Incoming…… and this time in the guise of an interview with JasonD, who is known for treading both sides of the line. So without further fannying around, here we go.

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You are versed in the art of getting publicity, be it crazy Spam Man or the offering of the support of the link analysis tool. For Stangelogic is any publicity good?

Hi Gimpy,
Let me start off by saying thanks for asking me to do this interview, I hope my answers live up to the great standard your previous interviewees have set.

As to getting publicity, I don’t know if I am versed in it but I don’t shy away from it either. As to whether all publicity is good then my answer has to be a resounding no, just ask George Galloway!

Partnerships. Good or is it a case of going it alone and keeping the spoils to yourself?

Partnerships are VERY good, but there has to be a two way street. I get lots of requests to partner with Strange Logic and all of them I investigate but sometimes I have to politely decline the offers. For a partnership to work the 2 (or more) organisations not only need to get a “win” from working with others, but they also need to deliver “more than the sum of the individual parts”

If a partnership is some people working together but the value added by the parties isn’t equal then it is doomed to failure. Just for the record, value isn’t always knowledge, ability, software or money though, It can be a million other things.

Go on share a nugget with us, you may piss off a few people, but if you pick a declining technique you wont get too much heat, or is secrecy the name of the game?

Hmmmmm. Nuggets huh?

How about a Chicken Nugget. Personally I think the best nuggets there are out there are Birds Eye’s Chicken Dippers - Oh, you mean SEO nuggets. OK, let me think.

How about a really simply one that is 99% common and business sense rather than technical. The web using world is greater than the UK and US and outside of those countries they speak languages that aren’t English. Look and investigate those lingual differences in the SERPs.

In fact here is one more. 3rd level PPC companies are a good thing for a certain search engine!

Data mining, is that a big part of what you do, do you do it personally and does it provide real insight. In most cases unless you can analyse the data properly, even the best is virtually useless.

I do a LOT of data gathering and research and yes, for me it shows some VERY REAL insights as to what is happening out there. I do think you’re right though, data without analysis is like Roast Beef without horseradish. It just aint worth bothering with!

Do you think your offer to help out the engines and software providers (link here) will ever been taken up? Why do you think they have declined so far, it has to be a pride thing, no?

I sure hope so. I’m sure the guys at the big engines will get there without me or someone like me eventually, but I am very aware of the problem from all 3 sides (Engine, CMS owner and Spammer) and I believe I have the problem solved algorithmically meaning it can be culled in one clean sweep rather than trying to enforce a non standard that has shown to not work (Link Condoms)

It’s definitely a lot better than the engines have in place at the moment.

As to why they have declined so far, I guess it is partly political. I’m an SEO that hasn’t denounced the dark side. I’m a Brit that doesn’t really want to travel for the fun of it. Could there well be more reasons. I’m pretty sure there are and if I had made private, rather than public contact I guess the response may have been different.

Who knows what the future holds though and the offer is still open 

If you were running the show, what would you do, clearly the results are not that good on all three, and don’t even mention arbing and overture. How would you clean up this town?

I have some answers to some problems but personally I wouldn’t want to run the show nor do I have answers to all the questions. I’m happier working as a side act to the main event  my SEO to the big boys’ search engines.

Arbing, specifically PPC arbing is a double headed sword for the engines. Commercial, money making interests –v- public perception of search quality. Google rule the roost in this area. Keep your own results pretty clean and abuse the competition. Thankfully it’s still possible to abuse Google and just for the fun of it I like to assist Yahoo in earning some money from it. I see it as my small way of redressing the balance 

What is the ratio of clean to dirty within Strangelogic and how do you ensure you don’t get a good shoeing on your clean stuff?

Most of what we do is so clean it could be used as soap, even by Doug. At the same time there is still a large quantity of sites that we control that could be seen as dirty. Just for the record, I do get dumped on clean stuff as well as dirty, but over the last year or 2 more clean gets dumped than dirty, but a lot of that is probably down to making my dirty stuff look cleaner rather than my clean becoming dirtier.

I fell really sorry for the guys n gals and that have all their eggs in one or two clean sites but at the end of the day we must all recognise that this is a business that is controlled by 3 boys and if you don’t prepare for the worst then you will die a speedy death when the inevitable happens.

What is your technical preference, in terms of platform, hardware etc. I know you like perl (grrrrrr) but what else do you use. Tell us about your ideal box.

I love Perl. I always have and with Perl6 coming out I think it will continue. For me, there is not a more flexible and robust language for rapid development. We generally code in Perl, prove the systems and processes and if necessary for speed we recode in C.

Our platforms are 100% Linux with our own clustered distribution, employing hundreds of nodes, that we have number & data crunching all day long. We keep saying that Widget Nix will be released to the world but so many things get in the way and enhancements occur to the OS that it hasn’t happened yet. Watch this space

What is the biggest seo/coding type mistake you have made and what lessons were learned.

I have never made an SEO mistake, I simply have SEO learning experiences that the engines deliver to me! LOL

My biggest coding mistake was the Church of Heil fiasco and what I learnt is there are times to shut up rather than respond.

I asked DaveN if he looked for flaws in the search engines. So I feel it is only fair to ask you the same thing. Being a good SEO is about being aware of changes, even trying to predict. Pushing the boundaries it about taking it that step further, do you go out looking for flaws, do you share them with mates, do you experiment, what is your angle?

I try as many different scenarios as I can hypothetically cover (which is quite a few thousand at any one time). I try to look at what might be happening and pre-empt the engines deploying it. I look for problems, because once I understand that, the system simply has to be deployed to counter it.

When there is an algo change, I go back to my previous work and hope the answer is there. So far it always has been, though not always perfect, but what many of us forget is we don’t need to beat the engines. We simply need to beat the guy at #2
I share quite a bit with mates but not everything and the main reason is a spark of inspiration can come back (and often does) in return. I know some amazing guys n gals in this industry (You’re one of them Rich) and sometimes a question someone else has, for totally obscure reasons, can start a chain of events that lead to some great ideas. Only yesterday someone said something that has my mind racing with possibilities. Because of that, unrelated question, I have new software that is being built right now that will dramatically change one area of my work – Thank you Adam!

My overall angle is actually quite simple 1.61803399 degrees

My parting comment will have to be if you want to learn about search engines then build one and make it one that has to encounter the same problems as the big boys. You may choice to keep your search engine in house only, but once you’ve seen the shit the likes of Matt and Tim have to deal with algorithmically then you’ll respect the problems they have to deliver answers to and learn how to deal with their answers yourself.

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Jason, thanks for taking the time to do this little Q&A, I know I found it interesting and it was appreciated.

Any interested in finding out more about JasonD, can go to his site StrangeLogic or catch him around the forums.

ukgimp out

Why oh why do people insist on making you login to a site to make a purchase? Well if that is not bad enough I came across a site that makes you sign up and login just to view the products!

So as I really want to spend some of my hard earned and I have bought from these guys catalogue before so I decide to give it ago and fanny around with the signup. The signup involves a double opt in scenario, which is cool I suppose, but I am losing my patience, remember this is just to look at the products at this stage.

Just a side note here, the menus don’t work if you have JS turned off:

So now comes the real beef, the clickpath down to a product to get the item in the basket is lengthy.

1. Click designer wear from JS dropdown menu
2. Pick a brand type (not ideal because I am after shirts and I don’t know which ones have shirts)
3. Click item from list
4. Click to choose size
5. Click to choose colour
6. “This item is out of stock”, in a light colour, that does not draw my eye. So I find myself looking for an add to cart button, then I notice this out of stock BS!

There is an option to add to wishlist, but what I really wish for is the ability to tell the owner of the site that they need to cut down the number of clicks to add a product to the cart, but above all, don’t allow me to go down a fruitless path.

OK they have tried a little, there is a drop down box to choose between “show all items” and “show only in stock” but I did not notice this until my third attempt so I got the hump and left the site, no idea how good the checkout is, but who cares.

I had my debit card out and I was about to buy £2-500 worth of clobba, but was thawted early on.

So the major lessons:

1. Dont force a login just to view the products.
2. Tell me before I try and buy the product, select sizes and the like etc if the product is out of stock.

Footnote:

I was not sure if I should link to the sites that I generally will be criticising, but I decided it cant be that bad, hell they might even take action. So the link is:

Brandswear.com

(also have a word with someone about the redirect, that be doing you no favours chief!)

OK, not strictly a web usability issue but kind of related in a little way and will make me feel better when I offload the issue.

To cut a long story short, I needed a German IP for hosting, so after realising that the British education system sucks as well, because I can’t speak any other language I find out that lycos.co.uk do hosting and supposedly with German data centres.

Double Bonus!

Now I don’t want go through all this malarkey just to get hosting, like I did last week only to find out they don’t do .de domains. So I thought I would call the UK helpline number.

0870 730 1135 (12p per minute)

30 minutes later I get through, to an automated system, only problem is that the lady is speaking German. So I hold on in the hope that I will get through to a real person that can forgive my poor language skills.

They now cut me off and a recorded voice from BT chimes in saying that “The other party has terminated the call”. WTF!

So the usability issue here is, if you are going to add a UK number for which you charge to call, at least have a British speaking automated system. Then to allow pissed off people like me, to have a way of actually contacting someone to either flag similar issues or suggest they have a good look at their support.

Dean Bloomfield, AKA DigitalGhost has agreed to answer a few of my questions and as ever comes back with some interesting points. And I am even going to claim that this was the real reason he came out of retirement

So once again read on…..

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Retirement clearly didn’t agree with you, as it looks like about six months and you gave up! So what is on the cards for DigitalGhost in 2006 and beyond?

Work, work and more work. Seriously, with a start-up launch, (Actually Marketing) client demands, research, testing and application development I see 2006 as a year of challenges. I also think that in 2006 search engines and SEOs will work more closely together than ever before.

The industry has become more sophisticated and the level of sophistication will continue to increase in the future. As a result of that sophistication, the relationship between search engines and SEOs will become less adversarial because the goals become increasingly similar. So for the future I see more research into IR and search technologies than reverse engineering algos. Just makes much more sense to anticipate than to react.

You are known for your loquacious, very eloquent, but loquacious posting on forums. With that in mind, are we going to see a return of DG on the boards and what subjects are going to get your juices flowing?

I’d be filling fora with vowel movements now if I had more time. Well, time and the inclination to repeat myself every time someone new came along with a question that has been asked and answered many times. I think the reason many of the ‘old-timers’ don’t post as frequently as they once did is simple weariness. It’s all good though; the new generation of SEOs can serve some time answering questions.

There are several subjects that excite me. Digital rights, which has been mainstream news for almost all of ‘05, social media and marketing, search technologies, education in the Information Age, why all the hype about Web 2.0, etc.

Algo’s and language seem to be a keen interest of yours so what evidence have you seen, if any, that the engines may be adopting techniques like LSI/hilltop/semantics etc?

If ‘java’ is returned as a result for a query on ‘coffee’, semantics are involved. The only question is to what extent are semantics incorporated into the algorithm? I don’t think any of the search engine reps will be mentioning LSI as it is patented by Telcordia. Are they using something similar? I certainly think so.

What was the last search related technical paper / patent that you read and do you care to share your thoughts on it?

Google’s Dupe Content patent.

My first thought is that it remains remarkably easy to smudge ‘fingerprints’ to the extent that Google’s dupe filter is duped. In reality, I think Google manages to find a lot of smudged and partial prints, which are of little use. As for SEOs and SEMs that want to duplicate content and use it, well, they learned to wear gloves and they don’t leave any prints.

You’ll know when Google perfects their dupe content filter when you can no longer find your stolen content in their results.

If you had to write a simple recipe for an SEO success what would the main ingredients be?

A. Forced me into a cliché huh? Start with good content. Then acquire quality links. Yes, it is that easy. And no, it is not that easy. Rather than a recipe, how about some qualities?

All the successful SEOs are curious. They exhibit perseverance. They are competitive. They’re confident. They aren’t afraid to fail. They hate to fail. They don’t mind being the underdog. They constantly educate themselves. But most importantly, they try a lot of recipes. A simple recipe is fine, for that simple success. But there are thousands of ways to succeed, several ways for each site, so why limit that recipe book to a single, simple recipe? Instead, cook something new every day. Throw out the recipes that leave a bad taste in your mouth.

So what did you manage to achieve with that Google Mini of yours. Although it would not have the latest algo on it I reckon it could be used on large-scale auto generated stuff to see what work and a whole host of other things, so what did you find out?

That little experiment was intended solely to find out what Google thought about word relationships. Is job related to employment? Is Job related to work or trials? Everyone keeps saying, ‘think outside the box’, well, I wanted to know what the box was thinking.

How do you rate the current search providers and what could they do better?

I think they’ve done a fantastic job of making information easy to find and a mediocre job of rating it. Until an algo is created that can differentiate between popular and important, we’re left with SERPs that display popularity contest winners.

What could they do better? Well for starters, they could solve the ‘AND Circuit” query problem. Go ahead, search for AND Circuit, with quotes and without, and let me know how useful the results are.

You have a solid and longstanding background I search, but six months is a long time. How long will it take for you to get up to a standard you are happy with and do you think it is possible for people new to search to get going quickly on a new site for instance?

I stopped working in the industry for six months, but I didn’t stop researching or reading industry news for six months. As for a standard I’m happy with? That doesn’t exist, there’s no room for complacency in this industry.

Is it possible for someone new to search to get going quickly? Sure. Will they rank well? I don’t know. Depends on the individual. The basics are well agreed upon, so an inquisitive business owner could start with the proper foundation and avoid a lot of mistakes. In competitive arenas though you need more than a couple of weeks of trial an error. I still find new ‘Link and a Promise’ sites in the SERPs though and they typically remain there until they hit someone’s radar. Getting to the top isn’t a measure of success though; it’s getting back to the top after you’ve fallen and managing to stay there that counts.

Without giving us the findings (unless you want to) can you tell us what sort of tests you are conducting right now to reverse engineer search engine algo’s and would you consider yourself a algo chaser?

A. I’ve never been a reverse engineer. I’ve always worked with prediction modeling. I want to be able to predict, within reason, where a site will place in the SERPs on various engines given a known set of variables. It’s much more valuable to have your own algo than it is to tear someone else’s apart.

Building your own search engine forces you to anticipate the same problems the search engines deal with. Issues like RLA, (Rapid Link Acquisition) are much more noticeable when you have your own set of patterns to work with than they are when you’re forced to borrow someone else’s patterns.

You may not know, but in the UK we had a marketing campaign for a mobile phone company that was based around whom you would have a one to one with. So dead or alive, who would you like to have a one to one with and why?

Nikola Tesla. I’ve always been fascinated by his inventions, his intellect, and his quirks. And I’d really like to know the truth about his ambient light with no apparent source…

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Dean, thanks for your time and your insight, some interesting thought provoking ideas you have there and I wish you lots of luck and reward with your new venture.

If you want to read more from DigitalGhost I would recommend firing up his Blog…. DigitalGhost’s Desk.

ukgimp out.

Well folks, it is time to get this mutha off the ground. Judging by the big fat text that say’s DaveN Interview you will have guessed that Mr N has agreed to answer a few questions related to search and anything else that seems pertinent.

So without further ado I invite you to read on and see what is going on right now in the world of DaveN.

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I remember when it was easy, throw up a page, throw in some links and away you go, but now things seem much harder for new builds. So how can the ordinary bloke with a website compete with aged sites and resource driven people. It’s a case of the richer getting richer no?

It certainly seems that way at the moment but I still believe that it is still easy to throw up a page and push some links to it and away you go. It’s all about knowing where to host, what’s on the page, the content of the page etc.

If you remember the old days of SEO when there were 8 Golden Rules to follow, now it is the case that there are 8 Golden Rules for each Golden Rule to follow… do you follow. More like 3D SEO rather than 2D.

There is though so much information on the web these days about SEO techniques. When I started it was all very secretive and not really understood what the true value of it was. If an ordinary person has enough time on their hands to sift through the forums they will get a head start.

Have you ever been wiped out of Google, what was it for, did you get it back and what lessons did you learn from receiving a good kicking?

Yep, I have had many sites penalised and hand removed from Google. But this was because I was lazy and stupid and didn’t keep 2 steps ahead of the game. They didn’t get back in and I opened up a fish and chip shop and retired. No, seriously we tend to run 3 or 4 different techniques at a time and if certain sites do get burnt we just walk away. We know for next time what works and what doesn’t.

I know that you do client sites that would be considered uber clean and you do outright, pushing the boundaries stuff, but are you ever tempted to push it a little to get client sites cooking that little bit more?

Not anymore. For the first time in my life about a year ago we took a clients’ site a little too far. We offered up advise which was like giving a child a gun with bullets. Basically the client went overboard on link acquisition and failed to stick within the boundaries of the Golden Rules.

You wake up one morning and you have no resources, no programmers, no full rack of servers, do you think it is possible for a non “resourced up” person to make it big in the search world. Could you do it again and how would you tackle it?

To be honest if I woke up one morning with no resources, no programmers, and no rack of servers it would probably be because I was on a yacht somewhere anchored off a tropical island in the sun, retired from the game.

I could do it again and I’d tackle it head on. I’d wake up the next morning and buy new resources and start again. I still have the knowledge that I will never lose and a great deal of motivation when something interests me.

A good friend of mine, NFFC, ran a thread on one of the forums a while ago and there was one thing that really hit home about how I work within the industry, which was the classic quote from The Godfather.

“Someday - and that day may never come - I’ll call upon you to do a service for me”.

Being a good SEO is about being aware of changes, even trying to predict. Pushing the boundaries it about taking it that step further, do you go out looking for flaws, do you share them with mates, do you experiment, what is your angle?

I do go out looking for the flaws in the search engines, which I suppose is the same as a good accountant who will try to find the loop holes on the tax system for instance. This enables me to keep a few steps ahead.

I do tend to share ideas with friends when it is advisable to. I have been caught out though in the past where ideas that I have shared in private forums have been abused. Not in the sense of being offered up to the search engines, but in the sense that if you find something that could make you £50k a month if implemented slowly and carefully and will live for 8-10months then great. But if this is implemented aggressively it may net £100k and only live for a month. The scraper sites were a classic example of this, even though I still believe that Google is still struggling with them.

When I see “golden nuggets” appear of forums, I think to myself, “there ain’t much time left on that one” and I have seen things that I have been privy to “outed” and then killed, so would you say there is a large amount of secrecy and funny hand shakes in this game?

Not too sure about the funny hand shakes mate, but there are certainly “funny” instant messages flying around the web these days. Small groups of SEO’s who are part of small private forums openly discuss ideas and new techniques.

You have a fairly large infrastructure, so you clearly believe in this business long term. So as a pie in the sky exercise, where is search going to be in 2, 5 and 10 years and will you still be able to make cold hard cash from it?

Predicting the future of the search engines is a very hard thing to do, but one thing for certain is that you will always be able to make cold hard cash from it if you manage to keep up with the changes. The word that is in the back of my mind more and more these days is “community”.

There will be more personalised search, like DaveN likes football, drinks beer and has an unnatural obsession with reading blogs. The search engines with then deliver ads related to my profile and not keyword related.
Also I feel that Google, Yahoo and MSN seem to be all focusing more on releasing new products like video download, photo libraries and software than on their own core search product.

I may be a cynical old bastard but when you take that 99% of all Googles revenue comes from adwords delivered by keyword search it’s hard to make sense that the natural listings are irrelevant, spam filled or informational.

In term of search what are the craziest things that Google / MSN / Yahoo are doing right now and how could they fix that?

I would say that for Google it would be that in an attempt to fix the 302 issues they seem to have caused some 301 dupe content issues now.

For Yahoo it will be MyWeb2. There is a funky thing that Greg Boser pointed out today that if you search for Threadwatch you get every listing from threadwatch.org, but if you search for David Naylor you get clusters of results from many sites including mine.

And MSN, it still seems that if you have the keyword in the URL and title that you can rank for anything.

How to fix these… that’s their problem… why should I tell them how to fix their problems.

You are a self proclaimed blog spammer or were, do you still do that, if not why and any plans to unleash the evil in the future?

Lol, I stopped blog spamming when everyone else started it, before it became a mainstream technique. That’s probably about the time when I started RSS scraper type sites.

The mighty blog spammer is still in my arsenal of tools and maybe one day I may dust it off and let it loose again. But as you well know I run a lot of blogs now and I know that it pisses people off a lot. Adding to that Wordpress and other blog companies do a much better job at blocking blog spam. So perhaps a project for the future will be to build a new one that will break through this extra blog protection.

Now time for a question that is like one of those quirky “end of news bulletin” stories (remember Butch and Sundance the escapee pigs). Well, what, to date has been your biggest SEO / programming faux pas, go on give us a laugh, have you ever sent 25K visitors to an aff, thought their conversion was cack then realised you left your aff code off for example?

I’ve done worse than that mate. I have built networks of sites and then when they started to pop in the plan was to monetarise them. I built one such network then forgot about half of it, so basically we were getting about 100,000 uniques a day that saw total garbage and no monetarisation at all. In fact I think there are still pages out there somewhere.

Another crazy one was that I was sat in the office with a guest while I watched with untold belief the conversation between a UK spammer and a Russian programmer. I can’t believe people actually use Russian programmers.

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Well Dave, I would like to thank you for taking the time out to answer a few questions, most appreciated.

If anyone does not know they can catch up with Dave on his Blog or talking random seemingly, unplanned stuff, on his explicit radio show with Mikkel on StrikePoint!. Enjoy.

ukgimp out.

Well hopefully this can be made to be a little different, different in that I am going to make the focus interview type sessions with prominent people in the search world. I have a few in the offing already so watch this space.

Another avenue I am going to pursue here at some point will be usability, I always find myself thinking “what ignoramus designed the processes on this site, they are shite”. So as I travel around the web and come across something I reckon I could do better I will make a note and hopefully put the details up here. A glorified moaning spot really.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy what I have planned, if not there is always SEO Blogs List

Cheers

ukgimp