SEO Blog

On New Year’s Eve, I found myself in the ultra far east end of Toronto spending the last moments of 2007 with the kids I went to kindergarten with! While my rapidly receding hair was turning its shades of gray, the faces of my oldest friends were filling in with the adult flesh accumulated through our forty or so years of living. The physical changes that happened to the children I grew up with made the moment infinitely more interesting. Would I know which one was Ian and which was Thomas? I can’t believe I even remember their names given I often have a hard time remembering the simplest things. It wasn’t so hard to spot the old childhood friends behind their new adult faces. To be honest, I did have some high-tech help.

Though I live 4500 km (3000mi) away and haven’t seen these people in almost twenty five years I can still recognize each of them. I have a Facebook account and have trolled the images of former classmates in my unending quest to get half-a-grasp on the curious and surreal process of growing into middle age. I know what they look like, what they’ve done, where they went to school, who they married and what their kids are doing. They know the same about me. We all come to the party with a foreknowledge that makes conversation run smoother, faster and deeper. I can now keep touch with my deepest roots in cyberspace. Personal contact would be better but half a loaf is still a fair sized chunk bread.

Yesterday, Dave Davies and I used our weekly WebmasterRadio.fm show Webcology to predict the key trends and fortunes of the coming year. When we agreed to do a predictions show two weeks ago, I figured it would fairly easy. I have been writing an annual predictions column for at least five years and each one rolled off my fingers quickly. It should be as simple as it was last year, right?

I was wrong. While we did a fine show, it tended to be more of a conversation about how search and social media was faring and less about predicting where it was going. For a number of reasons, the predictions have been far harder to make this year.

The world we work in is changing quite rapidly. Change has been a dominant theme in my thoughts in 2006 and 2007 and entering 2008, we see those changes seriously manifesting all around us. The pace of evolution in the market, the greater economy, the environment and in global politics is going to get faster. Each of these meta-areas has a direct effect on the business of search and Internet marketing as we know it and each has to be factored into every prediction. As we are starting to realize about Global Warming, the pace of change is accelerating exponentially. In 2008 what we have known to be solid ground is going to get rather swampy, much like the permafrost around Hudson’s Bay.

Far from being the sincerest form of flattery, imitation is often a big waste of time.

Two days ago I was performing a rather dull set of SEO experiments when I noticed something very disturbing. While testing Google’s SERPs against keyword phrases inserted into the Metamend Facebook profile, I found a Chinese SEO company had completely stolen the Metamend source-code, images and all. The Chinese firm, Okwoo.com had slightly altered and translated the site-text into a Chinese language but had left blog postings (many of which I wrote) in the English language they were originally written in. It’s called site jacking and it happens more often than a reasonable person might realize.

The discovery posed deep problems on many levels, the least of which was the series of phone calls that overtook the better part of the afternoon. It’s never much fun to tell the president that you’ve found a problem, even when you are not the one at fault. The way these things inevitably turn out, when you find and report it, you get charged with fixing it.

An incident earlier this morning has taught me a bit more about advertising through Facebook.

In case you’re interested, Chris Chan from Vancouver BC is selling his World of Warcraft account for a mere $900. I found out about it because his ad appeared against my Facebook profile which was weird considering I do not know Chris Chan and do not participate in WoW.

Consisting of, “70 mage BT/MH attuned,70 druid w/ rare kara mount!”, the sale of Chan’s WoW account has been broadcast to his friends and to the friends of his friends as well as being displayed in the Vancouver BC network marketplace. Though I have never played or even seen the multiplayer universe known as World of Warcraft, Chan’s advertisement was displayed to my Facebook account because a close friend of mine is an avid WoW gamer.

While it was sort of cool to see how the Marketplace system filtered an ad to my account, the PartyPoker pop-under that appeared after clicking Chan’s ad wasn’t so cool. It’s worth monitoring pop-under activity to see if Facebook relies on this type of advertising or if the folks working for PartyPoker have found a creative but spammy method of inserting their content-calls into the link-strings of Facebook profiles. (A third, more sinister scenario has PartyPoker adware on my computer but that is less likely as I use several adware scrubbers and virus scanners)