by the site’s seller, since he as trustee retains legal title. However, the beneficial ownership of the property passes to the purchaser. Thus Google has no way of knowing that the site was sold, afaik (if you know of other methods beyond whois, please say so in the comments.

Caveats On This Technique

You need to make sure that you draft the trust document very precisely. In particular, you need to show the three certainties:

• Certainty of intent [on the part of the settlor] to create a trust. If he meant it as a gift, lease, power of appointment etc. you might have trouble. Best to use the word “trust.” Obvious, but you’d be obvious how many people screw that up.
• Certainty of the subject-matter of the trust, i.e. the property. Is it just the domain? Hosting too? The backend? vBulletin licenses? Take an inventory of everything and specify it in the trust instrument (and in the contract specifying that you’re to have this trust created). Then make a clause that if you forgot anything, your intent was to include all things reasonably required for the site’s operation in the subject matter.
• Certainty of objects, i.e. the beneficiaries. Who exactly is getting the property? You? Your business partner? Your company? Note: If it’s your company, it had better be incorporated or else you get into really grey areas of the law. Good for your lawyer’s billings, not so good for you.

Penalty clauses for breach of the trust on the part of the trustee should be included and heavy, but not so harsh that a court would overturn them as unconscionable. This is tricky, and I know very little about these, so again, consult a real lawyer for advice.

If you’re buying a site without knowing the owner other than online, be aware that you run the risk of them “selling” the site a second time. As beneficial owner, you can sue the new purchaser to ‘trace’ your property and get it back, though you might have problems if they purchased it in good faith. Of course if it gets to this point, the site will have been sniped by Google and so you’re better off suing the trustee/seller for damages, since the rankings will be gone. This is probably the biggest problem I can see with the whole deal, since on paper (i.e. the Whois record for legal title), the seller still owns the property.

Finally, the last caveat is that if Google’s legal department gets jerky, they might argue that whois represents legal and beneficial title. It’s a weak argument, imho, but it’s there. And judges mostly don’t get the web (with some exceptions), so there you go… Rule #1 in law is avoid litigation.

Conclusions on Using Trusts to Beat Google’s Domain Demolitions

Whoa! Breaking Google’s rules can be legal and ethical? Shocking I know . More interestingly, I’m sure that jurists with more knowledge than me could find other areas of application for legal mechanisms in search (beyond trademarks). Incidentally, I think I’ve found an application for another legal fiction, and I’ll be blogging about it as the second part of this two-part “law and search marketing” series.

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I’d like to highlight that while I haven’t yet studied the civil law’s parallel mechanism, “la fiducie,” my understanding is that it should work the same way. After all, as you might have derived from the name, a “fiducie” is where property is held by a “fiduciaire” (French for fiduciary) for the benefit of another party. And trustees owe fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries, like website purchasers…

Update: As my presentation at SMX Advanced on the site buying panel was well received, and this is something I have an interest in, I now offer site buying services and consulting.

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Legal fictions can be used by greyhat SEOs to overcome Google’s nearsighted paradigms on buying websites and buying links. While Google is trying to pass off its guidelines as law – and is succeeding in convincing some people of that fact* – the facts are otherwise, and my two-post series on the topic will show that the law can actually enable people to skirt Google’s techniques and expose its faults.

For my first post, I will address how legal fictions in the common law solve the problem of having a website’s SEO strength reset upon purchase and transfer. (I’ve yet to grasp how the civil law handles this, though my understanding is that it has similar mechanisms.)

Everyone’s favourite competitive webmaster, John Andrews, recently liveblogged Matt Cutts’ presentation at Domain Roundtable . Matt explained that Google eliminates all or nearly all of a site’s value when it is sold.

Obviously this is not the case for corporate America (Myspace anyone?), which in any case has its own legal fictions defending it (News Corp bought Myspace Inc, and Myspace.com was just one asset…). But for your average independent/competitive webmaster, the situation is different. So hopefully this will be helpful to you search marketing folks without the benefit of Fortune 500 status to back you up.

Update: The post is live: Buying Sites? Use Trust To Avoid Google Domain Demolitions.

For my second post, I will show how another legal fiction enables the purchase of text link ads under the radar.

After my post on hiding/disguising text link ads as AdSense and other ad format, and Shady’s point on making paid links look like the result of linkbait , this tip is another tool in the link purchaser’s arsenal.

Google is broken: it gave up the original PageRank paradigm of valuing links based on the traffic they send in favour of some public relations notion of links as “votes” (next SEO that repeats that links are votes is getting their ass kicked by yours truly). Until Google fixes itself, buying links from craptastic sites with no visitors (the majority of link buys, imho) is going to keep working.

*”[B]lackhat tactics are [...] illegal ways to game the system to your advantage.” – Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics an Hour a Day, p. 206; otherwise an interesting and educational read and one which I’ll be reviewing here once I’ve finished reading it. Note also: I spoke to Avinash before publishing this and he wanted to highlight two points of context for the above statement:

• First, he recognized that it was a mistake and poor choice of words. His point was merely that it’s unwise as your site might get banned (which is a more accurate statement and one I agree with).
• Second, he highlighted that he wrote that prior to working for Google, and thus it wasn’t a statement that they had him put out there. (That said, I’m quite certain their public relations department was more than happy to see that statement put out there.)

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Net Neutrality has added another formidable opponent to its already large list, with the US Justice department issuing a filing with the Federal Communications Commission against Net Neutrality. This could potentially be big news for bloggers, Search Engine Optimization consultants and all those in the internet marketing industry.

Net Neutrality is the principle that all web sites be accessible to surfers for the same cost. The telecommunications industry is lobbying the US government to enact legislation allowing it to charge more for people to surf certain websites, or even certain forms of content.

There are two main reasons why Net Neutrality matters, and why this filing is bad news for the internet marketing industry. First of all, Net Neutrality means that a blogger with a critical opinion of some big telecom industry could easily see access to his website made prohibitively expensive. Or on a similar train of thought, if he outranks some telecom portal for a lucrative keyword, the telecom could make accessing his site more expensive than accessing its own portal.

In effect, it gives the telecom industry the right to affect the cost of doing business of anyone with a website.

In the offline world, this is the equivalent of letting your telecoms provider add a bunch of figures to the expenses column in your accountant’s books! In simple terms, this gives telecoms the right to censor web sites and web content they don’t care for in fact, if not in theory (theoretically you could always pay some exorbitant price if you reaaaally want to surf that site).

Second of all, if Net Neutrality is lost, then SEOs can find themselves and their analytics providers – I can hardly think of a more crucial element of the internet marketing industry – being priced out of the market by ISPs who also sell webdesign, ecommerce and internet marketing services.

I know that Bell has huge ads for its ecommerce offerings in the local yellow pages, and – big coincidence – they’re also a major ISP here in Montreal. The folks at NVI (whose writing at SEO Moz are fairly good – keep it up Guillaume!) might find their website suddenly on the “costly access” list.

Similarly, if/when they start offering analytics, you can expect Conversion Ruler (giving you guys a link because of Kent’s friendly email support) and company to find their own sites rather expensive to access. This could kill their businesses in a flash, since their business model is dependant upon people visiting their site.

ISPs and the telecom industry generally would be in a position of conflict of interest if they had control over their competition.

Thirdly, without even considering conflicts of interest and just considering the technological aspects of things, losing Net Neutrality could mean that people with bandwidth intensive sites are made more expensive. Photo bloggers and video bloggers beware! Adult industry – you’re in for it (but then, considering that you guys are the Net’s pioneers, my guess is you’ll find a hack around it that everyone else will catch up on 3 years later)! Soccer training site online? Better use text explanations for your drills!

Anybody doing business on the internet, and specifically the people in the internet marketing industry such as SEOs and analytics providers, need to fight for Net Neutrality. We all stand to lose a lot if we don’t.

Update: Other SEOs and marketing folk are discussing this issue. Jordan McCollum at Marketing Pilgrim is on it (funny… my girlfriend’s last name is McCollum too!) . Her write-up includes this killer quote, also discussing the likelihood that video users will be hit:

“Oh, wait. According to comScore, that would be 75% of US Internet users, or 132 million people (that would also be about 44% of the total US population). So three-quarters of Internet users should pay more to keep getting what they’ve been getting so that the other one-quarter can pay the same for the features that they’re not using?”

Touche!

Jeff Pulver ran a viral marketing campaign to support Net Neutrality, offering $1k for the best video ad. Kudos to you, Jeff; you deserve the link. Also check out Jeff’s great blog!

Ira Teinowitz of Adage has another worthwhile writeup, where he sums up why Net Neutrality is key:

“Favored providers could get faster access to consumers’ doorsteps and less favored ones could having difficulty competing.”

(Incidentally, you’d think that Ad Age would be doing better SEO… the URLs are keywordless, the title tag features Ad Age before the postname, a broken search function that won’t bring up the article when I type in net neutrality… go figure! At least they have smart writers penning quality content.)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.