All About Content

I’ve seen conflicting reports on whether MSN is gaining or losing market share. But after about 8 months of running its own search engine with a proprietary algorithm, what’s interesting is not that MSN Search is still not even close to catching up to Yahoo and Google, but that MSN is losing money. Microsoft’s CFO Chris Liddell said the revenue decline resulted not from any change in market share, but rather from the company’s inability to translate searches into revenue as much as it would like.

Given a choice between increasing profits from their search business and giving Google a bloody nose right now, or worse, we can be sure it’s not an easy decision. Microsoft is the latest high-profile company to line up against Google Print by joining up with the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance.

Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books in the first year, which will be about $5 million, assuming costs of about 10 cents a page and 300 pages, on average, per book. (Yahoo is paying for digitization of 18,000 books.)

According to Internet Search Engine Database, Google has announced that the third part of Jagger will be introduced early next week, though they aren’t saying what this phase will entail.

Usually, after any update, it takes one or two weeks for the re-ranking (not to be confused with a Google Dance) to sort itself out, so we won’t find out right away either. It goes to show that when it comes to SEO you’re much better off worrying about the things you can change (your website) instead of things over which you have no control (Google’s algo updates). With the sites I manage, I can be reasonably sure that if they disappear right after an update, there’s a good chance that they’ll be right back where they were, if not higher, in a week or so.

That’s probably of little comfort to businesses that rely heavily on organic search for generating income and, in fact, I was approached last week by a partner who had lost rankings for keyword phrases that he should have dominated. “Just wait and see,” unfortunately, isn’t really what someone in that position wants to hear, so luckily I was able to give him some practical (“actionable” in corporate-speak) suggestions for improving his pages.

The search engine algorithms are already pretty sophisticated, and it’s my belief that it is pretty much only the filters that are being finetuned. If every algorithm update is designed to further separate the content wheat from the spam chaff, it’s going to get harder and harder to “trick” the engines. Instead, you want to work with them to help them find you and understand what you’re about. While it’s true that they might not be able to figure out your tricks immediately, I believe we’ve reached a point where transparency is being rewarded.

Besides, convention has it that it takes Google only six weeks to figure out and counter new spam methods. Once your site is identified as spam you might as well start anew on a fresh domain that isn’t tainted. Who has the energy to watch their work crash and burn every month and a half?

It’s been shown that once animals understand what they are supposed to do to receive a reward, rewarding them irregularly rather than consistently is much more effective in reinforcing that behavior. Animal behavior studies have shown that some animals who are rewarded inconsistently for pushing a lever (for example) become obsessed with that behavior… As opposed to the test subjects that were rewarded consistently — those animals behave more rationally.

This explains some web marketers’ obsessions with algorithm updates and their rankings. As long as the engines keep them guessing, SEOs will keep pounding away at that lever.

P.s. The term “algoholic,” to described algorithm-obsessed SEOs, was coined by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs and made its national debut, I believe, at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.

I was going to pull together some of the major articles on the Google Print controversy, but then I found DigitalKoans, which has a great bibliography on the topic, as well as a ton of other content about e-publishing. Good stuff here, although I do agree with the person who left the comment about presenting the bibliography in chron order.

Breaking news: Yahoo, according to Yahoo, is more popular than Google.