Today, Google relaunched several of their help forums, moving them from Google Groups to a new help-specific platform. The English and Polish Google Webmaster Help group have made the move to this new format, with the other languages soon to follow.

Below, more details about how this change will benefit site owners and a bit of history about the start and evolution of the Google Webmaster Help group.

Historically, all official Google discussion forums have operated on Google Groups. While it made sense for Google to use its own products, Groups was initially built for old school email list-style discussions, and didn’t have functionality tailored for a help forum.

The new help forums are built on a platform designed specifically for posting questions and getting answers. They have improved searching functionality, “top contributor” designations, ratings, user levels, and the ability to mark questions as answered. This last feature should make a big difference, both for Googlers and others who want to make the most of their time by zeroing directly in on unanswered questions, as well as for those looking for answers.

How the Google Webmaster Help group began

In the title of this post, I said this this was version 2 of the Google Webmaster Help group, but it’s really version 3. The group originally launched in June 2005 as the Google Sitemaps group. The first few posts were about the Python Sitemap Generator and the Sitemap protocol syntax and there wasn’t a lot of Googler participation. Google Sitemaps itself also launched in June 2005 and the team started out pretty small. The charter was focused on XML Sitemaps, and didn’t have the larger scope it has now of helping webmasters will all crawling, indexing, and ranking related issues.

I had just started working on the team in those days and we found the discussions on the groups to be really valuable in knowing what issues people were having and heping us prioritize what to work on. We didn’t have a blog yet, so we used the group to communicate updates like this one. (I think this may have been my first post to the group.)

Expanding beyond Google Sitemaps

In August of 2006, Google Sitemaps officially expanded its charter and became Webmaster Central. Google Sitemaps became Webmaster Tools, the Google Sitemaps blog became the Google Webmaster Central blog (again, with expanded focus), we launched the webmaster help center, and the Sitemaps group became a subcategory of a larger Google Group that included categories for lots of other site owner issues.

Some great things came out of that revamp. The new categorization made it easier for people to find exactly what they were looking for and we were able to take advantage of other features, such as the ability to display a Googler icon next to our names when we posted. Rather than a faceless “Google Employee”, you got to see each of us separately. That poor “Google Employee” really had a split personality!

Expansion of languages and people

Lots of great things happened during this period. The groups expanded from 2 languages (English and German) to 16 as Googlers from around the globe (in particular from Dublin) started getting involved. Maile Ohye (in Mountain View) moved to the team to help with Sitemaps support and coding (and eventually took on a lot more) and we created a webmaster trends analyst position, intended specifically to help out site owners. This brought the additions of Jonathan Simon, Susan Moska (both in Kirkland), and John Mueller (in Zurich) to the team.

The bionic posters program was launched to show recognition to active and friendly posters, and acknowledged that the groups worked as well as they did because members, not just Googlers, were helping each other out.

A lot of people helping out in the various language groups were all new to that kind of thing and we got a lot of help from those who were experienced with the Google Groups support ropes, such as Jaime.

What about the new forum?

To use the new forum, you’ll have to register and set up a profile, even if you had one before on the old system. Susan told me that the transition seems to be going smoothly, but that it’s a work in progress and they welcome feedback. Sasch Mayer, one of the “bionic posters” wrote that this is a “much-needed technological upgrade” and that “indeed, given the ever-growing number of Googlers regularly frequenting the group, Webmaster Help can now safely be counted as the best place to get your website questions answered by Google’s own staff.”

I admit to being a bit partial to the Google Webmaster Help forums since I helped them grow and worked closely with the great people who staff them. But it also makes me happy that Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo also staff forums, where site owner questions are regularly answered. I know first hand how difficult it is to provide technical support for the entire web and every improvement like today’s by Google makes a big difference towards that goal.

Someone’s trying to trademark the term SEO, which has roiled the SEO community. The someone is named Jason Gambert, and he has filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, claiming to have coined the term “SEO” (for Search Engine Optimization). SEOMoz and others have moved to challenge Gambert’s claim. As the person (along with my partner Leland Harden), who actually did coin the term Search Engine Optimization back in 1995, I feel uniquely qualified to weigh in on the validity of Gambert’s claim.

Jason Gambert asserts that he was the first to use the term SEO, in a 2007 email. The actual origin of SEO happened this way, as recounted way back in 1997 in the book Net Results that Leland and I wrote with Rick Bruner. Here’s an excerpt from page 137:

The scene is the Heyman home, the summer of 1995, 3:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. The phone rings. Bob, senior vice president of audience development at Cybernautics, grabs the receiver and mumbles, “Hello?”

“Why the #$%$ don’t we come up before page 4 on this damned thing? Page #$%$ 4, you #$%$ morons” the voice on the other end shouts.

Examining the alarm clock and smiling meekly at his wife, Bob asks, “Huh?”

The caller was the manager for the rock band Jefferson Starship, then a new Cybernautics client. He was throwing a tantrum befitting a rock industry insider in the middle of the night over the fact that the Web site Cybernautics had recently built for the band appeared several screens down in a search of “Jefferson Starship” on a particular search engine.

As it turns out, the band was on the road, and the manager had wanted to show a club promoter how hip Starship was to have its own web site. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the URL (www.jstarship.com, now defunct), so he resorted to a search engine lookup. To his considerable annoyance, the page did not come up especially close to the top of the list.

The next morning, Bob dragged into the office a bit sleepier than usual, gathered the staff and explained that mastering the art of search engine ranking was a new company priority.

It turned out that what governed organic search results back then was how many times the keyword appeared on the web page. The Cybernautics designers had done a tasteful job and the keyword Jefferson Starship did not appear as often as it did on fan pages about the band. Once Bob had his designers have the words Jefferson Starship recur on the page in tiny black print against a black background the page rank vaulted to number one. The band was pleased.

Bob and Leland Harden called this new field Search Engine Optimization and soon thereafter hired the first SEOM (Search Engine Optimization Manager). And so SEO was born.

So, clearly, Jason Gambert’s claim of coining SEO in 2007 is patently spurious. Here are links to various posts about Gambert’s Trademark claim and the ensuing furor:

From TechDirt: Internet Marketer Tries To Trademark SEO

From SEOMoz: Pulling A Fast One

You can access the current status of Gambert’s Trademark filing here.

Bob Heyman is Chief Search Officer at Mediasmith in San Francisco. Bob’s new book (with Leland Harden). “Digital Engagement”, will be published by the American Management Association’s publishing arm in January.

Spotted via Google Blogoscoped, Google’s finally acknowledging turning 10 this month with a special Google 10th Birthday web site. It features a cool interactive timeline where you can click on various events in the company’s history and get more information, along with a new "Project 10 to The 100" challenge for ideas to improve the world and an invitation for anyone to share stories about Google.

Here’s a sample of the timeline:

Nice! My first review of Google back in 1998 made the timeline. If you click any link, more information shows up about it, with further references.

Looking for the timeline to clear up which exact day will be Google’s birthday? No such luck. "Google turns 10" is listed near the end but just brings up various posts from the Official Google Blog from this month.

Me, I’m still banking on Google celebrating this Saturday, Sept. 27 as its birthday. My past post, Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday, explains how Google’s birthday has been something of a moving target that for the past few years has hit on Sept. 27 rather than Sept. 7 (a date that many media publications choose for their "Google’s 10" stories earlier this month.

Want in on the celebrations? Google’s inviting people to submit written stories (100 words or less) or videos of how they use Google.

Google’s also using its birthday to kickoff Project 10¹⁰⁰, a project seeking ideas on how to improve communities, employment opportunities, energy issues, the environment, health issues, education, shelter and housing problems or anything else. Five final ideas will be selected, with Google pledging $10 million in funding to them.

Cute name, but ugh, bad for those who are going to search for this. Will they look for 10¹⁰⁰, 10100, 10×100, Project 10 to The 100 or what? None of these bring up the Google project in the top results yet. But just give it time.

Postscript: Google’s posted an official announcement of Project 10×100 here.

A number of stories about Google’s 10th birthday have appeared, as rounded-up below. However, the company itself isn’t yet celebrating, as its official birthday has tended to happen on Sept. 27 these days. Make sure to read Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday for more about Google’s moving birthday.

NOTE: See Google 10th Birthday Site: Interactive Timeline, Project 10×100 To Improve The World & Share Your Google Stories for news of the official Google 10th birthday site launched since this was written.

• Google at 10: Larry, Sergey , gigaom.com
• At 10-Year Mark, Google’s Glossy Facade Shows Cracks, PC World
• From garage to globe, Google celebrates 10th anniversary, ABC News
• Google at 10, in fear of youth!, Pandia
• Google hits the big 1-0, Vnunet.com
• Looking back on Google’s 10 years, San Francisco Chronicle
• Marissa Mayer talks about Google at 10 — and 20, LA Times Blog
• No Google Birthday Logo? Check Back on 9/27, Search Engine Roundtable
• A World Without Google, Technologizer
• The Omnigoogle, Rough Type
• Happy birthday, Google – now you can take on the world, The Guardian

If the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo does happen, the “postmortems” on Yahoo will come fast and furious. Perhaps the first of these is from the Mercury News, which recounts the history of Google and Yahoo’s early relationship and how the latter essentially “made” Google, which went on to become its most formidable competitor. The piece indirectly argues that Yahoo’s failure to recognize Google as a threat — despite Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s unsuccessful early attempt to buy it — is partly responsible for the company’s predicament today.

The article also argues, with interviews of many former Yahoo executives, that the company had several important missteps along the way. It’s easy in retrospect to see the things that Yahoo might have done. But if the company were more ruthless, the article suggests, it would never have adopted Google as its search engine in the first place. And Google might not have risen to become the juggernaut that it is today.

That term used to be reserved almost exclusively for Microsoft, as in “Redmond juggernaut.” But now it applies to Google equally in different respects.

Speaking of which, in anticipation of the likely coming of the search “duopoloy,” Portfolio Magazine interviews Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt on competing against MicroHoo and his sense of how it might affect the broader Internet:

Why does a merged Microsoft-Yahoo pose such a threat to Google? It’s an unstable situation. But the theoretical issue is the concentration of Microsoft’s resources and its history, combined with the very large share that it would have in certain applications—like instant messaging and email—that could be used essentially to break the internet and diminish choice.

Break the internet? All internet-based systems today are highly interoperable, open systems. The whole antitrust trial that Microsoft went through was really about it breaking that.

While it’s still possible that an alternative to Microsoft’s bid might emerge (via AOL) at the 11th hour, it’s quite unlikely at this point. In recognition of that, Yahoo and Microsoft met last week for the first time to informally discuss and explore the merger opportunity.

Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the "West Coast elite" or "digerati," you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon.

It’s OK. It hurts, but we both know it’s for the best. I know what you’re thinking. I can hear you explaining it to me, over and over. IAC chief Barry Diller bought Ask.com back in 2005, gave both Steve Berkowitz and then Jim Lanzone time to try and pull searchers in by being more innovative than Google, and that didn’t work. You tried. But now, it has to be out with the search product CEO and in with something new.

But listen, I say. Ask held its own against the combined weight of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. That was a success, it really was. And Ask WAS innovating. Among the major search engines, it was the only one with something really different, really unique going on. And as we’re about to move into a likely Google-Microsoft duopoly, perhaps Ask’s day was about to come.

Sigh. I know, I know. Innovation is all fine, but why bother if you believe you’ll never grow share? Why not shut everything down that’s new, fresh, and expensive to do and just get the most money off the basic traffic you know won’t go away.

I talked about this yesterday on the Daily SearchCast, before you announced the layoffs. That’s because Ask’s departure from being a strong, clear, independent voice in search was clearly coming. We saw the rumor about dumping your crawling technology. Yes, we’ve seen the denial of this and the further denial. But Barry, new CEO Jim Sacka, whomever is left — we don’t believe you. We know you’re just going to hand it all over to Google. C’mon, it’s obvious. You don’t have any heart left in the new organization to be running your own tech. You certainly don’t show it from the top. About the only reason I can see for saying you want to keep the tech is that perhaps you hope someone will still see it as valuable, so you can sell it.

Someone should. I’ll come back to that, when we play the What If part of this obituary. But let’s look ahead. You’ve decided that Ask is going to be reconfigured to appeal to women. I guess I missed the memo where women said they somehow needed a search engine that was different for them. What are you considering? Pink and lots of flowers? A recipe search? Maybe a section for working moms? Any more stereotypes you think might fly? Hey, why don’t you change CEOs again and put an actual woman in charge of the company that wants to build a search engine for women. That might be a good marketing move. Maybe bring back Jeeves the butler (as we’ve all been expecting), but this time as a shirtless beefcake.

You go, girl. You go after the women, but after just doing a panel asking teenagers about search – and hearing they see absolutely no reason for a search engine for teenagers — I’m puzzled about why women somehow need to have something aimed at them.

I like Forrester analyst Charlene Li — and she’s a woman to boot — but I hope you’re not believing her when she told the AP:

Li predicted many married women and mothers will be thrilled to have a search engine focusing on their interests. "It’s not so much that these women have simple questions," she said. "It’s just that they are so busy that they need fast answers."

Are you kidding me? Do you know anyone that wants to sit around and not get fast answers? What, men have more time because we occupy ourselves farting and picking our noses until the search results come up?

Reassure yourself that having a slightly higher share of women than other search engines (you say 65%; Hitwise tells us 58%) is going to pay off in this way. Sure, I know you can dismiss me as one of those West Coast elite digerati that you "stumbled" in trying to appeal to, as you told the Wall Street Journal. But I’ve also been watching this space for nearly twelve years. A crying need for "women search" has never come up. Good luck with that.

Oh, but wait. You’re going back to your roots as well, trying to get question answering going. Rather than have editors provide answers to questions, you’ll let searchers — women — flock to post.

Well, it could work. I mean, you’re not going to be a search engine like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft if you do that, so you’re staying in the deadpool. But there could be a business there. Yahoo Answers has certainly had success with taking questions from people of both genders. But just a little cold water – Microsoft’s Live QnA doesn’t appear to have ramped up to match Yahoo Answers in popularity, and Google shuttered Google Answers back in 2006 and is only considering it for select countries. But maybe Ask knows better.

FYI, you did have a service that let people ask questions. It was called Ask AnswerPoint, and the URL remains here (and here’s how it used to look). You ran it from 2000 through May 2002. That guy you fired — Jim Lanzone — he saw speed as a big issue in why it never took off. People didn’t want to wait for answers (which conflicts with having a search engine for all those busy women).

Let’s skip past the whole "we’re after the women" or "we’re going to answer questions" stuff. Let’s get to the dirty truth here. As a network, your biggest success has been driving traffic off toolbars. Get your Zwinky or your Smileys or your cursors and many other things from Fun Web Products. That’s apparently been your growth driver, people installing this stuff and ending up with Ask as a default search engine as a result.

Just remember, Ask has a really bad history here. At one point in 2005, Microsoft was even tagging MyWebSearch as a "Toolbar Browser Hijacker." Others flagged your products, as well. Jim Lanzone — yeah, him again — did a great job in trying to redeem Ask from that past history.

Well, it’s clear what’s going to happen. You’re going to embrace the toolbar stuff again. I have no doubt about that. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if (sadly) you pick up a point or two of share in doing it. But it’s not going to last. Give me a call in a few years and tell me if I’m wrong. But I don’t think it’s going to last because you don’t build a brand by sneaking it up on people.

You’re also planning to do the giveaway thing. Well, that certainly gave Microsoft a spike last year, but it didn’t keep. Microsoft is trying it again, and as long as you keep plugging away, that might give you some temporary boosts.

But really, spin on new ideas and new plans aside, I deadpool you because you’ve seen terminal velocity approach and decided to embrace it, rather than fight it.

Terminal velocity? You know, when someone or something is falling through the air, it reaches a speed where it can’t accelerate any further. The same thing happens with old search engines. Actually, maybe it’s reverse terminal velocity. You lose share and slip lower and lower until things stabilize. You’re no longer a major search engine. You’ve got maybe a few tenths of a share. But by doing absolutely no work, you hold on to that share — you reach a steady state. Your descent doesn’t get any worse.

Let’s take some past brands to understand this. AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Excite, Go, iWon, WebCrawler. These were all major search engines that pulled back from doing search on their own. But you know, hundreds of thousands of links still point at them. And that means they still get plenty of people who don’t know better going to them, doing searches.

I see this all the time in librarian web sites that haven’t been maintained, a list of search engines from years ago that still get referred to. Heck, search for search engine on Google, and you get AltaVista first. C’mon Google, rip AltaVista out of there (and hey, Mahalo gets it right by including Search Engine Land in the top results!). But AltaVista survives, gets searches, and Yahoo still earns money off of it.

Probably no search company understands terminal velocity better than Ask. They either own or power search for several of the old brands (Excite, iWon, and WebCrawler). They know that these properties are worth about a percentage point or more in search share in the US without having to lift a finger.

So, dump development on Ask as a competitor against the big three. Really, I do understand. To play the What If game, I do think Ask’s time might have been coming. Aside from brand, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are largely similar to each other. Ask was doing new stuff, and even Google was looking and starting to copy. I don’t know who exactly coined the phrase "going beyond 10 blue links," but I know the guy who popularized it — Jim Lanzone. And make no mistake, Jim failed to dramatically move Ask in the way that many might have been hoping for. But he understood search. He has many friends in the industry, not because he’s a nice guy, but because he was passionate about improving the search experience. Search is hurt by his departure, but his departure was only the harbinger that Ask itself would be leaving the stage.

I heard all the major search engines on our Generation Next panel at SMX West last week use that phrase: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Jim’s phrase. The Ask rep didn’t use it because the Ask rep pulled out at the last minute. The Ask rep probably will never use it in the future, because Ask just isn’t competing with the other three anymore. Ask is out of the game, perhaps at exactly the right time when it should be ready to run onto the field if Microhoo happens.

I won’t cry for you much, Ask. I know you’re in a different place now. I know what makes sense to me and many others doesn’t make sense for you. But I hope you’ll understand when I and the many others you’ve dismissed as the "digerati" aren’t counting you in the search game any longer. That’s because we know in our hearts you’re gone, even if you protest that it’s not so.

NOTE: I left off reading reactions from others until I finished my own thoughts above. Now that I’ve done that, I’ve had a look around. Readers should definitely check out Barry Schwartz’s Search Community Reaction to Ask.com New Search Strategy. I especially loved this part:

Diller pulls the soul out of Ask.com by removing Lanzone, he then pulls the smarts out of Ask.com by removing Gary Price and then pulls the will out of Ask.com by cutting 8% of the team.

Then there’s Lisa Barone, in Goodbye Ask.com: A Brand Evangelist Hangs It Up:

I’m heartbroken over the loss of an engine I loved and intensely angry at Barry Diller, the man who never understood the gem he had in his hand, and in return, threw it away when it wasn’t making money as fast as he wanted it to. This was a decision based on money, not about users, not about search, not about anything other than Barry Diller’s bottom line. This was not Ask’s choice. This was forced upon them and I think that’s important to remember….

If I could ask Barry Diller for one thing, it’d be this: Now that you’ve dismembered Ask and its heart, be man enough to just kill it once and for all. Don’t tell me that you’re “restructuring” or “refocusing” or “realigning”. That’s even more insulting than what you’ve already done.

Lisa, by the way, is not only a West Coast elite digerati. She’s also a woman that the supposed new search engine will shift to appeal to. But because she’s not an idiot, she understands that the "restructuring" talk is just that, talk for a break-up she didn’t want to have and a lost opportunity she doesn’t want to contemplate.

From long-time search observer Tara Calishain:

SF Gate refers to Ask as an “also-ran” among search engines. Five years ago I would have agreed completely. Now, I don’t think so. Had this shift in focus happened five years ago, I would not have much cared. Now, I care very much. Ask in the last couple of years has come up with some great offerings. The mapping service. The packed-with-data-but-still-usable search results. The terrific page preview with statistics. AskEraser. And Bloglines. (Hopefully, Bloglines will go on.) So many great things — I’m sad and sorry that Ask isn’t staying in the game.

Finally, ironically, where Barry Diller’s business motives are getting most of the blame, Diller himself might lose control of Ask-ower IAC by next week.

Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude.

Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft got together on the Sitemaps protocol, and Google, Ask.com, and Microsoft are now anonymizing log file data. Subsequently, Google called for international privacy standards. The November 2007 FTC public forum on behavioral advertising also focused on privacy concerns. These are all steps toward industry standardization with regard to consumer privacy, an issue search engines must address to maintain public trust. But search engines are not as motivated to establish standards for search engine marketing tactics.

Obstacles to standardization

The legion of search engine marketing practitioners is too fragmented to have a leader calling the shots that others will follow. After years of competing against each other, the white-hat/black-hat divide seems to be gravitating toward white-hat dominance, although there are still some black-hat practitioners in the marketplace. Matt Cutts recently said in his blog, “I was looking over a list of 20+ black-hat SEO companies that I compiled back in 2002. The majority either went out of business or have transformed into white-hat SEO companies.”

The wide variance in range of services provided by SEM firms is another reason why industry standardization is difficult to achieve. We have standalone SEO or PPC providers and firms that provide both SEO and PPC. Then we have the ad agencies with specialized search departments. Many traditional and interactive agencies provide search engine marketing in addition to a bevy of traditional and online marketing services. You can get email marketing, search marketing, banner creative, direct mail, and media buying services from these one-stop shops. By the same token, many of the SEO/PPC firms have expanded their services to include search and other marketing services as well. Part of the reason for the lack of industry standardization is the fact that your typical SEM firm is in no way typical.

Looking beyond the obstacles

Looking beyond these drawbacks, I also see signs that we may be getting ready to establish standards. For one thing, the industry is maturing. In some respects, search is still in its infancy because ongoing changes occur rapidly. But the saturation point is fast approaching in search marketing as growth begins to slow. Search marketing was a $9.4B budget item in 2006 when the SEMPO State of Search Marketing survey reported a 62% growth rate over 2005. SEMPO’s report for 2007 is not out yet, but industry experts believe growth is slowing due to market saturation and maturity.

Another sign of industry maturity is the growth in search marketing training programs. In addition to all of the individual courses and seminars, there are also search training courses in conjunction with search industry conferences like SMX and SES. We have a number of organizations offering certificates of completion for online and offline search marketing courses like the SEMPO Institute Search Engine Marketing courses and the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification Program. There are even a few universities that offer search engine marketing courses in their curriculum. These advancements also indicate the time is near for establishing common search marketing standards of behavior and techniques.

To understand why little progress has been made over the past decade, below is a brief review of past attempts.

The history

Act 1: In August 1998, Danny Sullivan wrote an article in SearchEngineWatch, “Promoters Call for Certification.” The article stated that principals from four major promotion and design firms had sent an open letter to the major search engines calling for establishment of a certification program for optimization professionals. At the time, Danny said,

“The letter is the first such coordinated move from the Web promotion community ever regarding search engine positioning issues.”

I was among those signing the letter to search engines, asking them to develop an SEO certification program in order to eliminate spammers and other search engine gaming techniques. At issue was the fact that Infoseek, then a popular search engine, had banned pages redirecting to other pages. In those days, optimization techniques depended on the redirects, which were the only way to record visitors and charge for optimization. I thought Infoseek’s ban came about due to the heavy abuse of redirect pages loaded with spam by the adult Web site industry. Reputable SEO firms weren’t interested in spamming with redirects, and the idea of certification seemed like a good remedy for the “Wild West” mentality of the day. However, the letter was politely acknowledged and ignored, except for Danny’s comments.

Act 2: In November 2001, Sullivan wrote “Desperately Seeking Search Marketing Standards,” a review on further attempts to establish search marketing standards. He started by saying every so often there’s a new push for search marketing standards and then cautioned they’ll need lots of luck because “the barriers to establishing standards remain substantial.” He opined that search engines are reluctant to be transparent because overzealous SEOs would likely come up with heretofore unknown spam techniques for favorable rankings.

Sullivan mentioned early efforts by WebSeed to provide a “Search Engine Promotion Code of Ethics” in 2000 (no longer available online) and, of course, Bruce Clay’s “Search Engine Optimization Code of Ethics,” which has been used extensively by search marketers since then. Both documents supported Clay’s position against doorway pages, a controversy then and now.

Sullivan discussed the whitepapers issued against spam, like “The Classification of Search Engine Spam” by Alan Perkins, as well as the disagreements over what constitutes spam. The article reviewed several attempts to begin the dialog on standards, including the efforts of Terry Van Horne’s SEOPros.org, the World Association of Internet Marketers (no longer online), and the heated threads on this topic at WebmasterWorld. All was to no avail.

Act 3: In April 2004, Sullivan wrote, “Spam Rules Require Effective Spam Police.” This article countered Kevin Ryan’s assertion in “Spam, Unprofitable Spam” that the industry has no rules. Sullivan pointed out that the rules are implicit in the Webmaster guidelines posted at Google and Yahoo!.

He discussed the futility of lobbying for standards by saying, “SEM pioneer Paul Bruemmer pushed for search engine optimization certification back in 1998. But as I wrote then, just having a “rule book” doesn’t mean an end to spam. We also had a push in 2001 for search engine marketing standards, which also has gone nowhere in terms of reducing spam in search engines.”

Sullivan suggested that a real solution to the spam problem would be for search engines to publish a list of companies they have banned. While this seems like a good way to help consumers avoid non-reputable SEM firms, the search engines were afraid of possible lawsuits.

He mentioned SEMPO’s reluctance to enforce spam rules for its members, agreeing that it’s not the responsibility of a third-party group to enforce rules they don’t create. Since then, SEMPO has created a Metrics and Standards Task Force with a mission “to develop a set of standards and guidelines specific to search marketing.”

Back then, the only advice Sullivan could give to those seeking standards was to follow search engine guidelines and ensure your vendor does as well if you outsource. He cautioned the engines are good at detecting spam and other non-sanctioned techniques, and while they can’t catch every single instance, it’s not worth the risk of being banned.

Where we stand today

In August 2007, the IAB and DMA in the UK launched a certification program (one that left Danny less than impressed). In January 2008, the IAB announced a successor program, an online best practice resource to “reinforce its commitment to trust, transparency and accountability within the search industry.” The new initiative has the backing of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. To be hosted on the IAB UK Web site, the Search Best Practice Resource will provide access to materials promoting an understanding of key search marketing issues and how advertisers can conduct search marketing responsibly.

Complementary to existing material on the site, the new resource will include how-tos on search marketing best practices for basic and advanced techniques. There will be checklists to help advertisers through key steps in the search process, and a section describing basic search engine policies on trademarks, user privacy, and fraudulent or invalid clicks. The resource will be managed and updated through the Search Council, which is leading the project in conjunction with the DMA and other search industry projects aimed at advertising agencies.

While the IAB and DMA have taken some steps to establish search marketing standards, SEMPO states in its FAQs that it is not a standards body or a policing organization:

“Is SEMPO a standards body for the SEM industry? SEMPO is not a standards body or a policing organization. Membership in or involvement with SEMPO is not a guarantee of a particular firm’s capabilities, nor does it signify industry approval or disapproval of their practices.”

SEMPO has a Metrics and Standards Task Force, and we have contacted the committee to see where they stand with respect to search marketing standards. As stated on the committee’s description, “The mission of this task force is to develop a set of standards and guidelines specific to search marketing.”

Call for standards circa 2008

As you can see, the call for search engine marketing standards dates back to 1998, and the industry hasn’t stepped up to the plate yet. Search has grown and become mainstream, but the industry needs to increase its value, authenticity, and integrity by identifying a set of standards to help replace devious SEO techniques that still tarnish our industry.

The lack of SEO standards is one reason why some businesses give this valuable marketing strategy short shrift. While 75% of marketers say they use SEO (MarketingSherpa 2008 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide), they obviously spend more money on PPC (SEMPO State of Search Marketing 2006). Right now, the only thing that marketers can do is obtain a methodology statement from their search agency, read it carefully, and ensure the agency follows search engine guidelines, which are somewhat similar but also vary.

Many search agencies say they’re committed to SEM best practices. But establishing standards will take more than lip service. Real people will have to stick their neck out to get this done. It will take leadership by individuals, by search agencies, and by our industry trade organization. We need search standards to bring more credibility to our trade.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and in-house consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for the strategic implementation of search engine marketing activities within Red Door’s Internet Presence Management (IPM) services.

Note From Danny: See also A Bad Month For SEO’s Reputation for some recent thoughts from me on the standards issue. Paul is one of several panelists on our Is It Time For Search Marketing Standards? panel at the SMX West show next week. We’ll have coverage of discussion out of that session after it happens.

Google has a special logo up on the Google home page today. The Google logo is made up of legos, to celebrate Lego’s 50 year birthday.

Google’s culture has always had a special place for Lego. Google’s first servers were “modded” up with Legos. The Google founders have admitted to having a special “fondness” towards Legos, and we all know that computer geeks can’t get enough of their legos. Google has Lego art in their offices. Lego fans have built Google logos in Lego, and so have Googlers themselves.

If you visit Google.com, you will see the logo. You won’t see it after you do a search on Google, so there won’t be a small Google lego logo (or at least not at the time I am writing this). Google UK has the logo, and so do Google France, Google Mexico, Google Israel, and Google Denmark. In fact, it appears all Google country-specific sites may have the special logo up for the day. That doesn’t happen with all special logos, so this is truly an international celebration!

Children, gather ’round. When I was a boy, we didn’t have Digg. We didn’t have Slashdot. When we wanted a big traffic rush, we had to walk eight miles in the snow to Yahoo Picks — Yahoo Picks Of The Week & Picks Of The Day — and we liked it. But now, Yahoo Picks is gone.

Bow your head to the news that TechCrunch highlighted today. Let a tear or two flow down your face as you read the formal announcement:

We’re sorry to say that Picks has stopped updating. After 12 years, we’re moving on to new projects and fresh ways of highlighting cool sites across the Web. We’ll still be here in different guises, like on Yahoo! Green writing about eco-friendly sites, or Yahoo! Answers calling out cool questions, or on the Yahoo! Buzz Log, sifting through what people are searching for online. And the Yahoo! Picks archive will remain available to anyone who wants to wander in. Thanks for your support and attention all these years.

Here’s the first Yahoo Picks Of The Week (I believe), from August 1995. Note that there was a parody of The Spot being highlighted. Kids, "The Spot" was what we had for entertainment before YouTube came along with Mentos & Coke.

And aw, here’s my Access Disk Provider Report being a Yahoo Pick for February 2, 2005.

Think back as well to NCSA / Netscape What’s New, which was a predecessor to Yahoo Picks, highlighting key sites from June 1993 through February 2005.

Those were the days, my friend….

As I write this on New Year’s day, I can’t help but reflect on how SEO has changed during the more than 12 years since I first started optimizing websites. I was browsing through my hard-drive looking for a document I had saved that had various article ideas in it, when I stumbled upon a file from the year 2000 in which I had written an outline for a potential SEO workshop I was thinking of teaching. I never did do that workshop in 2000, but did eventually hold the first of our High Rankings Seminars two years later. The seminars had a good run from 2002-2007, but this year I decided to instead focus on our SEO services, as well as our new SEO Training Classes.

When I spotted that old workshop outline from 7 years ago, I thought it would be interesting to compare it to the current workshop outline we’ve been busily putting together for our upcoming class. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I sometimes feel that the more SEO changes, the more it stays the same. Would the old outline be focusing on the same things we’re focusing on today? Or would it be completely irrelevant in today’s highly competitive world of organic SEO?

When you’re as deeply entrenched in SEO as I am, you often don’t notice the incremental changes that happen along the way. You simply go with the flow and make minor adjustments whenever they are necessary. Of course, all those minor adjustments can add up to major changes in the way you do SEO after enough time passes. Before you know it, your process is completely different and you didn’t even know you changed it! (As an aside, this is a good thing for people like me who are resistant to major changes in life!)

So, let’s take a look at what was in that old 2000 workshop outline document:

Introduction – Google has over 1.3 billion pages indexed.

Hmm…a quick look at the Google home page, and I realized they don’t show the number of indexed pages there anymore. I guess the page war they used to have with the other search engines got boring! I typed the word “the” into the Google search box, and it came up with 9,890,000,000 pages indexed. Let’s just call it 10 billion. That’s nearly 10 times more pages indexed than in 2000.

In SEO terms, that means there’s 10 times more competition for most keyword phrases — ouch!

Next up in the old workshop outline was “SEO Considerations” listing the following:

• Design
• Keyphrases
• Body Text Copy
• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Meta Keyword
• Submission
• Link Popularity

Not really too far off from what we might talk about in 2008, but I currently leave out talk about the Meta keyword tag (other than to mention not to waste time on it). Although, it appears that in the old document I was planning on saying basically that as well! Hooray!

Today of course, we also leave out any discussion of submitting to search engines. In 2000, I was advocating submitting the home page URL and then leaving it up to the search engines to crawl the rest. Back in the 90’s, many of the search engines of the day (especially Lycos and Excite) would suddenly drop any given URL from their indices for no apparent reason. I had a little section of the old workshop outline for explaining that people might want to resubmit if their URLs were suddenly dropped, or after a redesign. Nowadays that’s neither necessary nor helpful, and submitting isn’t a topic of discussion for the current classes, other than to say it’s not necessary.

The other SEO considerations are of course still discussed in great detail. My old outline didn’t provide exactly what I was going to talk about in terms of the design, but I ran across another old file on my computer from a similar time period that outlined some of our High Rankings services at the time.

One aspect was “reorganizing the navigational links on your site (as necessary) so that each page is linked to every other page on your site (which is important because the search engine spiders need to be able to ‘crawl’ throughout the different pages of your site in order to index them properly).” Which tells me that way back in 2000 I already realized the importance of site architecture when it came to SEO. That was somewhat surprising to me, because it seems that many SEOs still haven’t figured that aspect out today!

Additional topics in the 2000 workshop outline were things like “The Difference Between Search Engines and Directories,” as well as a whole section on “Submitting to Directories.” There was mention of Lycos, Excite, WebCrawler, Go (Infoseek), Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, and LookSmart. I find that highly amusing, as it seems like decades ago when we obsessed over those engines and directories!

We definitely don’t bother with any those topics these days, although they were a significant part of my presentations in the early SEO seminars in 2002. I even had a whole case study about the Yahoo Directory. These days I rarely even recommend submitting to them, as their directory is no longer a place that brings website traffic. DMOZ is a submit it and forget about it deal, and LookSmart is…umm…some sort of PPC thingee? (As another aside, I remember when LookSmart was brand new and owned by Reader’s Digest. They had editors who scoured the Web to find the cream of the crop websites. Ahhh…the good old days!)

The above info was basically going to fill up the morning of the old workshop, and then in the afternoon the plan was to look at some of the attendees’ actual websites and make suggested improvements. That’s actually very similar to what we’re planning for our upcoming workshops, as well. Although in the 2008 version, there’s a lot more to it than simply “reviewing the tags and code” as I had in my old outline. For the competitive SEO landscape of today, we plan to arm the attendees with a complete SEO strategy. Anyone who has SEO’d more than one site knows that the strategy is going to be different for each and every website.

So yes, things have definitely changed in the SEO world since the year 2000. It’s important to note, however, that the fundamentals have not changed as much as you may think they have. What an SEO spends their time on today will probably be somewhat different than they did in 2000. But the one element that will never change is the same one that I’ve been advocating forever—whatever SEO methods or strategies you use, the thing that will get you the furthest is creating an awesome website!

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.