January 25 2010
Some SEO Advice for Danny Sullivan
A client calls you up and says “I want to optimize for New Brand Name” and you say, “You’re doing a bad job of optimizing for Abused Brand Name“. How do you think that conversation should go forward?
If the SEO specialist is not paying attention to the client’s stated marketing objectives, then how useful is the SEO advice that the SEO technician has to offer?
Before you reach for your tattered old copy of “Classic Client Blunders In Search Marketing”, take a long hard look at what Bill Gates is trying to do. On the little SEO-stomping floater that pops up when you hit the site, Bill says:
I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.
He doesn’t say anything about becoming a blogger or joining the blog community.
You know, there IS still a World Wide Web beyond the blogosphere. Bill Gates’ site doesn’t look like a traditional blog in any sense to me. I get the distinct impression he doesn’t want to be just another blogger.
So the fact that a lot of imposturous blogs are crowding a name space (”Bill Gates blog”) that Bill has eschewed doesn’t lead me to conclude he is doing anything wrong.
I have, through the years, criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft in many ways, but I have always lauded Mr. Gates’ marketing savvy.
His approach to launching his Website flies in the face of SEO expectations — and that is EXACTLY the kind of thinking the SEO community needs to learn from.
Just because every idiot with a Bill Gates Complex wants to rank for “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t in any way mean that Bill Gates should want to. In fact, that is the most compelling reason for Bill Gates to avoid the “Bill Gates blog” name space completely.
Sure, Bill could hire a search reputation management company to clean up the name space for him but he doesn’t need to. He has caché — an intrinsic value that ensures millions of people will follow his footsteps across the Webosphere wherever he goes.
Bill Gates can easily do what most people only dream of: build a query space. People will search for “The Gates Notes” because that is the name by which Bill Gates Website is being promoted.
Whether people find it using “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t matter any more than whether they find it by using “Bill Gates sucks”, “Bill Gates is evil”, or “Bill Gates should fire Steve Ballmer”.
The brand name the client chose was “The Gates Notes” and it was a stroke of basic marketing savvy — no one had made an effort to pollute the name space. Bill Gates scored a coup over all the illegitimate bloggers and armchair SEO advisors by deftly moving around the problem.
In fact, I am sure many people will link to http://www.thegatesnotes.com/ with the erroneous anchor text “Bill Gates blog” and variations on it because everyone thinks that all you have to do on the Web is create a blog.
If The Gates Notes is a blog, it must be a proposal for what 3rdGen Blogs should look like, because it doesn’t look like a blog, it doesn’t act like a blog, and it doesn’t have to be a blog if it doesn’t want to be.
Danny Sullivan’s very long-winded SEO analysis of the Gates site has undoubtedly earned far more links and commentary from news organizations and bloggers than this little ‘ole response will — so the public has been led down the wrong path once again by the good intentions of someone who forgot to apply the standards of the Web to the subject of his post.
Oh, wait. The Web has no standards.
In fact, neither does SEO — and if SEO did have standards we have no way of knowing whether those standards would have discouraged the shot across the bow that Danny lobbed at Bill Gates.
It’s unfortunate that someone so visible in the SEO community should go to such extreme lengths to offer what amounts to a load of hogwash — or, what we would call in more polite terms — very poorly framed SEO advice.
You don’t just run down the client and say, “Hey, Bub! More people search on ‘Bill Gates blog’ than know to search on ‘The Gates Notes’ so you need to change your title tags.”
That would be equivalent to telling Dial Soap that they need to change the title tags for their site to include the words “hand soap”, “bar soap”, and similar generic expressions.
How much money do you think you would make as an SEO offering that kind of advice?
Although “bill gates blog” is nowhere near as ubiquitous as “hand soap”, it’s still not the brand that Bill Gates chose to build. Should Dial Corporate start marketing its site as “tips on how to use soap”? What about “the best soap blog around”?
Before you go shooting off your mouth, criticizing people for not using obviously spammed out keywords in their title tags, stop and consider that maybe — just maybe — some people are a little more comfortable with the process of building a brand than the average small business and affiliate site owners.
The SEO industry really doesn’t get the full value of what it means to be a brand.
Danny Sullivan is certainly a very successful thought leader in our field — he could teach most people more than just a thing or two about search engine optimization.
But I really have to say, Danny, what were you thinking when you wrote that post — except that maybe it would be a great piece of link bait?
The SEO rarely if ever gets to pick the brand keyword — we just have to knuckle down and do our job to ensure that the right site(s) appear for the new brand.
THAT is what search engine optimization is really all about. It has nothing to do with calling out people for the sake of obtaining a few golden links.
Written by Michael MartinezDisclaimer: My use of “the client” is only figurative and not intended to mean that Danny Sullivan has a business relationship with Bill Gates.
[...] So I went over to Best SEO Blog and wrote some SEO advice for Danny Sullivan. [...]
While I agree with your points about the brand building and how the majority of SEOs (myself included) do not think about it often enough but rather have a knee-jerk reaction to fix metas/content/structure/canonization, there are some points in Danny’s post that are valid.
Even if Bill Gates did not start Gates Notes so it can be a regular blog, he did start it to reach people. As many people as possible. No one starts a blog or an opinion website to reach as little people as possible or to show it only to those that are looking for it in the first place.
No, I believe it would be a safe bet to say that Mr. Gates would like more people to read his blog, i would assume he wants to also to reach the people that are not looking for his brand. Under this assumption, Danny’s point about duplicate Title’s is completely valid. Why wouldn’t people searching for Sundance-related queries find out from Gates Notes that he is going to attend? Why not make sure that the message is delivered to as many people as possible from its source and not some PR regurgitating link farm? If he writes (and he probably will about his Malaria combating efforts, why not try and reach those people that are searching for malaria-related keywords and not just for [bill gates malaria] ?
The purpose of media is to allow the author to reach as many people as possible. True, Bill Gates has a very wide base of people that will search him out no matter how he optimizes his Titles, but that is not everybody. Bill Gates does not *need* to optimize his titles, his business will not fail because of it, but by not optimizing them, he is missing on people that are not automatically connecting him with the issue they are searching for, hence his brand does not play a part.
Interesting post, Michael. I agree with virtually everything you stated, except for the part about not recommending that Dial optimize for terms like hand soap, etc.
Not saying that should be a key facet of their marketing strategy by any means, but at the same time, if the phrase is relevant to the product they are marketing and they have the authority to rank for it, there’s no reason not to go after it.
It’s just another source of relevant and residual traffic. Granted, at the end of the day, the true ROI in terms of consumer conversion will be low, but the volume will more than make up for that.
Well, we can certainly argue techniques and details but I will refrain from doing so as Danny certainly covered a lot of very good basic advice.
I think his choice of case study was brilliantly opportunistic. If you want to get people to talking about search engine optimization, Bill Gates is one of a few people whose names might start that type of dialog.
Perhaps there is a strategy behind Danny’s article that deserves better recognition. Nonetheless, I think he is sending a mixed signal.
As for the motivation behind the post, that is more than obvious. Can you imagine the links that the article will get if Bill Gates actually changes his Titles ?
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Well, Bill Gates said he told his people to change the site tonight, so I think Danny definitely scored a major hit there.
Hi Michael,
Although I think that Danny was writing with tongue firmly in cheek, the point that you have made is spot on. Fortunately his “brand” is big enough to make people change the way that people search without alot of effort.
I can’t agree that Danny Sullivan is going to influence many people to search for “bill gates blog”. Maybe more people will because of the all the publicity his article generated, but the difference between 1.5 million searches for “bill gates” and 1,000 searches for “bill gates blog” is measured in multiple orders of magnitude.
Apologies Michael, I mean’t Bill Gates’ brand influence and not Danny Sullivan’s…
Didn’t know about Bill Gate’s new website until I read your post and followed your link over to Danny’s post and then followed his link to Bill’s site. I’m glad Gates is tackling important, substantive issues like poverty and education. I hope he updates his site regularly. Even without any changes, it would only take a few weeks to move up the SERPs. This is a case where all the author has to do is start a site and he’ll automatically get links and traffic. Going with the word “notes” implies he doesn’t have to blog regularly, just when he wants to. It also implies he doesn’t have to write long paragraphs, just brief notes. That’s a smart move on his part. His time is limited and this way he won’t get bogged down writing long formal essays. You of all people know how demanding it is to write formal posts. His posts or “notes” are like bullet points. I use bullet points throughout my own site because I’m not a good writer (too lazy to put in the effort) and my students aren’t all that literate. I didn’t see a comment button on any of his pages. My guess is that he just wants to enjoy his new site, kind of like a new hobby or toy. Shame on Danny for raining on Gate’s parade. Can’t Bill have a little fun diversion without being beat-up? Give the guy a break. He should be treated no differently than all us Mom and Pop types with hobby sites.