The Seattle-Search.com Blog

When Seattle’s SEOmoz decided to “go private” last year by taking on over a million dollars in venture capital investment, the search world saw a fly in its alphabet soup.  Just what ROI could the VC’s see from SEO services that would warrant that kind of investment?  First came SEOMoz fee-based “membership” and the monetization of tools which SEOmoz had previously offered to SEO’ers for free.  But the skunk works projects are just getting started and the mozzers hope they will come out smelling like a rose. This week, SEOmoz built on its reputation as the Web’s most prolific link-baiters cum search tool makers by unveiling their most ambitious product yet. The name of the service borrows liberally from the ancestral “Moz”-illa and Netscape  brand DNA — it’s called Linkscape.

Linkscape offers two types of reports that detail inlinks to a URL, anchor text distribution, domain and overall link metrics including comparison reports that compare link metrics and anchor text distribution of a small group of URLs.

Embracing and extending the moz namespace, the Linkscape reports also encompass two new, branded indices. The fitst is mozRank™ - the raw link popularity of a URL or domain based on analysis of the links pointing to it (similar to global link popularity metrics used by the engines). The second is  mozTrust™ - an estimation of how trustworthy a URL or domain is in the eyes of the search engines based on the quality and quantity of trusted links pointing to it.

Seattle-based online real estate broker Redfin today released a major new version of Redfin.com that allows consumers to evaluate neighborhood inventory and pricing trends, using data previously accessible only to real estate agents. For each neighborhood, city or postal code covered by Redfin, consumers can view new listings, price reductions, open houses and trends on how many homes are selling, how long they are taking to sell and at what price. Read the rest of this entry »

Two illustrious Internet audiences, the Web’s leading authorities on online security and the leading practitioners of advanced search engine marketing, descended on Seattle last week. What the two groups had in common was a bright line between White Hat “best practices” and stealthy Black Hat maneuvers, although which tactics were being censured and which advocated was sometimes in question.

The AOTA Summit 2008 attracted the chief security advocates for Microsoft, Avenue A | Razorfish, eBay, PayPal,. the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the FBI and the White House, along with Wash.-state attorney general Rob McKenna and Craig’sList founder Craig Newmark. The theme, “”Reaching the Tipping Point: The Future of Online Trust” was based on instilling consumer confidence.

Craig Spiezle, director of the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance which organized the event explained that spam is a tactic of choice for many criminals working online.

“There’s a big proportion of mail today that is spam,” he said. “Just by opening up a mail, there’s a potential your unprotected user or unprotected PC could have malware loaded on their machine.”

“There’s another whole area of corrupting and comprising ad servers today …You see an ad, you click on a link and you actually are taken to site that tries to get malware on you,” he said.

That illicit tactic overlaps with a concept analyzed at SMX Advanced and known in the search engine world as “cloaking,” where a link you clicked on to reach a particular goal did not lead to the destination you had in mind. In the search example, the content of the destination site was withheld or misdirected by the search engine spider. Advanced search marketers are conflicted about the relative degree of risk that a search engine like Google will allow or find acceptable. Some to try and eke out an extra advantage for their Website’s visbility.

In a lively discussion post about the relative value of “dark side” tactics at a search conference, organizer Danny Sullivan was apologetic, “The conference had content that was far more blackhat that I would have liked to have seen. It had content I was embarrassed to see presented, because it is not about the type of SEO I’d like people to learn or know about.”

Having said that, many conference goers appreciated learning more about the black arts of search. They learned what to look out for from competitors, while being amused by the pure entertainment value of the aggressive, and sometimes brutally effective, “overnight sensation” power of the black hat tactics being discussed.

SEO pundit Michael Gray was outspoken, “If Google were Hostess Twinkies, they would take up 90% of the shelf space in your local super market. Sure you could always stop by the bakery and pick up yestedays day old Yahoo bagels or the produce department and pick up that crazy [MSN] fruit that they keep changing the name of, but you’d still be tripping over pop up displays of Twinkies in every aisle.

“Corporations shouldn’t make the rules in any industry, but in our world they do, and it’s even worse that it’s not even multiple companies but just one. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about Google’s way or everything else. “

Travel search site Farecast was rumored to be a takeover target recently and  CEO Hugh Crean has confirmed that the site has indeed been acquired by Microsoft. TechCrunch, citing John Cook at the Seattle PI, says the deal was worth something in the $100-$115 million range.Microsoft has a long history in travel, having started Expedia in the mid-1990s (it was sold to IAC’s predecessor USANetworks in 1999). Farecast’s claim to differentiation was that it could predict whether air fares or hotel prices were going up or down to help travelers know when to buy. The site has been around for about two years.

The capabilities are already present on MSN travel and we’ll likely see it affect travel-related search results on Live Search.

At last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City, Seattle-based Widemile Inc. announced the launch of a new Optimization platform that can reduce the time of testing landing page success to a fraction of other systems.”

Multivariate optimization makes each advertising dollar more accountable and work harder, making it highly appropriate for the current economic environment. The Widemaile system makes it possible to test multiplke factors and testing levels in a fraction of the time, and with a percentage of the transactional data of traditional systems. The methodology is referred to as Predictive Analytics.

Randy Barney, Director of Site Optimization for Avenue A | Razorfish had this to say: “We’re excited about Widemile’s approach and toolset, which is structured to scale with our business and client needs.” [24x7]

Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives — writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.

Whrrl — not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl — is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.

Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends — who may be at a nearby restaurant — or at the very least get a review of the restaurant that a friend wrote a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.

Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile-phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as “a live phone book that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list.” Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.

Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — on about eight to 10 phone models — can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 a month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to pursue more funding early next year, employs 34 people.

<http://www.whrrl.com/

Seattle social networking startup Blue Dot is scrapping its name and repositioning the service — now dubbed Faves.com.Users of the new site can create a personalized Web page populated with their favorite news topics. For example, a Seattle Mariners’ fan who also enjoys surfing and cooking could sign up to receive information about those specific topics from other users who have bookmarked related content. That puts Faves.com in direct competition with sites such as Topix.net, Digg and Stumble Upon. The concept also is similar to what Seattle’s SportsUltra is trying with its customized sports news service.

<http://faves.com/home>

Google’s stock will top $900 next year. Online voting won’t happen in our lifetime. And Microsoft Corp. will make a big push into virtualization, possibly buying Citrix.

Those were among the forecasts Tuesday night at the WSA annual predictions dinner as five panelists from the Pacific Northwest technology industry — Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group; Kelly Smith of Curious Office Partners; Jonathan Sposato of Picnik; Enrique Godreau of Voyager Capital; and Steve Lidberg of Pacific Crest Securities — fielded a variety of questions about the future of the industry.

Moderator and P-I columnist, John Cook, has the story.