Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

Matt Cutts from Google, Harry Shum from Bing, and Rich Skrenta from Blekko spoke on a panel today at the Farsight Summit. Much of the conversation was around the Bing/Google results copying ordeal , but part of the conversation was about search quality in general, and the impact content farms are having on it.  Blekko announced this morning that it has banned eHow and other content farms from its results. See the full list here . Watch our recent interview with Skrenta about webspam here .  Cutts was quick to extend some praise to Blekko, saying they "made a great domain," and that he appreciates that they’ve done some interesting things lately, mentioning the spam clock, for example. He quickly followed that up by saying, "The fact is that we do use algorithms and that’s our first instinct, but when we see manual spam, we are willing to remove it manually." He added that within Google, they could say certain domain names are webspam, but they’re trying to do things algorithmically. "We have a lot more projects that we’re working on," he added, appearing to suggest that Google’s not done with its content farm cleanup process – at least that’s how I interpreted it (something I suggested in a recent article ).  Cutts said that when Google finds spam with its manual team, it also ejects it from Adsense, and that people tend to put the blame on AdSense, but even if that disappeared, we’d still have spam.  When asked what incentive Google would have to remove content from AdSense-driven pages that drive billions of dollars for the company, he just said that Google has always taken the philosophy that they care more about the long-time loyalty of users.  Then Demand Media was specifically brought up (as it has been by inquiring minds in other instances), but there was still plenty of vagueness. Cutts’ response was to mention a comment on Hacker News about how Demand Media had five articles on how to tie your shoes, then simply turn it around to "we don’t care if a site is running Google ads…we take action…we want to find an algorithmic solution."  Meanwhile, plenty of this type of content is still saturating Google SERPs. There are way more than five articles from eHow on fixing scratches in your car’s paint, as illustrated in another article : Note: He did not say anything to the effect of "we don’t consider eHow a content farm." Clearly Blekko is less shy about what it considers a content farm (again, see the list linked to above). Skrenta says "there’s more spam than good sites," and that it’s "easier to make a list of the sites that you actually want to go to. He notes that the top fifty medical sites have actual doctors and medical librarians creating and curating content (as opposed to what you might find from a site like eHow).  The Bing position appears to be to let Google lead the way in how to deal with search quality, which is kind of a fun position given the whole results-copying ordeal. Shum said Matt and Google need to "take this thing very seriously" because they and the industry are looking to the leader to make the web more fair and cleaner. He did say that they were also looking at Blekko and what others are saying about the topic as well. 

Facebook took in an estimated $1.86 billion in advertising revenue last year, according to eMarketer , and AdvertisingAge says that the top two advertisers were AT&T and Match.com. Google was number five.  It is the third-largest advertiser on Facebook, however, that has raised a few eyebrows, including those of Google’s Matt Cutts. The advertiser is something called make-my-baby.com – not a well-known brand that you’d expect to see in the top three. Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, said the following in a Google Buzz update early this morning (via Marshall Kirkpatrick, who has an interesting write-up of the situation): Visiting make-my-baby.com instantly prompts you to install a browser plugin. The "terms and conditions" link takes you to http://mmb.bingstart.com/terms/ which has phrases like "If Chrome ("CR") is installed on your PC we may change the default setting of your home page on CR to Bingstart.com."  I also noticed this phrase in the Zugo toolbar section: "To uninstall the Toolbar, please visit the Toolbar FAQ ( http://www.zugo.com/toolbar/faq/ )." Sadly, that url is a broken link. It looks like a few people have had trouble uninstalling the Bing/Zugo toolbar, according to pages like http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/746034 or http://mymountain.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-remove-bingzugo-toolbar-hijack.html If make-my-baby.com is Facebook’s 3rd biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software without reading the fine print that says "Installing the toolbar includes managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to bing.com" ? After some discussion about the find, Cutts also says, "It’s entirely possible, even likely, that FB and MSFT didn’t realize this was going on. I wouldn’t assume they were aware of what was going on." One has to wonder how much of Bing’s growth can be attributed to practices like this. It might not be a substantial amount, but on the other hand…third largest advertiser on Facebook? And this is just one example of a site like this. It didn’t take Cutts long to find several more with a quick search. There’s no telling how many site like this are actually out there.  "It’s pretty remarkable that even at the top of this giant success story of Facebook advertising, and perhaps near the top of the story of Bing’s steady rise as a search engine, is a Web 1.0-style pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible internet users," says Kirkpatrick.  It’s worth noting, as mentioned by a commenter in the Buzz conversation, that Cutts broke this story using Google Buzz, which goes to show – it doesn’t matter if the site is called Twitter, Quora, or Google Buzz – if there is interesting content there, it’s got to have some value. Webspam in a growing problem. Watch our exclusive interview with Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta , who talks about the trend. 

Microsoft’s engine has halted growth, but witnessed clear year-over-year gains.

Yahoo continues to lose search revenue.

Spend on display media for Bing almost doubled month-over-month, according to Kantar Media.

Everybody’s talking about Bing today since the Microsoft’s new search engine became unexpectedly available on a widescale. That includes Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts. An interesting conversation took place on Twitter today between Cutts and Betsy of the Bing account . Cutts was apparently doing a little ego searching on Bing and does not appear entirely impressed with the results. SEO Services Group has transcribed the conversation:   Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog. Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it. Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ? Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!! That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later: To me, this just looks like Cutts stepping up to market Google in the wake of Bing’s launch. Bing’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it only makes sense that Google would want to make sure they don’t go thinking its better than their own search engine. It’s about protecting the brand. Whether this is Matt’s intention or not, Cutts pointing out shortcomings in Bing’s search results is going to resonate throughout the industry. He is practically the posterboy for Google, at least among the search and tech savvy crowd.  A lot of people follow Matt Cutts. A lot of people hang nearly everything on what he has to say (search-wise). Cutts has shed some light on some issues with Bing though. It’s a little early to burn the search engine at the stake. After all, it’s not even supposed to be launched yet, but after trying an ego search for myself (not something I performed in my first Bing runthrough ), I am also much happier with Google’s results. By the way, here are some more Bing findings . What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts .