Published: December 1, 2008

The following is the transcript of an interview of Brett Crosby, Senior Manager of Google Analytics, conducted in several sessions in January, 2007. He has been shaping the Web Analytics industry for ten years as the co-founder of Urchin Software Corporation and more recently as a senior product leader at Google. He is currently responsible for product positioning, feature roadmap development and all external product communications. Brett holds a degree from USC in Political Science and International Relations.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: That was a major announcement that came out in late October (2008), and certainly a very significant change in Google Analytics.

Brett Crosby: That's correct. This was a major announcement for us. We launched seven new enterprise-class features, and we are pretty excited about it because it went over fairly well.

Eric Enge: Why don't we take a moment and talk a little bit about each of them?

Brett Crosby: The interesting thing about this launch is that when we first started with Google Analytics it was to a relatively niche market. The whole web analytics industry was much smaller than it is today. But then it very quickly went from the backroom to the boardroom and every room in between.

Suddenly everyone wanted access to these reports, and what we recognized in the process of launching the version we launched about a year ago was that we really had a much broader audience than we had before. We needed to redesign the reporting interface, the way the information was displayed, and the accessibility of the entire interface.

Last week's launch was really about bringing depth to our entire customer base. It was about going out and tackling some of the most advanced features in the analytics space like Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting, Advanced Visualizations and features like that. We took those things that were still very niche and only available to very few in the analytics space and made them easy to use, free, and accessible to everyone. That's what this entire launch is about, and why this particular kind of enterprise-class feature bundle is a very significant launch for us.

Eric Enge: How long has it been in the works?

Brett Crosby: We've had these features in mind for a long time. We have been developing them for a while, but it wasn't clear that we were going to necessarily launch them all at once. But then, all the stars came into alignment and it became a perfect launch to do altogether, and also great timing for the eMetrics Conference in Washington, D.C..

It was great because we have historically liked to launch things there, and it remains to be seen when and where we do our launch. It's more about when the product is ready then trying to time it to any particular tradeshow or anything like that.

But, it was a nice coincidence for us, because that's when we launched the major upgrade last time. We've launched other things, like Google Website Optimizer at that show too. So it worked out very well for us to be able to launch there.

Eric Enge: Let's talk a little bit more about the features in the release.

Brett Crosby: First, we updated UI in admin interface. We added things like Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reporting, so this became increasingly important. We decided not to just highlight those things, but to highlight everything else that allows you to change the look of your data.

Let me get into Advanced Segmentation. Advanced Segmentation is, I think, one of the most significant parts of this launch. It allows you to look at a segment of traffic without having to setup a profile to do this, as you used to have to do with GAGoogle Analytics.

You can setup a new segment and look at data historically as well. And, it's not just for a single report. Say you just want to see customers who came in through Google AdWords versus all the other customers on your site, for example.

You can see that for all of your reports as you go through your interface. If you set that advanced segment up it remains, so when you log in next time you can enable and view it very easily. We actually have pre-populated several Advanced Segments we think people will want to look at. And you can use that Advanced Segmentation to do whatever segment you want to view.

Eric Enge: So, these default segments are some of the obvious things like paid traffic versus non-paid or direct traffic or search traffic as a category, and things like that. So, there are about nine or ten of these that are predefined, and then right here from the very same screen you can go ahead and setup a new Custom Segment and define it the way you want.

Brett Crosby: That's correct. There are a lot of options in there. You'll notice when you are setting up a segment that it's drag & drop. It's very easy to use because you don't have to go and manipulate HTML, or play with any code to do anything. It's very, very user friendly, and obviously that was intentional so it can be for everyone, not just for web analytics experts.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you could define a Custom Segment and that would propagagate te though the interface for you?

Brett Crosby: Yes.

Eric Enge: I also like the fact that when you setting up an advanced segment, that it tells you right there out of all your visits how many of them match up with the segment you defined. Can you talk a bit about Custom Reporting?

Brett Crosby: We worked on Custom Reporting for a while with user experience folks within Google. We did eye tracking studies, where we are watching them behind a one-way mirror and we can see what they are doing. Obviously, they know we are doing this within usability test and it's great, because you can see if the designs you've done are actually things that people can figure out or not, and how long it takes them to figure them out.

What we found is that when you show people, you can actually test it. You've set this up and you are showing people a funnel of what's happening as we are setting up these Custom Reports. So, if they are going to get zero results at the end of it, they are going to know this before they save it, and then have to go look in the interface and find out there is no data.

We thought that wasn't a very good experience, so we allow people to see what's happening as they are creating these funnels. If it returns no data, perhaps I need to make it a little more general than specific.

So those are some of the steps you can do within Custom Reporting, along with Drag & Drop. The other thing that is cool is that there is also some auto-fill capability. Say you cared about traffic from Rio within its geography, and you pull that down.

You start typing it in, and as you type "RI," you will see RIO and you also see Riverside if you've had traffic from both places based on your actual data. But it won't suggest it if you don't have traffic for it. We found this to be very helpful. Otherwise, you can have a typo or something like that that throws you completely off.

Eric Enge: Right. And, in the case of the Custom Reporting you have right in the Custom Reporting menu, the reports you create or save are the same as the segments are?

Brett Crosby: That's correct. One of the interesting things is talking about both of these things together. You can setup an Advanced Segment of traffic that you want to look at, and then you can also setup a Custom Report. And, within that Custom Report you can look at their traffic segment.

So, if you wanted your Custom Report to list people who visited three pages, and were using the Chrome browser, and perhaps they had to be sent to the site from Google. Then you can say that's your Custom Report. Then you can look at this special Advanced Segment, to see if your visitors visited a certain page on your site for mainly that segment.

Each of them is very powerful by itself, but when you combine them they're even more powerful. This is in my opinion very, very significant.

Eric Enge: Yes. Well, in my view the things that you are addressing here are what have been the longest standing weaknesses in Google Analytics, and this is a big step forward.

Brett Crosby: Great. I am glad you feel that way. I think that has been a definite perception of a need out there, and we are glad to get these features out there and let people start using them.

Eric Enge: Let's talk about Data Visualization.

Brett Crosby: Motion Charts is something completely new. It's sort of an advanced version of the Data Visualization we launched that came out of the Trendalyzer acquisition. These are reports on an x and y axis that are essentially bubble charts that will animate overtime. You get to chose what's on the x axis and the y axis, and you also get to chose what determines the size and the color of the bubble.

Once you set up those four dimensions, you can watch the fifth dimension over time. And, it's fascinating, because it really brings the data to life. You can see anomalies in your data that otherwise might be obscured in typical spreadsheet-style reporting.

Eric Enge: So, how do you set it up?

Brett Crosby: You can set it up from any report that has columns and rows within Google Analytics. These all have a visualize button. You can click that button and go onto the Motion Charts, and you basically get to select your parameters as I described before. You can see things like time on site, bounce rate, conversions and even repeat buyers, and play that overtime. As the bubbles move around you start noticing things that you didn't realize, perhaps that people who bounce end up coming back and buying on your site. Things that wouldn't be obvious start to become obvious.

In our help center we have created some pre-suggested settings that you might want to see within Motion Charts to find certain details. There is a great SEM Motion Chart setting that you can do, and by setting all the five dimensions properly you can see great SEM information, for example.

We've also done one for SEO, and there are somewhere around fifteen or twenty of them that we've pre-suggested. This is our first interaction with Motion Charts. Eventually you can see us pre-baking some of these suggestive things into the product, and there are a lot of directions we can take this.

Motion Charts will continue to be developed as they are today, and those developments will continue to be rolled out within the GAGoogle Analytics Motion Charts as well. I think of this as the first major step in the direction of these visualizations, but there is a lot more that can happen with Motion Charts, so that's a pretty exciting thing for us.

One of the reasons we don't have too much pre-configured in this is that a lot of this is about data exploration. It's about being able to explore data in new ways and discover things that you might not have known if we showed you your data in a table format, for example.

This is something that as people start to play with they are going to find some really fantastic things. We think that people all over the place will start posting in our forums things they have discovered that they like.

We think this is something that has potential to generate a lot of user community involvement.

Eric Enge: Next up - let's talk about the API.

Brett Crosby: The API (Application Programming Interface) is currently in a private beta, meaning that if you let us know that you are interested in trying it out, we will put you on a list and invite you in if we have capacity. It's also to let people know that the API does exist, and that we are working towards getting a full launch.

The reason that it's beta is that there may be some changes and updates as we go based on the feedback that we are getting. . The reason the API is so significant is that people have already been out there trading a whole bunch of tools around Google Analytics.

Third- party developers have come up with really interesting things like an iPhone app that renders your Google Analytics data. There is a desktop application that someone created for Adobe Air. There are approximately about 26 Greasemonkey scripts out there where people have created some sort of hack into our interface or pull data out of Google Analytics.

They have done all of this without the benefit of an API. Now that we are providing an API we believe that you will see a lot more interesting things come out of these third party developer ecosystems.

Eric Enge: Right. There are also people who have gaGoogle Analyticsdgets and widgets, right?

Brett Crosby: Yes, that's correct. Gagadgetsdgets, and widgets, and all kinds of things. I know some people in the media have been calling for us to create the capability for you to report your own GAGoogle Analytics data completely publicly. And, you could imagine that someone could create a widget that will do that and you could put in your own website. This way you'll be able to see how many visitors you have on your website on a given day or whatever other kind of data you may want to see.

Eric Enge: Or, it could show the most common referrers for the day.

Brett Crosby: Yes, exactly. The interesting thing is that there are so many things like that that are not necessarily at the core of web analytics that we would traditionally build. The idea is to be able to open this up to developers worldwide so that other people can create things that we might have never dream of. Then they can make them available to the rest of the Google Analytics community.

Eric Enge: Right. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

Brett Crosby: Exactly, that's correct. And, you may find there will be things that are more popular than Google Analytics that come out of this. So, I find it really exciting to get the development out of our hands a little bit and putting into the hands of the community and letting people start working on what they want to see. And we have such a large customer base that I think the possibilities are almost endless.

Eric Enge: Are there any limits on the API, like a limit on the amount of usage you can get overall or at one time?

Brett Crosby: You should be able to pull virtually 100% of the data out of GAGoogle Analytics currently. Whatever limits we might set is still being figured out. The goal is to put as few limits on this as possible, but it depends on how actively people are using this.

Eric Enge: Right. You could imagine somebody creating an application that became extremely popular somehow, and that would place a fairly large demand on your infrastructure.

Brett Crosby: Right. As long as the data is useful to people we are on the right track. But, we also want API developers to develop applications in a responsible and efficient manner.

Eric Enge: Right. Of course an application that comes to my mind as something to dynamically pull out of the interface when you have a new referrer.

Brett Crosby: Right. That would be great; someone that you've never seen before.

Eric Enge: Yes. Most likely it means you get a new link. You'll know that long before any search engine would report that link to you as it is pulling that data right out of GAGoogle Analytics, and I think that's a nice SEO type tool.

Brett Crosby: Yes, exactly. I am sure there are dozens and dozens of things like that, that are not at the top of our development list, because we want to create bigger things like the API.

Eric Enge: Can you talk about the Google AdSense Integration?

Brett Crosby: This is something that we've wanted to push out there for as long as I have been at Google, which is about 3 and a half years now. We are really excited about getting this going, and it's something that will be rolling out overtime. The bulk of these features that we have been talking about are rolling out over the coming weeks, and are already are active in a lot of our customers' accounts.

The AdSense Integration and the API are things that we'll be rolling out a little more slowly. The main reason for that is that we want to ensure that we don't overwhelm support so we are always able to help clients who need help. We don't want to overwhelm people or leave people wanting support and not getting it if our expert researchers are overwhelmed, right?

Eric Enge: Right. What will it actually mean for a publisher?

Brett Crosby: This is really great for publishers who are using AdSense on their site to monetize, because now they can finally see which pages and which referrals are monetizing best. You can imagine also if there is segment of traffic that a publisher really wants to look at to see their repeat visitors. . For example, they can see if people that have been to their site more than three times within the month monetize better than one-time visitors do.

Or, they can see if the people that come in once and click out on an AdSense ad actually make them more money. And so, you can determine which ones you should be targeting and if you are going to do any outreach, or advertising, or something like that.

These are the sorts of questions that people can start to answer with the GAGoogle Analytics- AdSense Integration. It's obviously very powerful, and it's basically going to allow people to start finding segments of traffic that they weren't aware of or didn't know how important they actually were.

Eric Enge: Right. So, Let's say you have a site that's organicorganic- centric, and you find out that a certain class of pages has twice as high a CPM of another class of pages.. You might not be linking to that better converting class of pages from your homepage and you might now choose to do so. Or, do other things to raise their visibility and increase the amount of traffic on those pages.

We could probably come up with twenty of these without a lot of difficulty. A lot of tuning possibilities end up opening up.

Brett Crosby: Yes. Depending on the kind of site you have, what your goal is, and the type of content you are pushing, there are different things you are going to look at, like different authors potentially. There are all kinds of things that might suddenly become interesting to look at. The idea is that as we are getting this out there, people could start to find these things. If Google AdSense is the way you are driving revenue on your website, it couldn't have happened in a better time, considering this economy.

The timing on the Google AdSense Integration and really all of these launches couldn't be better for people, because now you can start to really hone in on the traffic that's working for you, and look at how you can best monetize that traffic.

Eric Enge: Thanks Brett!

Brett Crosby: Thank you Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Brett Crosby interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin, November 24, 2008
• Hitwise's Bill Tancer, November 17, 2008
• Dennis Mortensen - October 27, 2008
• Guy Kawasaki - October 14, 2008
• Bruce Clay - September 22, 2008
• Microsoft's Nathan Buggia - Sept. 15, 2008
• Yahoo's Frazier Miller - Sept. 8, 2008
• Microsoft's Ziya Genceren - September 3, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Published: November 24, 2008

Rand Fishkin is among the search marketing field's thought leaders, serving 30,000+ daily readers on the SEOmoz blog. Rand has appeared in Newsweek magazine and been quoted by the Washington Post, USA Today and dozens of other publications. He is a frequent traveler and speaker on SEO, blogging & web marketing at worldwide conferences, but loves his hometown of Seattle, WA.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Let's start with an overview of what Linkscape is, and how people might use it?

Rand Fishkin: Linkscape is really two big things right now. One is the index; the crawl we built of the World Wide Web, which is about thirty billion pages right now and probably going up to something close to double that in November. Talking to Ben yesterday it sounds like it's going to be just a week or two more before we are doing that update.

That index is used to construct a link graph, and then that link graph feeds into the public tool that you see at www.seomoz.org/linkscape, which is a link research and link intelligence tool. So, by learning how important certain sites and pages are, how many links point to them, and from how many different domains, we are learning all sorts of details about the links. What's the anchor text, what's the target URL, what's the relative importance, all that kind of stuff. It's a very robust tool for link intelligence. If you could dream of all the things you wish you had in Site Explorer, we are trying to do that.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, that sounds like a good objective. How did you go about assembling the index?

Rand Fishkin: We looked at a lot of papers from research staff. We did some test crawling back in December and January. One of the things that we did early on was downloaded Wikipedia and DMOZ and build little mini link graphs internally, just to see how we liked our metrics, and whether we thought they were good or not. And then we went out crawling the web using a web crawler to discover links.

We started with a list of trusted seed sites. And we basically went through a list of all the trusted seed sets that other academic and IR conferences and papers had proposed previously. We dug through those and found ones we liked and ones we didn't so much like. It turns out that a lot of EDU links you would think would be great seed sites link to some pretty scuzzy stuff.

So, what you really want to do is find between a few hundred and a thousand really solid websites and pages that don't link to anyone bad. Then you get that Kevin Bacon effect where 6 degrees of separation shows you some pretty bad people, and at 5 degrees they are not so bad. At 4 degrees they are pretty decent, 3 degrees they are really good, and 2 degrees they are great, that kind of thing. So, the further away you go, the further in link hops you go from trusted sites, the worse the Internet gets.

Starting with those seed sites and crawling out from there actually gives us our mozTrust score. So we basically use those trusted sites and crawl from there, and just keep on crawling until we got to a place where we are relatively happy. And, that's where we were happy enough for a beta launch, which was this thirty billion page index that you see now. We like it a lot, because it is very domain diverse.

Basically, the index bias, rather than going very deep into big sites, tries to go very, very wide and cover as many sites as possible. So, for example, I think Nathan Buggia was here a couple of months back for a Whiteboard Friday. He said that at Microsoft they have about 75 million domains that they think are worthy of including in their index that they show in the main search results. In our crawl, which is probably considerably smaller than Live's, we found 150 million domains. So, we really try to be very, very broad as far as domains go.

Eric Enge: So, you are focused more on breadth than depth, so if you had a hundred thousand page site, you only crawl part of it?

Rand Fishkin: Exactly. And, you can totally see that when you plug stuff into Linkscape. You can see that we have a lot more external links than internal links, right? So, you'll look at something like Hulu.com and you will see that they know about 20,000 unique external links but only have 1,500 internal links. Clearly there are more than 1,500 pages on Hulu, but we haven't crawled with the same depth. So obviously, there is some disparity between us and the major search engines right now, and we are looking to close that gap in the next three to six months.

Eric Enge: Right. So, is any of your index a result of licensing data from a third party?

Rand Fishkin: Right now, very little of it is. Technically none of it is crawled under the SEOmoz brand. There is no crawler out there named SEOmoz, there is no crawler that comes from our servers. So I guess it technically all comes from a third party, but a third party that's controlled by us, a third party where we dictate the crawl and how the process works. We only backfill that when we find sites and pages where we can't reach them for some reason.

So, a good example would be something like the economist.com. Right now we don't have information on The economist because it turns out they actually block all robots except Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Web Archive, Archive.org and a couple of others. So, we are going to end up buying the economist crawl from archive.org and including it that way. I think that might be a good way to think about it.

Basically if we are not getting the data one way to build our index, we'll go get it in another way. Now, there are some folks who block everyone except Google, and it turns out that for those guys, especially if they put no archive on their pages, there is pretty much no way to get that data. And, we are okay with that. We are talking about maybe one 100,000th of the web's pages, probably less than that even.

Eric Enge: Sure. So, there is a lot of speculation out there that your bot is called dotbot.

Rand Fishkin: I think there is lot of speculation about that.

Eric Enge: Can you tell me about that?

Rand Fishkin: So the website that runs dotbot is on our list of sources, along with others. So yes, that is absolutely one of the places that we may be pulling from, now or in the future, but we are not saying specifically that we only run one of these spiders. Right now it's just, here's all list of sources so that if you want to block, you could potentially block all of the sources that we could pull from.

Basically the thinking behind that is just if you block us, and then you see your information on Linkscape, you are probably going to be very upset. So, what we say is if you want to keep us out, no matter where we get your information from, use the meta noindex. Instead of meta robots noindex, use meta SEOmoz noindex, and we will keep you out, we won't show you in our list of results.

If you want to block specific bots, you can see all the potential sources and all the potential bots that we've got on our list and you can block any or all of them, or none of them, whatever you choose.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the list of bots on your site is a comprehensive list of sources?

Rand Fishkin: That's right. If we get blocked or find new sources, we may use those. Anytime we do that, we will update that list so that you know where we are pulling from so if you want to block other sources you can. We are very aggressive about getting data, there is no doubt about it. But we don't want to go over the line and be just totally evil and cloak our bot or disguise ourselves use the headless Firefox browser or something like that to crawl. So, we do disclose all the stuff there. Before we pull every single bot we make sure that they obey robots.txt and all the sources you see listed there obey robots.txt.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the bots that you are making use of, you are leveraging their existing crawl data, right? As opposed to having them do a custom crawl for you?

Rand Fishkin: In some cases but not all. So, for example, I believe it's Exalead that will crawl for you for specific stuff. So, you can contact them and say can you crawl this, and I want this crawl data, right? And, I think the guys with Majestic SEO are the same way, right? So, if you say I want you to crawl this, can you crawl this for me and tell me that, they can do that too. Of course there are open source crawlers, so anyone who wants to download an open source bot and just crawl a few hundred or few thousand pages can do that too, and build their own stuff, and then that kind of thing. But yes, so we may buy data to backfill anything that we can't get on our own, or that we have trouble getting on our own.

Eric Enge: Right. So, what about the people out there who have done the math and say there is no way you could have crawled more than 7,000,000 pages in the time that you are talking about?

Rand Fishkin: I think that if you go and look at Linkscape and you start to add up the number of links and all kind of stuff, you will see that our index is much larger than that. There are 30,000,000,000 URLs, and I don't know that we'd have any particularly good reason not to disclose that number, right? If the number was actually 10 billion I would definitely say 10 billion because that would be accurate.

I think Danny Sullivan was very wise when he said that number of URLs crawled is such a terrible metric. It really is meaningless. So, I would say if 30 billion sounds like it doesn't mean anything to you, it really doesn't mean anything. Go look at the tool and see how many domains and pages we actually know about that are pointing to your site or the site that you are interested in looking at.

Eric Enge: Right. I agree that 10 billion or 30 billion doesn't matter, but there is speculation that it's really 7 million.

Rand Fishkin: 7,000,000, I mean I think we have like 7,000,000 or more links to Google. Certainly not every page on the web links to Google. Google.com; number of links. So, let's see, we've got 178 million unique links to pages on Google.com. So, that's probably more than 7 million pages that we had to crawl to get that.

If you want to dispute it we are not going to be releasing our index in a downloadable format. It is tons of terabytes of data. Certainly if you spend any time looking through the tool and looking at the number of links pointing to even very small domains, you'll get a sense that they clearly have a ton of pages. And, the 30 billion number just comes from the index, obviously I haven't actually seen it. I just asked Nick and Ben how many pages we have. And they said we've got right around 30,000,000,000.

Eric Enge: Right. Just to summarize at the end of the day you've engaged multiple sources to sample the data and used a variety of different seeds

Rand Fishkin: For the crawl that we designed, the seed set is something that we set right at the beginning. So that doesn't really change. And then, we know from that seed and from the crawler we build out what we want to crawl next, what we haven't seen yet, and where we have gaps in our data. And, that's where we do the back filling. If we haven't crawled something than we'll say alright, that's on the schedule for next month's update, or this looks like it's very fresh and different than last time we crawled it. Just to make sure we crawl it again next month.

Eric Enge: So, you talked a little bit about this before, but let's expand upon it. What should a site webmaster do if they don't want to be in the SEOmoz index?

Rand Fishkin: There are a bunch of things that they can do obviously. I think there is the SEOmoz meta tag, which says SEOmoz, don't include me in your results. I think there are two problems that a lot of people have with that. One is that you can't do it with one command for a whole site, which is frustrating. When we pull from third party sources, they wouldn't know not to crawl you.

So, basically we have a big list of gaps in our data, right? So, the meta tag tells us not to include this page in your index, and we know not to do that. Note that the only way to make sure that Google never includes your URL is not to use robots.txt, because then they will still show it just without any crawled data.

You have to use the meta noindex because using the meta noindex they will know not to show you in our results. So, we are the same way. If you use the meta noindex we will know not to show you in our results. Obviously, you can use robots.txt to block any or all of the sources.

And, if you are concerned about other bots there is a company called Syntryx that builds its own World Wide Web Index, and then sells something very similar to Linkscape for around $25,000 a year and plenty of other private label tools that do similar things. I think there are numerous other ones who do stuff like this as well and that Linkscape is not as unique as we hoped it is. It's just one of the only public ones, one of the only ones that anyone can get access to.

Eric Enge: And there is Attributor and Visible Technologies?

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah. Attributor is a little different, they don't crawl for links, they crawl for content. So, they try and find people who've stolen content across the web. They do the web crawling and say oh, it looks like you are stealing content from the AP; you owe them a link, or a license, or you have to pay them, or whatever. I think Visible is for reputation management and that kind of stuff. But, in any case if you want to block any bot out there, you should use the robots.txt. I think that some other smart people have said that if you want to be really careful, you can restrict by IP address. So, you can basically say aha, you are a bot, you are requesting my robots.txt, let's check if you are the IP address that really matches up to your bot. And, I think that's a great way to keep prying bots out.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you use the noindex tag you do not include the page; is that correct?

Rand Fishkin: That's right. We used to have in Linkscape for the first 9 days that we launch. We'd actually show you all the links from meta noindex pages.Then, someone said hey, wait a minute that's not cool, you shouldn't be showing those..So we removed it. Now we basically hide all of those by default. You can no longer see meta noindex links inside SEOmoz, and that's for robots. Now we have this new tag SEOmoz to basically say I am fine with this showing up in other search engines, I just don't want to show up in you guys.

Eric Enge: Now, by keeping out, does that mean that you won't show the links originating on that page or you won't show the links going to that page?

Rand Fishkin: The former. Basically we are just like the search engines, just like Google or Yahoo. You could run a link search at Yahoo, Google, Exalead, or Live when they had theirs active. You could get links to a page because that data comes from those pages that link to it. What we won't show is that page in any of our result. So, for example, if you are linking to spammyviagra.com or whatever, we won't show you in our list of links to spammyviagra.com when someone queries. It's just like the major search engine.

Eric Enge: Sure. So what happens at the end of the day if somebody who is really determined didn't want their competitor to be able to get back link structure on their site?

Rand Fishkin: They should make sure that everyone who links to them uses the meta noindex, meta SEOmoz noindex tag.

Eric Enge: Right. Practically speaking...

Rand Fishkin: Not very practical; no.

Eric Enge: But, you can go to linkdiagnosis.com and get a less robust set of data perhaps, but you'd still get a back link profile on someone's site that you can download on your spreadsheet.

Rand Fishkin: Yes. And, the same is true of Yahoo Site Explorer. You can go in there and export a CSV and see all those links that point to it right now. There are some people who have commented online that keeping yourself out of SEOmoz is not particularly valuable. You really want to keep out everyone who links to you, and that's a much more challenging task. Linkscape is one of at least half a dozen products that I know of that will show you this data.

Eric Enge: Right. So are you being held to a different standard?

Rand Fishkin: You know though, I think that is SEOmoz's own fault. The messaging that we've always had, and the brand that we've always created is one of extreme transparency and extreme respect for Webmasters, and this is I think is a break from that. We are basically not fulfilling the same expectations at that high level of transparency that Webmasters have had in us since we launched SEOmoz.

I am conflicted about it, I really am. But at the same time we feel really strongly about this product. If we didn't build it, we'd want someone else to build it, and obviously other people have built it. I think to a certain degree there is a conflict between the brand that we created and the expectations that people have for us and how we are going to treat Webmasters.

We've always had competitive link intelligence tools in SEOmoz, but they pulled from other sources, from Yahoo, or Google, or Microsoft, or other people. This one is kind of like oh, well now you are the source of it; you are the one crawling me and grabbing my data and that kind of thing. And I can't really criticize folks who are upset about that. I think that they have a legitimate point, and I do feel bad about it. I think there is more we want to do.

A couple people have suggested that rather than having to pay for your data for your own site, SEOmoz should offer it just like Google Webmaster Tools does, a way to register your domain as your own.. And then, you can go and see the link intelligence report for your domain in advance for free. I think that is an excellent suggestion and it's also very valuable from a marketing perspective.

Eric Enge: Something that also strikes me as quite interesting that you have are tools like HitWise and ComScore and how they give you detailed information on other people's pay per click campaigns.

Rand Fishkin: Yes, you can see where people go on the web and what they search for, and all that kind of stuff. If you put it in a relative sense SEOmoz doesn't seem like a bad guy. But, if you put it in a sense of hey, this is a group that's always had this ethical and moral stance towards transparency and made it a core of their identity, and that kind of thing.

Now, they are being a little dodgy about how they grab, or the fact that they are so aggressive with grabbing, and that you actually have to jump through several hoops if you are not willing to use that meta SEOmoz tag to keep your information out, that kind of stuff. And so, I understand that frustration and that anger, and I don't want to downplay it. I don't want to say oh well, they are all wrong, right? They are not all wrong; I think there is some legitimacy to those concerns.

Eric Enge: Right. At the end of the day, the value you see in the tool is something that you feel strongly enough about that you will deal with the criticisms.

Rand Fishkin: That's the bottom line. And this project has been a dream of mine since 2005. I think I mentioned in my presentation at SMX East that Todd Malicoat, Nick from Threadwatch, and others all said hey, this is a really good idea; someone should build a crawler and an index within the World Wide Web that's for SEOs. It should use SEO types of metrics, and build our own version of PageRank so we don't have to rely on Google's. Then we can compare it to Google's, and all that kind of stuff. And that, I feel, is a really important goal and something that we really want to do. It's something that we weighed against potential concerns and decided to build.

Eric Enge: Let's go ahead and talk about ways that people can use this and things that they can do to make their lives easier as an SEO.

Rand Fishkin: Well, there are a bunch of things that always frustrated me about Yahoo Site Explorer. One of the things is if you get a thousand links and there is no information about why that thousand is there instead of another thousand. What order they are in, whether it's most important to least important, or are they all scrambled up? They will show you nofollows, and non nofollows; and they won't mark them.

They don't show you the target URL where that link is pointing to if you've done a domain wide link search. And, they won't tell you the anchor text. There is no indication of how much link juice it is passing. So, we always wanted those kinds of things in link analysis tools. Scraping Yahoo and then trying to reverse all that data is just not an efficient way to do it. Building your own index I think is the only good way to do it.

Then, we have wanted to have all this information about people for a couple of years now. We have been saying do Nofollow PageRank sculpting, right? Other people said that Nofollow PageRank sculpting is a sure sign, it's a big flag to Google, because almost nobody does it except for SEOs. And, there is really no way to refute that until we've built this index in the World Wide Web.So out of two hundred or so billion links, it turns out that almost 2% of all links on the web use nofollow. And, almost half of them use it internally to point a page on their own site; so that turns out as a massive group of websites and webpages.

Eric Enge: Right. And, it includes sites like Citysearch?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yes. I mean it includes all kinds of sites. Facebook, and Yelp, and MySpace. Many people are using PageRank Sculpting. I think that's great information to have about the web as a whole. One of the other fascinating things is that twice as many pages that use 301 use the 302 Redirect. And that's probably not entirely smart, right?

Eric Enge: Well, you do realize that every web developer at birth gets subjected to radiation, which makes 302 the default redirect they use.

Rand Fishkin: That probably causes some of that. All of that aggregate data is incredibly valuable for this analysis sort of stuff. And we have all the individual data and features that you dream that you wish you had in Yahoo Site Explorer. So, if you want to know what is making a site rank above another, you can go look and see a bunch of metrics about that particular URL, including who is linking to them and what the anchor text is saying.

A lot of times a really, really crappy page on a site like Wikipedia will out-rank a fantastic page or the homepage of a really important niche website, because that's how Google works. They are kind of bias towards big, important domains right now. I feel like the ability to see that, and the ability to know a lot about Off Page SEO is important, because it's just so frustrating to try to figure out what the engines are doing or which direction they are going without having this.

When we did the search engine ranking factors on SEOmoz we asked all sorts of experts (including you, Eric!), what they think are the most important elements? And we saw people from very different backgrounds, people who tend to disagree with each other a lot on the blogosphere, all come together with some pretty similar answers. They all said that links are really important and domain authority is really important.

Eric Enge: Right. And, if you are trying to initiate a new link building campaign, and you are trying to figure out where to go, having that ability to get some sense of what the most important targets is very valuable.

Rand Fishkin: Yes. I think that's one of those really fun things, and I think it's a process that will refine overtime. Right now when we stack up mozRank, which is our main metric, it's very similar to Google PageRank in its intuition in that all links are not created equal. Pages with lots of links pointing to them are more important than pages with few links pointing to them.

One of the fun things that we really like to do like go and try to plug in alternate versions of your domain. We plugged in seomoz.com, www.seomoz.com, seomoz.org, www.seomoz.org, and you can see how many people are linking to each version of the different site, and how many different domains are pointing to that. So, it's really fun to do that kind of comparison

I think those comparisons can be really valuable to people. You can see if you need to redirect some things, or what you should be concentrating on in terms of building more juice to these domains, or that kind of thing. All that kind of stuff is really quite awesome to do. And then, there is spam analysis too. I think people might be somewhat critical of this like they have been in the past.

My general stance on it has been pretty unwavering, which is that SEOmoz is not an organization that says, we are going to try and protect spam from being discovered by the engines. We say hey, if you are a spammer, you know the risks of manipulating the engines. I am certainly friendly with a lot of people who do black hat SEO and I have no problem with them. Except in the worse cases, I don't even think it is illegal or even that bad. But, Linkscape is fantastic for going in and realizing which sites are manipulative so you can know not to invest in those links.

We had this funny experience inside SEOmoz where we were kind of like oh man, are the search engines going to be really upset when we launch this? But we learned by hanging out with engineers from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and at SMX East that they all had the same thing going.

They were on a panel and an audience member asked: my competitor I think he is using spam blah, blah, blah, and Aaron from Google was up on our panel, he said you should use Linkscape and figure out what he thinks of those links, and then maybe report them to us. They all sort of had the same mentality of that maybe this isn't so bad, and that it might be good to outsource some of the spam control back to Webmasters to a certain degree.

Eric Enge: Right. So what is the cost to use Linkscape?

Rand Fishkin: Well there are some basic features, things like how many domains are linked to you, how many pages are linking to you and a couple of other metrics that are all free. So, no matter who you are, you can grab them on your site or any other site. The advanced tools, the ones that show the list of links and all that kind of stuff where you can search through URLs or anchor text is part of a pro-membership, and pro-membership is $79 a month to start, and then I think it goes up to $249 for the top package. That top package gives you lots and lots more Linkscape reports per month. I think the basic package has 20 advanced reports per month and unlimited free basic reports, obviously.

Eric Enge: Right. What if someone has an annual membership?

Rand Fishkin: Then they get 20 reports every month, and it refreshes your credits every month. It's the same style as some of compete.com's services, where you get credits every month, and then you use them up. I think we are coming up with a system to where people can buy individual credits and block standard features. So, we should have something released on that front soon, hopefully.

Eric Enge: Thanks Rand!

Rand Fishkin: Yes, thank you Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Rand Fishkin interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• Hitwise's Bill Tancer, November 17, 2008
• Dennis Mortensen - October 27, 2008
• Guy Kawasaki - October 14, 2008
• Bruce Clay - September 22, 2008
• Microsoft's Nathan Buggia - Sept. 15, 2008
• Yahoo's Frazier Miller - Sept. 8, 2008
• Microsoft's Ziya Genceren - September 3, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008
• EveryZing's Tom Wilde - August 11, 2008
• Microsoft's Brad Goldberg - August 4, 2008
• Vitrium System's Peter Nieforth - July 28, 2008
• Aaron Wall - July 21, 2008
• Google's Carter Maslan - July 14, 2008
• Yahoo's Priyank Garg - July 7, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Published: October 27, 2008

Bill Tancer is the General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise. Bill brings 12+ years of marketing, market research and corporate strategy 12+ experience to Hitwise. As the GM for Global Research, he provides cutting-edge research and insight into online consumer behavior and the application of online competitive intelligence.

Bill's analysis of the online landscape has been quoted extensively in the press, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today and Business Week. Bill is a frequent guest on CNBC, and has been interviewed on MSNBC, NPR, CNN Radio and CBS Radio. In addition to speaking at keynote events, Bill is the author of a weekly online column for TIME, "The Science of Search." He was also named Television Week's "12 to Watch" for 2008 and is currently on the advisory board for the PEW Internet and American Life Project.

Prior to joining Hitwise, Bill has led market research and strategy teams at LookSmart, Zaplet, NBC Internet and Pacific Bell. Bill has also covered the Internet sector for Gartner Group as a senior technology marketplace consultant.

Bill has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Florida in Quantitative Management and a Juris Doctorate degree from the Walter F. George School of Law, Mercer University.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Tell me what it's like to be a data geek?

Bill Tancer: Well, it's interesting. Since I have started speaking about Hitwise data, and I have been at the company almost 5 years now, I find that I am not alone in being a data geek. The more people I talk to about data, the more people are coming out of the data closet and saying hey, you know what, I am a data geek as well. I think I have been into data since I was very young. And, the thing that I enjoy most about what I am doing right now is that I am finding out there are lot of more people out there like me.

Eric Enge: It gets into just how you want to go about solving your problems and what kind of information you might base your decision on.

Bill Tancer: Yes. I think it starts with a curiosity about how things work and what makes us tick. Hidden in the data are a number of different sources that can tell us things like how we react to what happens in the offline world and what we can tell about our reaction based on what we do in the online world.

It's that curiosity that starts everything, figuring out what makes us tick. And then, from there I think the next step is finding the business application for what we learn from that additional curiosity

Eric Enge: Right. And, that's one of the things that's wonderful about the book (Click) and the things that you have been speaking about; there are some things that are not naturally easy to quantify.

Bill Tancer: Yes, absolutely. A lot of things aren't quite easy to quantify, and there is very much an art and a science to a lot of the analysis that we do. There are a number of examples that we go through where you start with a very simple example and you think that perhaps searches on personalities in a relevant reality television show, like Dancing with the Stars, should correlate very well to the vote on the show for those same personalities. But it actually takes getting into those search terms and finding out what are the variations in the way people are searching, and where are they going from that search to find the intent behind it. And then you have to factor in that intent to your analysis.

Eric Enge: Right. And, you gave the example in your SMX presentation about how you were sitting in a hotel room one night and you were watching Dancing with the Stars while working on a presentation for the next day, and you did a click check to see who was getting the most search volume. And, you predicted that Stacy Keibler would win, but it didn't turn out that way, did it?

Bill Tancer: No, it didn't. And, that was the first example where it became very clear to me that it was necessary to take that second step in the analysis to actually get behind the search term and figure out what the intent is of these searches. Thus, in this example of Dancing with the Stars, if there is a search on Stacy Keibler does it really equate to somebody who has the intent to vote for her, or is there some other motive?

With that specific example it turned out that a lot of people were searching for pictures of Stacy Keibler. So, when you looked at searches for her versus Drew Lachey, where people were actually interested in his performance on Dancing with the Stars, you have to make some adjustments in your predictions.

Eric Enge: Right. If I remember correctly, you also did something where you saw what the demographic or age range was and you realized that 18 to 24 year old males probably weren't going in to vote on Dancing with the Stars.

Bill Tancer: That's right. That's one of the advantages of having the Hitwise data in our system behind this analysis. I can take Stacey Keibler's name, and beyond just charting volume of search results for Stacey Keibler, I can look at things like what are the combinations and ways that people are searching for her? What are the terms that they are using, and then I could even take the most popular searches for Stacy Keibler and find out where people go when they search on her.

That's where you can start to infer the intent. And, what I did in this example is I looked at some of the top sites like the Official Women Of Wrestling site, which had males 18 to 24, and 25 to 34 as its primary demographic. From there you can start to put together your analysis and figure that this demographic probably is not so likely as to vote on a reality television show. And again, looking at the search terms that are generated that end up in people visiting that site, they were looking for pictures of Stacy Keibler.

That's what led to something we call the Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient, where we adjust our prediction based on what we see in the search term data. So, that's a good example of where there is art to this analysis; you really do have to make some logical inferences when you look at the data. At the same time I try and keep things very simple.

Eric Enge: It seems like to do this kind of analysis there is a certain amount of creativity needed, because you don't necessarily know where your Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient is going to come from.

Bill Tancer: Yes, there is creativity. I think the first place creativity shows up is just figuring out what to analyze because there are so many things to be analyzed. We are capturing data on over a million different websites broken into 172 different industry categories. It's a dataset that updates every single day. One of the challenges that we face as analysts with this dataset is determining what to analyze.

It can come from a variety of different solutions, from seeing something on TV like I did to reading something in the news or even hearing a conversation in passing. It will cause a flag to go up and I‘ll think I should look to the data to see if I can corroborate or dispute what I just heard.

Eric Enge: Alright. So it's one of those things where you need a data geek; you need someone who has certain amount of creativity and passion. And then, you need to make sure that the person doing that analysis is really focusing on things that are actionable.

Bill Tancer: That's right. And, that's another step. If we know we get beyond the initial curiosity to answer a question, and then we get to combining the art and science of making predictions based on this data, the next step is to say, okay, what's the actual insight that we can get from this. I am not going to make a business out of predicting a reality television show result, but if we take what we've learned in that whole analysis, we can apply it to business.

We can apply the fact that people will often search on things based on what's happening in the offline setting, like television. If search correlates with that offline activity, there must be some very valuable insight on the effect of a product placement, or a television show on a brand, and using search terms as an indication of brand equity.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you can measure the impact of your campaign. It gives you another gage on how you did. How much search traffic did you generate?

Bill Tancer: Right, exactly. And, not just how much search traffic you generate, but what can that tell us about our brand? One of the hardest things to get at is brand associations, what's our brand equity? Not only is it difficult, but it's also timely and costly. What I've found is that search term data can give you very valuable, quick insight into what's happening with your brand.

Eric Enge: In your SMX presentation you talked about understanding what innovators and early adopters were doing.

Bill Tancer: That's right. One of my favorite parts of the book was this idea that we had, where we looked at websites that have gained popularity very quickly, sites like YouTube. If we could look at the segments of visitors to those sites and even roll it back to a time before those particular sites were really popular, we should be able to identify who are the early adopters of new technology.

In the book I talk about Everett Rogers, who is a professor and sociologist who came up with his diffusion of innovation curve. He studied how long it takes products or technology to diffuse throughout a population? From that he developed the diffusion of innovation curve that identifies the adopters in the product lifecycle from innovators to the early adopters, to the early mainstream, late mainstream, and so on.

What I found very fascinating with this data is that we could actually visualize this curve that Everett Rogers talked about back in the 1960s and 1970s. If I took our data from YouTube and rolled it back to before the site became very popular by segment and retract things in mosaic segments, I could figure out what the segments are that are the early adopters of this technology. If I can do that, and we did that across a number of different sites, I could search backwards say what these same users are doing today, and actually give us some insight into what might be popular tomorrow.

Eric Enge: You had a really good example that you gave about the Google Chrome situation, which actually revealed a new kind of Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient

Bill Tancer: Yes. That was an interesting example. I spoke at a Google Authors event, and I was talking about this analysis and what we had found, and one of the engineers came up to me afterwards. He said, "we'd be really interested to see what happened to Google Chrome, because we think that the early adopters for this technology are probably MAC users and also Linux users."

An interesting correction coefficient happened in the offline world when Google rolled out Google Chrome. They released it only for Windows, and it wasn't available on Linux, and it wasn't available for the Mac. We took a look at our data to figure out which segments were adopting it. We looked to see if they were the early segments that we identified in our previous analysis, and they weren't just as the engineer had expected, because the "Young Digerati", "Bohemian Mix", the "Money and Brains", which are our names for the segments that are the early adopters that we've identified in the past are the Mac users primarily; some of them Linux users.

We found different segments were adopting Google Chrome. I don't know what that's going to mean for Chrome going forward. I imagine that Google will come out with versions for other operating systems. But, it's been really interesting to track; to see what affect that entry point has had on the adoption of that technology versus what happens when they come out with support for other operating system versions.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you could imagine a different situation where perhaps they pre-anticipated that the best audiences for early adoption of their product, and based on that launched with better support for Mac and Linux environments.

Bill Tancer: Yes. I think it's little too early to tell for Google Chrome, but it's going to be very interesting following this going forward to see how this is going starting with a different entry point. Entering more in the middle of the curve versus the beginning of the curve; how it affects the long-term adoption of this new browser.

Eric Enge: Right. Google is in unique position in there. They can stand different types of adoption curves, probably more than many businesses can.

Bill Tancer: Probably.

Eric Enge: So, just another thing to maybe think about is how businesses can apply this kind of thinking with the whole discussion we've had about the top search terms for affluent people. Another example you have used is that the top sites for this segment were all the finance sites, such as Merrill-Lynch, Schwab, Fidelity, and so forth. But during the initial part of the down turn they suddenly were looking more at entertainment and diversionary sites.

Bill Tancer: Yes. We looked at the most affluent segments that we track. We went to August of 2007 and we looked at where these people were going from this affluent segment that was called the Upper Crust. What we found was that the top twenty of their sites they were visiting were sites like their Schwab Account , Merrill Lynch Account, Fidelity, Yahoo Finance, Google Finance.

We pulled that same set of top-twenty sites for that segment in August 2008, and those brokerage accounts were at the bottom of the top twenty, and at the top were a lot of the diversionary sites, game sites, and celebrity blogs like TMZ. What the data was showing us was that as things were trending down, it looked as though this affluent segment was deciding not to pay attention to their portfolio, because they would rather engage in other activity.

It did change as the brokerage firms and the investment banks began getting in trouble. Suddenly, this group was going back and actually trying to get into accounts. It's something that's on search term data where a number of incidences of terms such as "how to log into my account". These people had been away from their account so long that they had forgotten how to actually get in and check their portfolio.

The insight there for businesses is the need to understand what's happening with your consumer. Don't always think that you know how your consumer is reacting to market conditions as in this example. You might think, but behavioral data, actual observed behavior, can tell us what people are actually doing, and that's just one example.

Eric Enge: Right. So, one fictitious scenario here is that you might want to be changing where your ad campaigns are running depending on where the audience you are trying to reach is going.

Bill Tancer: That's right.

Eric Enge: There are probably a million ways that you can spin different insights into these different things. But, the big lesson here is that there is a lot of valuable business information that can be obtained from data as long as you avoid getting fooled by a Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient.

Bill Tancer: That's right. You also have to be careful if actually you are looking out for the Stacy Keibler Correction Coefficient. You need to be looking out for what's the intent behind the behavior that you are observing, making sure you are factoring everything in, and that there isn't some outside variable that's affecting what you are seeing in the data.

Eric Enge: Right. You can trick yourself pretty easily actually. So, how is research data different from the other kind of data collection techniques that people use?

Bill Tancer: Well, if we go all the way back to judicial market research, there are surveys and focus groups and a number of different observed behaviors. Then there is all we have available to us in data today which is search term data, visits to website, visits to categories of sites etc. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. The advantage to traditional market research tools like surveys and focus groups is that you can ask specific questions and get answers.

There are a few challenges to traditional market research. One is getting represented users so that you really have something reflective of the population that you are trying to predict or extrapolate. There is also the issue of having a sample size that's big enough to make an accurate extrapolation of the population. And then, the other issue is that we don't always say how we truly feel or how we would act.

Often times observed behavior is different from what we say we would do. We also have the advantage of being able to collect on a very large sample of users, the challenge is to observe internet behavior when you are not really asked the question. You are making that inference from behavior, and that's where you can get hooked up. That's where the difficulty lies.

Eric Enge: Right. I think it would be interesting if there was a way, for example, to draw a correlation between the various political polls that we are seeing out there all the time, and what people actually do when they vote in this election.

Bill Tancer: Yes. Politics is unfortunately one place where the predictions don't work very well. As you get closer to an election, the more crossover traffic happens. The more people are visiting, opposing viewpoints in terms of websites or searching and opposing candidates with opposing viewpoints.

It's probably due to swing voters and people also checking out the positions of an opposing candidate as the way of formulating their own arguments to support their position or their candidate. And, because of that crossover traffic, there are confounding variables that make it impossible make a prediction.

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of Click? What gave you desire to write the book?

Bill Tancer: I think one of the crucial points in my career at Hitwise is when we decided to start our blog, which is still active at www.ilovedata.com. We were posting some of these interesting things that we were seeing in the data here. The response that we got was incredible, both in terms of traffic, and of influencers that were calling us and asking us for more data and really engaging in this data.

I think at that point I realized I was probably going to write a book on this topic. From that point I started writing a column and I am currently writing a column for Time Magazine called "The Science of Research," which is pretty much the same as Click. There is lot of interest on this specific topic as what we think is inferred about ourselves from what we do online.

Eric Enge: Indeed. So, it's the national progression of being a data geek.

Bill Tancer: Yeah, the product life cycle of a data geek.

Eric Enge: Thanks Bill!

Bill Tancer: My pleasure. Thank you Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Bill Tancer interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• Dennis Mortensen - October 27, 2008
• Guy Kawasaki - October 14, 2008
• Bruce Clay - September 22, 2008
• Microsoft's Nathan Buggia - Sept. 15, 2008
• Yahoo's Frazier Miller - Sept. 8, 2008
• Microsoft's Ziya Genceren - September 3, 2008
• Google's Maile Ohye - August 25, 2008
• EveryZing's Tom Wilde - August 11, 2008
• Microsoft's Brad Goldberg - August 4, 2008
• Vitrium System's Peter Nieforth - July 28, 2008
• Aaron Wall - July 21, 2008
• Google's Carter Maslan - July 14, 2008
• Yahoo's Priyank Garg - July 7, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Podcast Date: October 24, 2008

The following is a written transcript of the October 24, 2008 podcast with David Szetela of Clix Marketing and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hello everybody, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting. You can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am pleased to be here today with David Szetela of Clix Marketing. You can see his website at www.clixmarketing.com, that's c-l-i-x marketing.com. Thanks for joining us today, David.

David Szetela: Thank you, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Enge: Indeed, so we thought we would talk a little bit about what's going on in the world of broad match. Let us start just by talking about some of the general problems with broad match if we can, and then expand into the way Google has expanded it recently, making it potentially a lot more dangerous for advertisers.

David Szetela: Got it. So broad match is one of the keyword match types that can be used in Google Adwords PPC Campaign, and basically the way the broad match is supposed to work is for a given keyword, let's say a two-word keyword for example like red sneakers, Google was supposed to display the advertisers ad when somebody does search using both of those words in any combination.

So, broad match will match the keyword red sneakers to "looking for sneakers that are red" as well as "I want the red colored sneakers", so the point I am trying to make is the words, the keyword will be matched to a search term when that search term contains those two words in any combination with any intervening words that might occur in the search query.

So about a year ago, maybe a little more than a year ago, Google decided that that they would start matching keywords, broad match keywords, to a broader range of synonyms, and their official explanation for this is that they are helping advertisers who don't have the time or the imagination to bid on all of the variations of keyword that they should be bidding on.

Eric Enge: Right, maroon for example might be a synonym for red.

David Szetela: That's right. My official stance on Google is they are not evil, at the same time they are a publicly-traded profit-making company, so this is an example of a move that they made to both benefit some advertisers and benefit the shareholders as well, because increasing the number of search queries that match a keyword displace the ad more frequently and therefore I gets more click money for Google. Hopefully, that means more click money for the advertisers as well, but in practice there is a problem, and the problem is that Google's software matches the keyword to a variety of search queries that is way too broad.

I will give you an example, let's say the advertiser is a sneaker manufacturer and they sell red sneakers and they sell a lot of them. Well, Google might match that keyword with a word that has synonyms for each of the individual words. So for example, they might match, if someone typed in a search term where can I see a picture of Ruby slippers?, the ad for red sneakers might come up because of the fact that Google decides that they have matched the word red to ruby and sneakers to slippers.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: Obviously that's a problem because the ad is not at all relevant to the search query, and Google might say or some might say that's not really a problem because if the ad display and the ad is pertinent to the search term then the person doing the search will not click on it. Well, there are two problems with that explanation, one is that if the ad comes in reaction to a search term that's irrelevant, the ad accrues an impression and the click through rate is worse and the quality scores worse, so that's a problem.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: A bigger problem is something that I have been trying with calling the Szetela Theorem which is that people will click on anything. Basically Eric, when we start talking about content I will describe this again, but basically you can assume that no matter how irrelevant the ad to a search query, some people that use that search query will click on the ad, and I think it's intuitively obvious that all of those clicks and combination will be less likely to convert, so the net effect is impressions go up, clicks go down, the clicks that do come through a low conversion rate, so that in a nutshell is the expanded broad match problem.

Eric Enge: Right, so it seems like you have two options: you can spend more money and get less results or you can spend more money and get less results. Let's talk about how we can avoid this problem or at least minimize it.

David Szetela: Yeah, there are three good ways to minimize it. I will start with the most extreme, and by the way we have tested all of these methods. I also worked out a couple of methods with the help of my good friend Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster, who's a brilliant guy.

Here are those three ways - #1 is just don't broad match on one word and two word keywords, okay. So, that's kind of the most prudent, safest method; just don't bid on them. And as a segue into method #2, I will say that if an advertiser has a sufficient number and variety of phrase match and exact match versions of dangerous one-word and two-word keywords, then they should be covering most of the bases. So again, solution #1 is just don't bid on one-word and two-word variations of keywords, broad match versions of those keywords.

Variation #2 is at the other extreme, which is keep them, and this is actually Google's suggestion, which is go ahead and run one word and two word broad match keywords, but use a very useful report called the search query report that does a pretty good job of showing the advertiser the search queries that are matching the keywords in the ad group. So basically, this is how we first found that the bad matches were happening, running the search query report and seeing things like Ruby slippers, mauve high-heeled things like that, that Google was, that search queries that Google was matching to our keywords.

Then, Google's recommendation continues by saying then the advertisers should use negative keywords to try to make sure that such bad matches don't occur in the future. Well, I think that could be a fine strategy for advertisers with relatively small campaigns, with relatively small number of keywords; because it takes a lot of time #1 and #2 it, Matt and I coined the phrase, it's like playing Bob the Weasel, it's basically closing to barn door after the horse has gone or scrambling to negative out bad matches after the money has been spent.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: So, for our clients, we concluded that basically closing the barn door once a week or once a day was basically prohibitively time-consuming and not really staunching the flow of ad money.

Eric Enge: Right, so that the preferred tactic then is the, take the one-word and two-word phrase and exact and phrase match them.

David Szetela: Right, but here is one trick, and this is solution #3 and I have to credit Matt for this, which is let's take the example of red sneakers again. The phrase match version of red sneakers would match the search query I am looking for red color sneakers but it would not match the search query I am looking for sneakers that are red, because phrase match only matches search queries with the same words in the same order.

So, the way to mitigate this is, and I will through a quick step-by-step process which is the way we are handling it, and that is #1 stop bidding on one-word and two-word broad match keywords, #2 make sure that the phrase match and exact match versions of all those keywords that you might turn off do exist in your campaign, and #3 add phrase matched versions that are the inverse of the two-word broad match keyword. So if you bid on phrase match red sneakers and phrase match sneakers red, then you will cover the widest variety of almost all of the matches that you might have gotten with broad match if it were correctly, it wasn't expanded out.

Eric Enge: Right. So, that's very cool. Well, super. Why don't we talk a little bit about ways to turbo charge your Google content advertising?

David Szetela: Yeah, okay, before we get into that I just remembered one thing that I really do need to include and that is 3 months or 4 months ago Google introduce yet another feature very similar to expanded broad match called Automatic Match. And I am not going into detail about it, just realize the fact that it's like broad match but on steroids, and it results in an even greater number of inappropriate ads being triggered by keywords where the search query and keywords bear no resemblance to each other.

So, my recommendation for most advertisers is to definitely do not use automatic match, turn it off if it's on; the only exception again is the small advertisers with small ad groups or small overall campaigns with a small number of keywords that just don't have the time to manage a campaign as tightly as others.

Eric Enge: Alright.

David Szetela: I hope I saved some listeners a lot of money.

Eric Enge: I imagine you did, and so let's talk about content advertising.

David Szetela: Okay, in a nutshell, and by the way I want reference to our blog where there is a lot of information about expanded broad match and content match or content advertising and also to the 30-Installment Search Engine Watch column that I did on content advertising, so I am going to summarize the best advice from those 30 columns in about 10 seconds to 45 seconds.

Okay, the #1 reason why advertisers do not succeed on the content network is they don't realize that best practices for content network PPC Advertising are much, much different from best practices in search. So here are the top three tips, #1 never run a combined search and content campaign. Unfortunately, this is the condition by default in Google and Yahoo and Microsoft too. So basically, if you have combined search and content campaigns, turn off the content. If you are creating new campaigns, create separate campaigns for search and separate campaigns for content; just do that and you will save the lot of money.

Tip #2 is that one of the main reasons that, one of main ways that content and search campaigns are different is that the keywords function completely differently. In a content campaign, the keywords should be the words that appear most frequently on the kinds of sites where the advertiser wants their ads to appear.

So one of the examples I give in the column is, a company that sells bodybuilding equipment and they realize that their target audience is also interested in hunting, so basically they want to put their ads on sites where hunters hangout. So basically, their keyword list would be all about hunting, it would be big-game hunting, I don't know hunting very well so I am not going to do well on these keywords, but let's just say the keywords are all about hunting; so that the ad which may even be addressed to hunters like "hey hunters, want to make sure that you are physically fit for the next hunting trip come to our body building website" it seems counter intuitive to search advertisers because they are used to making sure that their keywords match search queries, search queries match the ad and it's all about the product and service.

To be successful at content advertising, you have to start thinking about what kinds of sites do I want my ads to appear on and sometimes that's a demographic group sometimes it is a special interest group, so the keywords, if you just follow this one tenet you will do fine, and that is the keywords in a content keyword targeted campaign should be the words that would appear most frequently on the target group of websites.

Eric Enge: Right, because ultimately this is display advertising, it's a different environment, right? And, someone is on a website, this is about hunting site, they are not really thinking about bodybuilding when they get there, but because the demographic matches right, that might be good place for you to run your ads.

David Szetela: Absolutely. In concert with that, tip #3 is exactly as you just said Eric, content advertising is much more like display advertising, or print advertising, or television, radio; basically the ad is interrupting the main event which is the content that the website visitor came to view.

Search advertisers are used to writing ads that assume that the person looking at the ad came to the page with an interest in what the ad might be selling, just the opposite occurs when an ad appears in a website, the site visitor and the person who is looking at the page came for the content and the ads are tangential to the content. So, the ad has a responsibility that every ad has but it's even sharper with content ads, and that is it's got to jump up the page and scream I have got something for you, so it has to, its first duty is to distract attention away from the content and to the ad.

So, I go into probably two installments of this in the column using imperative words, using exclamation points, using very, very strong offers in the ad are all good practices. Now, the good news is that, and this is another major difference between content and search; with content ads you are not penalized if your ad text does not correspond directly to the keywords and if you think about my explanation of the keywords you will see why that's true.

So, there is lot more latitude the advertiser has in the language that they can use in the ads, they could and should basically jump off the page, grab this site visitor by the throat and convince them that there is something to gain by clicking through to the website.

Eric Enge: Right.

David Szetela: And by the way, I go into a lot of detail in the column about non-text ads because as many people have probably noticed there are some really great non-text ads that do a great job of distracting attention away from the content. Sometimes obnoxiously so, but if you do, the advertisers do their job right, they are making a very logical, credible connection between the content, the ad, and the website that's offering the product or service.

Eric Enge: So, right I mean at the end of the day, if your mission is to be a distraction, which it is in this environment to some degree, then embrace that mission. I think that's a great tip. This so much opportunity I think in content advertising because very few people do it that well.

David Szetela: Yeah, I mean the time right now is perfect to start using it because #1 at the available click inventory, the number of possible impressions and clicks is huge and growing faster than search and #2 as you just pointed out, since it has traditionally been very scary to advertisers there is much less competition in the content network than there is in the searching network, where the competition is huge and is driven and the cost per click clicks up way out of the range of some advertisers.

Eric Enge: Alright, cool. So let's move to our third topic and talk about different types of keyword variations that people should have in their ad groups.

David Szetela: Great topic! The backdrop to this is that people type some crazy things into that search box and sometimes you can blame the literacy, sometimes you can blame different styles, sometimes there is just no explanation; but we have spent a lot of time in our company doing research into what people actually type into the search box. And so, I will give you three tips out of many that I believe every advertiser should be using in every campaign.

#1 is when a noun appears in a keyword list, the advertiser should bid on three different plural versions of that noun or that noun within a search phrase. And those plural versions are the correct one, and at least two incorrect ones. So if the keyword is a red sneaker, then obviously the keyword red sneaker should be included, but also red sneakers with sneaker's and red sneakers with sneakers'. People use the incorrect pluralizations all the time and Google let's you bid on them separately.

We have frequently found that there are more impressions and more clicks on the keywords that are incorrect pluralizations, and we would not have gotten those if we had just bid on the singular version of the noun or just the correct pluralization of the noun, so that's tip #1. Tip #2 is I am going to, it's kind of 2a and 2b, 2a is many savvy advertisers bid on their trade names, let us say the name of their company.

Eric Enge: Sure.

David Szetela: The slightly more savvier bid on the domain name and the URL of their company because the fact is that people doing searches, many people, and I am talking about uneducated people, I have watched lots of my educated friends do this, they don't even use the address bar or the address field on the browser, they just go directly to Google or Yahoo, they type the domain name into the search box, they don't go immediately to the site, but generally the listing for the site comes up first in organic and then they click on it and then go to the site.

What is less well-known and well-practiced is that, again people type very strange variations of domain names and URLs into the search box. So, we routinely bid on, I think we are hitting up to 250 or 300 different variations of domain names for every brand name or domain name that's we bid on. And I am talking about things like "www (space) domain name.co", things like if the domain name is two words like Clix Marketing, they enter "http://www.clix(space) marketing.com" where they accidentally put a space in.

And if the advertiser is not bidding on that, then the searcher even though they know exactly what they are looking for will not find the site, because the site won't come up in natural and it won't come up in an ad. So that's 2a, 2b is frequently when people are looking for specific product or service, they start by saying to themselves, I wonder if there is a site out there that is named exactly this product or service. So, an example of that is red sneakers; if someone is get set on buying a set of red sneakers right now, many people will say I wonder if there is a redsneakers.com and type that search term into the search box on the search engine.

Another best practice is to find your best multiword keywords or even one-word keyword and bid on all of the domain name variations and URL variations of that word, and you will be very surprised to find that lots of people typing crazy things and the clicks are cheap and the conversions are high.

Eric Enge: Well great David, I think those are some great tips that can really help people who are new or even fairly advanced in paid search and content advertising jack up their campaigns. So, thanks for joining us today.

David Szetela: My pleasure and I just wanted to add that I would love to hear from listeners; I would love to hear success stories based on what I have tried to teach and also be happy to answer any questions. My email addresses david@clixmarketing.com.

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Podcast Date: October 20, 2008

The following is a written transcript of the October 20, 2008 podcast between Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and Eric Enge:

Eric Enge: Hi, this is Eric Enge with Stone Temple Consulting; you can see our website at www.stonetemple.com. I am here today with Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link. And, you can see her website at www.alliance-link.com. Good morning, Debra.

Debra Mastaler: Hey, good morning Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. So, today we are going to talk a little bit about getting links for e-commerce sites. It can be very challenging as we'll explore during the course of the discussion. And, we are lucky to have an expert with us to help us think about how to go about doing that. Why don't we start by talking about why it's difficult to get links to e-commerce sites?

Debra Mastaler: I think link building in general, nobody would disagree that link building in general is difficult. But, link building for e-commerce sites has some added challenges mostly because I think they lack readable content. They have actionable content on them and that they sell products; have information that people want.

But, from a reading standpoint they cannot provide the who, what, when, where and how that a lot of people look for in content, so it's more difficult just to go to someone else and say hey, will you link to this purely e-commerce site, that's online to make a profit, can you help me? People are very well aware of the value of the link.

I think as SEOs we've done a pretty good job of educating the public on the value of links and on the value of link building and ranking. People are online so much more now and doing so much business online that it's become imperative that sites rank well in order to see a benefit. And, from an ROI standpoint, nearly everybody understands some aspects of SEO. And, e-commerce sites have a greater challenge in getting links to them just because of that, because they lack some content and sometimes some opportunity to get links coming into them.

Eric Enge: Right. I think one of the key insights that I got over the past few years is that what you are really looking for in a lot of cases is those people who care enough about their visitors that they want to link to great content. Well, they don't think of your e-commerce site as great content; they think of it as commercial, and they don't want to link to you to help you make money. They want to link to you, because they care about their visitors enough to want to give them a superior experience or answer questions that aren't answered on their own site.

Debra Mastaler: Sure, absolutely. Well, if you take yourself offline; if you operate completely online without an offline presence at all, if you go ahead and take yourself offline, you have to ask yourself why would anybody come into my store on Main Street, and what can I do to make myself different and attract attention.

It's no different online; you have to do the same thing. So, you have to appeal to the people that you need to advertise into those venues and into those people to get into and draw the attention to your store. We get a little hung up sometimes just on the fact that we look for easy ways of doing things, and sometimes we just don't stop and look at the bigger picture and say okay now, I have a challenge, this is a big challenge for me; what am I going to do to overcome the obstacle?

If you were just operating at Main Street, USA, what would you do? And, a lot of times if you answer that question you can start to see opportunities online and offline for drawing attention, which in our case online means links. So, sometimes you have to stop and just say okay, I can't, it's hard and oh well, it was me, because I am an e-commerce site. But, truly in the big picture if there was no Internet what would you do; you will have to do something. So, think about those issues that you would start with offline and start to apply them online.

Eric Enge: Right. What are the kinds of things you can do to help attract links to an e-commerce site?

Debra Mastaler: We always get this question, people kind of hit you up and say what can I do, there are so many things to do; we could be here all day long. But, if you break it down into some manageable compartments if you will, and sit down and say okay, we are going to do step A, step B, step C, and approach it that way instead of being a little overwhelmed; and the same thing with this type of link building and this type of marketing online. This is more about linking; marketing for links and it is for link building.

When you have an e-commerce site, you have to take yourself into that mindset. So, let's look at the one basic thing that everybody has online is a website, everybody has their site. And, e-commerce sites tend to have elements to them; they have perhaps video online, or they are running contests online, or they have employment centers online. They have different elements of their sites that makeup their key overall presence.

Each one of those issues, if you are running articles, if you have employment centers, if you offer downloads of some sort, each one of those elements is potential for you to expose yourself a little bit and there are directories out there that each one of those elements can go into. Normally, when we talk about directories, we talk about the basic directories like Yahoo, and DMOZ, and Best of the Web, those are great, but they have a one-on-one submission ratio.

So, you put your site in there and they represent your entire site. There are about 25, maybe 30 decent; I use that term lightly, directories that are still in the Google Index and that are still showing some value measurement there that you can add your site to. After that they are junk. Add your site of 5,000 directories? Most of them are junk.

Eric Enge: Sure.

Debra Mastaler: There are about four or five good ones. So, all of the elements on your site then suddenly become another opportunity. If you are an e-commerce site, you definitely have RSS feeds for example. There are probably 35 or 40 different general directories for RSS feeds; those are links back into your site, they are coupon directories. There are software directories, download directories. Also, there are video directories, and there are article directories.

So, all of a sudden instead of having 35 general directories, you have several hundred specialty directories that take those particular elements of your sites. So, right there your foundational link building has been kind of; you are giving yourself a way to get a handful of base links all pointing into your site.

The greatest thing is that they point to internal pages of the site not just your dotcom, or your dotnet, or your dotorg. So, there is some deep linking that's involved in there as well. So, basic things like that; use your website first, first and foremost. I think another opportunity that we'd look at with e-commerce sites is the Q&A section.

People when they buy products typically have questions about the products, and we always encourage our customers to go back to their customer service people and ask them to draw up questions that people calling can ask. How does this work, how does that work; how does this discount work, how does that work? And, we compile a huge Q&A or some people call it an FAQ. And then, we promote them; we promote the heck out of them.

We send out press releases, we send out media releases; letting the media know that they are there, just because it's added content onto the site. So, develop all of those questions that you get, that come in through your customer service area and build out those areas on your site to content rich. They can be link embedded; they add again fodder into other elements like the article directories. But, the biggest thing is that they allow you to contact the media, because you have the full element on your site. And, once the media gets hold of it, people trust and believe what they see when they read it in an online publication.

So, the trust factor comes up, but you become top of mind too with the media, and you are the one that they contact and they write about. Interview opportunities at that point become golden. Once you have one media person that does the interview, you can use that and send it out to other media people just to say hey listen, I know that you write about x, y, z products, you can see that we've been interviewed by this magazine. If you'd like to interview us as well, or in the future we would really appreciate it.

Journalists are a little bit lazy, and I don't say that negatively, but trying to qualify a lead or trying to follow up on sources takes time and journalists are under deadlines. If you've been interviewed once by a known journalist, you've kind of have that credibility stamp already on your forehead as well. And, it goes a much, much longer way into helping you get interviews down the road. So, there are a handful of things to get started.

Eric Enge: Right. Well, let's pick up on one of those, for example you mentioned article directories. And, it may even be a couple of years ago when Google first took some steps to; what's the right way to put it, to clamp down on article directories. So, if you are looking in an article directory just to use that specific example, what kind of things do you look for to give you a comfort that it's something that is a good link?

Debra Mastaler: Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a great observation about the article directories. A lot of people have questions about those from a duplicate content standpoint, or about the fact that they just don't give a lot of, what we call link juice or link popularity back to a site and those are all elements. You can use the basic general article directories, and again like the general directories it's probably; from my experience anyway from general directory there are probably 10 or 12 of them that are worth it.

People actually use and pull content out of them, and as an e-commerce business you can write about specific things related to your business. One of the issues that we talk about too is accreditation, people don't always credit you back on your site. If you are using articles, be sure that you pull a snippet out of the article and stick it into something like Google Alerts; these are finders that come back and let you know when people have downloaded your content based on the snippet, and make sure that you are getting credit back into your site.

But, there are other things besides just the general directories too if you go into; we use Creative Commons, and I think we have more luck with Creative Commons than anything just because of the fact that they get tens of thousand of views. People are visiting there everyday to download content; also when we use the article directories we come up in the places like Squidoo that we call content generator sites.

We build a presence out on Squidoo for particular term. So, if I had an e-commerce site that sold shoes, I would build out a page on Squidoo say for each one of my types of shoes, running shoes, athletic shoes, whatever, dancing shoes. And, all of the information in the content that we have from our site that we are writing, but also generate into there, that gives you another link into your site and a little bit more exposure. But, article directories are not just the only place to stick content.

If you are an e-commerce business, you probably belong to an association, the better business bureau, your chamber of commerce. All of these websites ask constantly for content; they are looking for information and you can provide content to them to host in their directory sites, which most of them have online. I know here in; where I live in Williamsburg, our chamber of commerce asks for articles from its people all the time and runs them in their newsletters and in their directories. So again, you've got to kind of focus on that. If I wasn't online and I wanted to utilize some of these factors, how would I do it?

Eric Enge: Right.

Debra Mastaler: And, probably the association and the chamber market is professional organization. Most businesses have a professional or what we call a professional fraternal organization behind them. Really good example of something I worked on not too long ago is Phi Alpha Delta. They are the professional fraternal organization behind lawyers if you will; solicitors if you are in the UK.

Eric Enge: Right.

Debra Mastaler: And, they have 300,000 members and 535 chapters. Well, if I was an attorney and I was hocking my firm, then that's probably a fraternal organization that I would want to belong to for several reasons. A), I can solicit to the members in there and solicit links from them. B), they have newsletters; they have article directories I can put my material in. They do conferences; you can buy space in the conference handbooks. I am a huge proponent of deriving links from sources of people that already have a propensity to like what it is you sell.

Eric Enge: Sure. And, it also drives relevance in the picture too, right?

Debra Mastaler: Oh, huge. Those four factors; link popularity which is link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance, it plays under the two key factors involving relevance and anchor text. So, meaning you are getting links from sites that use the same type of verbiage, that use the same type of approach that you do, and that's huge. So, and it's not just associations, like I said that your chambers, your professional organizations.

Your advocacy groups; different states call them different things, some states call them federations. Some states call them coalitions; these are all groups of people that stand behind a particular cause; sponsorship clubs, even your basic clubs. So, anything that has the demographics that you appeal to, that has a large clustering of people, it's very, very much worth your time to invest and purchasing a membership from, and then work in that particular group of people.

Eric Enge: Right. So, do we have a specific example or two that we can talk about?

Debra Mastaler: Well, for instance when we were talking about the attorneys, that fraternal organization is something that we did purchase membership from for a particular client and went in there. And, this has been several years ago; I haven't done this recently with this particular group. But, he has continued and we've continued to keep them as a client purchasing space in all of the conferences. 535 chapters generally means that they have each chapter as a state, and then they have city chapters.

And, they all do particular conferences, so there's a conference handbook that's online for every one of them. So, if you start to think about buying space, ad space in each one of those for writing articles, you can see that the inbound links would start to grow very, very quickly. I did run something recently in an organization that's demographically targeted. And, for instance there is an association; and this is not my association that I use, I am jus