The Rational Basis For Decision Making

The impact of SEO on politics has yet to be really felt, but Chris Bower from Open Left is following the Electronic Grass Roots strategy I wrote about a year ago with his Google Bombing John McCain initiative.

Using the best practices of repuation management, Chris has chosen articles from established media outlets and is attempting to drive links to these articles with targeted anchor text.  Since the articles are keyword rich, on target and focused, they are highly relevant to the phrases.  Since the anchor text Chris suggests are taken from the article titles, it is very difficult for the engines to differentiate between "legitimate, editorial endorsements" and the kind of manipulation.

The only red flag for the engines will be that most bloggers will go ahead and link to all nine articles from one location instead of taking the time to create individual posts to support each topic/position they are trying to Google Bomb.

For example, one social commentary blog posted all of the links from a single story, although the author did at least take the time to change up the anchor text and add some more commentary.

Here are nine positions by John McCain that shows his true political allegence.  He is not a Maverick or an Independent, he has sold his soul to the Neo-Con Right Wing to get the nomination.

(1) John McCain Filibusters Minimum Wage Hike accuses the Democrats of class warfare — While adding to the war on the poor.

(2) McCain The Hypocrite economic policy shaped by lobbyist, just like every other republican agenda item. Bought and sold by Corporate America

(3) Bush, McCain On Social Security : Shredding the safety net. John McCain doesn’t need Social Security - He has two government pensions and married an heiress. .

(4) McCain Defends Nafta : It makes it so much easier to get export jobs when you create a special tax free zone and give corporations refunds for sending your jobs over seas. John McCain is a man of the people — Who make over $250,000 a year.

(5) McCain On Irag : Keep Troops in Iraq for "A Hundred Years".

(6) McCain Supports Bush Veto : Deny kids health insurance expansion.

(7) McCain Opposes GI Benefits: : He already got a government funded college education, why should our troops expect the same.

(8) McCain Opposed Choice: He supports individual rights of corporations, but not women’s rights to control their own body.

(9) McCain Defends Bush’s Iraq Policy : The biggest disaster in 225 years of American Foreign Policy and John McCain, the man running on his experience, supports Bush’s Policies.

I was at the flex for the Campfire One event last night to mingle with the Blogarazzi, drink hot chocolate while being regaled with Guacamole recipes and tales of how Google’s new friend connect was going to allow anyone to add social features to their website with only rudimentary html experience. Google has jumped from gadgets to widget by leveraging all the work done to support their Open Social and Open Auth to make it easy for web-masters and web-apprentices to go social.

It’s not the quality of the widget that bothers me or even trade offs that webmasters make when they join a platform. I don’t mind that Google is leveraging open source to meet Facebook’s platform play. Facebook has lots of dough and lots of hubris.

I am bothered by the sudden lack of oxygen in the room as Google inhales whatever momentum social networking has left and makes sure that the next phase of social networking companies will suddenly need to be Google Centric. Microsoft used vaporware and some very predatory contracts to drive competitors out of business. Open Social, Google App Engine and now Friend Connect demonstrates that Google has perfected the art of co-opting everyone else’s efforts by offering them an infrastructure umbrella.

Google has absorbed the best ideas of the emerging social web for pennies on the dollar while making sure they have the inside track on monetization. They have done it with a team of hard working, dedicated engineers who want to make the web a better place. Unless you are a cynical search marketer or your start-up is suddenly having trouble breathing, you won’t even notice.

I will be speaking on June 4th at SMX advanced on SEO Analytics. Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know - It’s more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

Not surprisingly, I will initially focus on ROI for ecommerce sites, particularly the importance of configuring your internal systems to capture Lifetime Customer Value within your CRM system instead of leaving it to 3rd party tagging software.

I will also talk about Crawl frequency and index inclusion as well as some of the data hidden in Google Webmaster Central.

Does anyone have a metric you find useful that you are willing to give up or a tool that you recommend? All contributions will be duly credited.

Google has been displaying local results for queries that contains a local component for some time now. A common query like san francisco restaurant displays 10 local search results along with a map. We now expect this type of local targeting because the query contains a geographic component which Google interprets as a geographic data.

Many search pundits have been calling recent changes in SERPs another Google dance. Evidence suggests that Google may be adding geographic information about brick and mortar stores and service companies to the algorithm along with reverse IP lookup to help boost site rank for regular results. Take the query engagement ring . I conducted this query in San Francisco and Los Angeles and got very different results.

Here is the same query in San Francisco.

Just to be sure I wasn’t seeing results from different data centers, I went ahead and queried multiple date centers using the SeoLog.com Datacenter Ranking Tool and discovered that the results didn’t match the LA results or the San Francisco results. In fact, some sites significantly better in both San Francisco and Los Angeles than they show on any of the data centers using the SEOLog tool.

We know Google been collecting service area information from webmasters from webmaster central. We know that they have extensive data from Google maps and third party vendors about where businesses are located. It makes sense that Google would add relevance to a website that represent a brick and mortar or service that is nearby. It appears they are starting to do so.

My son decided to make brownies last night. Since he is of the Google generation, the thought of a cook book never crossed his mind. Instead, he headed right to his laptop and searched for brownie recipe .

Imagine my surprise when he asked me why Google was suggesting adding weed to his brownies. I consider myself pretty liberal as a parent and I don’t fault Google for returning porn if my child enters a keyword that calls for porn, but I really don’t want them suggesting adding drugs to dessert.