In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn't tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location.

Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article:

Take, for instance, the way Google

• Widgets
• Video content
• Video games
• Product comparison
• Travel
• eBooks

They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets.

AdWords was just the start!

Videos, maps & product search…look how Google self-deals in each while managing to call it a value added feature (or some such).

If Google collects data, hosts data, sorts data, recommends personalized consumption habits, and then makes small investments in new content from proven past performers (and then give them a bit of stealth promotion on their network)…how is it possible for Google to lose money? (Outside of lawsuits)?

Google can claim they are “democratizing” media while showing a string of successful partnerships based on investing using real time data that nobody else as access to. Meanwhile if you are a publisher they are gutting your business model through paying people to snag your content and wrap it in their ads, while they also redirect user attention to the companies and acts they have invested in.

“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market… and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

Note that there was no moral debate on the table. Their only internal limitation to setting up a hedge fund and swaying the markets to increase the profits of their trades would be that they thought it was illegal.

How much of the online ecosystem can Google consume before publishers promote other views of the web?

One way to fight this sort of strategy is Yahoo!'s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy. It increases short term margins, but in the longrun it makes one that much more vulnerable. Google can always buy the partner of choice and then ride off the free promotion & validation that the acquisition gained from earlier partnerships. Sure adding more noise to a noisy market can bring in eyeballs, but fleeting ones. Death by a thousand compromises.

The other is to work in markets too small for Google to be interested in. Or to define & create a new vertical, like Zynga did. Even with as shady as Zynga's founder is, longterm that company is in a better position than Yahoo! is.

Originally posted here: Google As Publisher…
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Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms.

Content farms, such as Demand Media's eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry “concern”. “Industry” being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being “competitive threat”.

A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled “Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout“. They talk about “job threatened journalists” and “diminishing content standards”. Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press!

The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs.

For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns “quality” results. Since when has Google ever been about “quality” results? Google's aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant.

“Quality” and relevance may not be the same thing, and thinking in terms of an arbitrary notion such as quality is to misunderstand what Google does.

For example, if a searcher, with a below-average level of reading in English wants a quick answer to a question about the common cold, then who's to say a simple, peer-produced bullet-point explanation is less relevant than a doctoral thesis on the same topic? Everyone benefits when the answer is factually correct, of course, but there's nothing to say the content mill won't offer factually accurate content just because the production process is low cost. If geared towards rankings, the content may also offer the facts in a format the user finds more useful.

Google is mostly about utility. It's about providing value to the end user. “Quality” is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Let's also not forget Google argue that Adwords – advertisements – are content, which are also rewarded by a relevance algorithm. I'm guessing the council won't be arguing that advertisements can be a form of quality content any time soon.

And what does quality mean anyway? And who defines it? I think I can guess what the elitists at the ICSC may argue – they know what it is, and they will define it! Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

Solutions To The Content Crisis

One solution they offer to this perceived “content crisis” is to create a set of public guidelines for internet content, or an accreditation process for syndicated content.

Heh.

Reminds me of the SEO “best practices” debates of years past. The result will be the same, of course – they'll end up talking to an audience that consists entirely of themselves. Everyone else will be getting on with the job of producing content.

What concerns us is that most of these new content syndicators are producing low-quality articles that are link based,

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free.

Sure that can make sense for seasonal promotions, but you could do the same thing by having subdomains and sister websites. Dell.com can be the main site, Dell.net (or deals.dell.com) can be the deals & promotions website, and Dell.org can be the good karma charity site. No paying someone else for brand you already spent to build. Beautiful. But I digress…

In October of 2008 Google's CEO revealed which ad Dollars they were chasing, and what loophole they were opening up in their relevancy algorithms

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

That led to the brand update, and now Google even recommends specific brand modifiers when you search for words like “digital cameras.”

…and here is the problem…

Less than 2 years after Mr. Schmidt's prophetic brand drivel, the Financial Times is doing a series on Google, in which Google's Amit Singhal is blaming brands as being a major issue:

Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By

Excellent Penn & Teller program on multi-level marketing. BTW, NSFW. Those who are easily offended, shouldn't watch it. Any of it. Not one minute…..

As Penn & Teller rightly point out….

Easy Money Is BS

These multi-level marketing schemes aren't limited to home parties for sex toys, BBQ accessories, and household cleaners, of course. They are rife on the internet. If you've spent any time in internet marketing circles, you'll have seen hundreds, no doubt.

Worst business ever.

What Is Multi Level Marketing?

Multilevel marketing is where the salesperson sells items on commission – with a twist. The real “opportunity” – supposedly – is to be had recruiting a downline. A downline consists of other commission-only salespeople who try to recruit other commission-only salespeople. And so on. Some may even sell a few products!

Apparently you're not allowed to refer to the triangular-shaped Egyptian icon anymore….

The Problem With Any Marketing Opportunity

One major problem with MLM, or any market opportunity, be it affiliate or otherwise, is the size of the market.

All markets are limited. All markets are limited because the number of people is finite. Some markets are significantly more limited than others. For example, the number of people who have $2K, or whatever, to spend on, say, a rapid-mass-cash-code-instant-money-generator is quite small.

That isn't to say there isn't money to be made, however the more people trying to flick products, or recruit a downline, and the more people trying to rank well in the SERPS, the less chance a paying customer will arrive via any one site. Claims about making a lot of easy money on-selling such products, therefore, should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Evaluating Market Size And Potential

Over-hyped marketing opportunities often fail because they attempt to sell commodity product into very saturated markets. Or, there may be very little demand for the end product. If there was a lot of demand, surely they'd invest money in experienced salespeople in order to grab market share ahead of competitors.

So how do you size up a market, MLM or otherwise?

If there was an easy way, well….life would be too easy Really, it all comes down to some educated guesswork.

Here's one simple way of thinking about it:

Market size = the number of buyers in the market x quantity of product purchased buyers in the market per year x price per unit

You could get a rough idea of the number of buyers by looking at search volume against keywords you deem to have some level of buyer intent. Estimating the quantity they buy depends very much on the product. Does it need to be replaced often? i.e. a battery. Or is it a one-off? i.e. A house? When multiplied by the cost, you can estimate the potential size of a market.

There are a number of methods you can use. Some more complex than others. All involve guesswork. However, it's important to have a rough idea when deciding where to best focus your efforts.

Quantifying the potential of a market is somewhat more difficult.

I could find out the size of the car market in the US using the above equation, but that doesn't mean I could successfully enter that market. I would also have to evaluate my abilities, the level of competition, and the level of investment required.

This is often the mistake rookie affiliates/multi/level marketers make. They get suckered by the potential numbers, without stopping to think if those numbers make any sense. Even if they do, then does that mean the marketer can successfully enter that market?

Really, the marketing approach – be it MLM or otherwise – is irrelevant. The key questions to ask when considering any market are fundamental ones: how big is the market, how many competitors are there, and how can I compete?

Here is the original post: Multi-Level Marketing BS
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Open source software is awesome, and I am much richer for it existing. But the concepts that work in widely downloaded free software may not apply as well elsewhere. One of the best books on this topic is Jason Lanier's You are Not a Gadget, which in large part inspired this post.

Openness is one of the most widely espoused important ideals upon which to build an online business. The reasons it is preached so heavily are

• anything that is free doesn't have to get over the penny gap, so it is easy to gain traction when compared against paid alternatives
• openness encourages economies of scale built on the labors of others (and re-mashing bits of others works together wrapped in a thick layer of ads)
• the growth and margins created by the above 2 allow the embedded value in network effects to be flipped to a greater fool for a huge multiple of its intrinsic value

But most such plays are exploitative and short term based. They are leveraged bets with hidden costs.

The free tool you use is using you as a free tool.

Given people free access to post content to your server means you spend hours every week fighting spam, and when they post kiddie porn (or similar) your site goes down without warning. Did you build your website on that same “free” service that went down without warning? Oooops.

Not too long ago the publicity whore who preached the importance of loyalty & openness canned all his freelance writers with a 1 week notice, but revoked their ability to delete their own content before breaking the news to them.

YouTube intentionally violated copyright because they figured someone else would get stuck eating the $100 million legal bill.

The network of free content is a PageRank black hole which creatively flows PageRank to the shadow sites heavily wrapped in ads.

Have 43,807 friends? How many of them know your name? I define a friend as someone who you know something embarrassing about, who also knows something embarrassing about you. If there are no inside jokes there is no friendship. The only way you have thousands of friends is if the word friend is meaningless.

The network that was on top of the world seemingly only yesterday is today's digital ghetto.

Once you build exposure, the openness that was initially vital to overcoming obscurity can become a hindrance. Which is precisely why the highest value web companies are quite closed off. Sure they might have a public relations angle where they promote openness (and perhaps you should too), but beyond that it is often better to go the other way.

Read the original post: What Creates Digital Ghettos?
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Google has released guidelines to keep companies away from unethical search engine optimizers, which may cause websites to be dropped from search results. “If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf,” the Google UK guidelines …

Read more: Google: Beware of unethical search engine optimizers

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Generally I have not been a huge fan of registering all your websites with Google (profiling risks, etc.), but they keep using the carrot nicely to lead me astray. … So much so that I want to find a Googler and give them a hug.

Google recently decided to share some more data in their webmaster tools. And for many webmasters the data is enough to make it worth registering (at least 1 website)!

AOL Click Data

When speaking of keyword search volume beakdown data people have typically shared information from the leaked AOL search data.

The big problem with that data is it is in aggregate. It is a nice free tool, and a good starting point, but it is fuzzy.

Types of Searches

There are 3 well known search classifications: navigational, transactional, and informational. Each type of query has a different traffic breakdown profile.

• In general, for navigational searches people click the top result more often than they would on an informational search.
• In general, for informational searches people tend to click throughout the full set of search results at a more even distribution than they would for navigational or transactional searches.
• The only solid recently-shared publicly data on those breakdowns is from Dogpile [PDF], a meta search engine. But given how polluted meta search services tend to be (with ads mixed in their search results) those numbers were quite a bit off from what one might expect. And once more, they are aggregate numbers.

Other Stuff in the Search Results

Further, anecdotal evidence suggests that the appearance of vertical / universal results within the search results set can impact search click distribution. Google shows maps on 1 in 13 search results, and they have many other verticals they are pushing – video, updates, news, product search, etc. And then there are AdWords ads – which many searchers confuse as being the organic search results.

Pretty solid looking estimates can get pretty rough pretty fast.

The Value of Data

If there is one critical piece of marketing worth learning above all others it is that context is important.

My suggestions as to what works, another person’s opinions or advice on what you should do, and empirical truth collected by a marketer who likes to use numbers to prove his point … well all 3 data sets fall flat on their face when compared against the data and insights and interactions that come from running your own business. As teachers and marketers we try to share tips to guide people toward success, but your data is one of the most valuable things you own.

A Hack to Collect Search Volume Data & Estimated CTR Data

In their Excel plug-in Microsoft shares the same search data they use internally, but its not certain that when they integrate the Yahoo! Search deal that Microsoft will keep sharing as much data as they do now.

Google offers numerous keyword research tools, but getting them to agree with each other can be quite a challenge.

There have been some hacks to collect organic search clickthrough rate data on Google. One of the more popular strategies was to run an AdWords ad for the exact match version of a keyword and bid low onto the first page of results. Keep the ad running for a while and then run an AdWords impression share report. With that data in hand you can estimate how many actual searches there were, and then compare your organic search clicks against that to get an effective clickthrough rate.

The New Solution

Given search personalization and localization and the ever-changing result sets with all the test Google runs, even the above can be rough. So what is a webmaster to do?

Well Google upgraded the data they share inside their webmaster tools, which includes (on a per keyword level)

• keyword clickthrough rank
• clickthrough rate at various ranking positions
• URL that was clicked onto

Trophy Keywords vs Brand Keywords

Even if your site is rather well known going after some of the big keywords can be a bit self-defeating in terms of the value delivered. Imagine ranking #6 or #7 for SEO. Wouldn’t that send a lot of search traffic? Nope.

When you back away the ego searches, the rank checkers, etc. it turns out that there isn’t a ton of search volume to be had ranking on page 1 of Google for SEO.

With only a 2% CTR the core keyword SEO is driving less than 1/2 the traffic driven by our 2 most common brand search keywords. Our brand might not seem like it is getting lots of traffic with only a few thousand searches a month, but when you have a > 70% CTR that can still add up to a lot of traffic. More importantly, that is the kind of traffic which is more likely to buy from you than someone searching for a broad discovery or curiosity type of keyword.

The lessons for SEOs in that data?

• Core keywords & raw mechanical SEO are both quite frequently heavily over-rated in terms of value.
• Rather than sweating trying to rank well for the hardest keywords first focus on more niche keywords that are easy to rank for.
• If you have little rank and little work to do then there is lots of time to focus on giving people reasons to talk about you and reference you.
• Work on building up brand & relationships. This not only gives your link profile more karma, but it sends you a steady stream of leads for if/when you fall out of favor a bit with the search engines.

Those who perceive you well will seek you out and buy from you. But it is much harder to sell to someone who sees you as just another choice amongst many results.

Search is becoming the default navigational tool for the web. People go to Google and then type in “yahoo.” If you don’t have a branded keyword as one of your top keywords that might indicate long-term risk to your business. If a competitor can clone most of what you are doing and then bake in a viral component you are toast.

Going After the Wrong Brand Keywords

Arbitraging 3rd party brands is an easy way to build up distribution quickly. This is why there are 4,982 Britney Spears fan blogs (well 2 people are actually fans, but the other 4,980 are marketers).

But if you want to pull in traffic you have to go after a keyword that is an extension of the brand. Ranking for “eBay” probably won’t send you much traffic (as their clickthrough rate on their first result is probably even higher than the 70% I had above). Though if you have tips on how to buy or sell on eBay those kinds of keywords might pull in a much higher clickthrough rate for you.

To confirm the above I grabbed data for a couple SEO tool brands we rank well for. A number 3 ranking (behind a double listing) and virtually no traffic!

Different keyword, same result

Informational Keywords

Link building is still a bit of a discovery keyword, but I think it is perhaps a bit later staged than just the acronym “SEO.” Here the click volume distribution is much flatter / less consolidated than it was on the above brand-oriented examples.

If when Google lowers your rank you still pull in a fairly high CTR that might be a signal to them that your site should rank a bit higher.

Enough Already!

Enough about our keywords, what does your keyword data tell you? How can you better integrate it to grow your business?

Excerpt from: Google SERP CTR Data by Search Rank

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A common practice in the marketing space is for people to diminish what you do, state that it is below them, help rebrand your stuff in a negative light, and then at some point in the future basically clone the idea (maybe with a few new features, maybe not) and then push their clone job aggressively as though it is revolutionary.

Another shady practice is when you ask people for advice and they say “no don’t do that” and then as soon as they hang up the phone they send off emails to their workers telling them to do that which they told you was a bad idea.

I don’t think that the average person or the average marketer is inherently sleazy. But I think when you look at the people who are the most successful certainly a larger than average percent of them engaged in shady behavior at some point.

To keep building yield and returns at some point short cuts start to look appealing. And so you get

• the word of mouth marketing organization sending out brazen spam – and being proud of it
• automated ad networks designed to maximize yield without concern for what they are pushing – even if they categorize some of the offers as “get rich quick” scams
• a search service which wraps its ads around tons of pirated copyright content – paying thieves to steal it & trying to force more of the copyright content online

None of the above is a cynical take or an opinion at this point. That was simply a list of 3 stated facts.

Create a large enough organization with enough people and you can always make something shady seem like it was due to the efforts of a rogue individual, rather than as company policy. A key to doing this effectively within a large organization is to publish public thoughts that are the exact opposite of your internal business practices.

The word “propaganda” was a bad word, as that is what the Germans were using, so Edward Bernays had to give it another name – public relations.

Recently the Google public policy blog published a post titled Celebrating Copyright. Around the same time Viacom leaked the following internal Google document

You can’t get any clearer than that!

In the past when I claimed Google operated as-per the above I was accused of being cynical or having sour grapes. But when you tie together a lot of experiences and observations others lack and you are not conflicted by corporate business interests you have the ability to speak truth. You are not always going to be right, but the lack of needing to cater to advertiser interests and filter means you will typically catch a lot of the emerging trends before they show up in the media – whatever that is worth.

If you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. – Eric Schmdit

Speaking of the media, have you heard about the Middle American Information Bureau

The Century of Self is an amazing documentary, well worth buying

Continued here: Does Marketing Make You Cynical?

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A lot of people who are well known as SEOs spend too much time on self promotion and not enough time on business development. BTW I would classify myself as being in that camp, though I have been slowly migrating since meeting my wife

So much of SEO stuff is sorta ego in place of performance IMHO. And the problem when you hire top SEOs is that even if they have a strong brand and do great work on their own sites, the market pricing for services tends to be so dysfunctionally under-priced that…

• it is mostly an exercise in back patting to even do any client services after you have a good amount of capital, cashflow, and leverage online
• even if you think you are hiring one of the best SEOs you still rarely get to work with them because the people who are out there being really well known are by and large lead generation tools for the company, and the bigger the company is the more likely you are to have an intern servicing your account

Getting serious cashflow out of servicing the SEO market is akin to squeezing water out of a rock, especially when compared against running your own websites.

To me, the measure of an SEO’s success is not in their knowledge, but in their ability to leverage their knowledge to build cashflow. I know money isn’t everything, but we live in a world where the algorithms grow more complex every day. So each day you are working for less than your market value is a day closer you are to being broke!

Spamming and jamming can get you some paydays, but its not easy to *consistently* pull down 7 or 8 figures a year in profit if you are not building at least 1 or 2 properties with serious staying power and momentum behind them.

Given the complexity of SEO and the lack of liquidity in the SEO market I think that by and large the best SEOs who generate the greatest profits derive most of their profits from publishing. Given that I thought I would highlight some of the people who I would view as top SEOs (and why).

Danny Sullivan

Few people have Danny’s knowledge about the history of and trends in search. Even fewer have that type of knowledge while being accessible. And even fewer yet would have been able to put a decade in building up momentum for a brand and website in the industry, stop, start over from scratch, and compete against what they had built for a decade.

Imagine the strongest site you have, giving it a decade of effort, and then one day trying to start from scratch competing directly against it with a similar business model. And yet he pulled it off.

Greg Boser & David Naylor

Greg is probably the first name that comes to mind when someone says “old SEO” (yes even before Bruce Clay). His knowledge is much like Danny’s in being rich with historical context. The thing that Greg has done to make consulting actually worth doing is tie payment to performance. Doing SEO in that manner is like becoming an affiliate, but one with few competitors and a huge advantage in the marketplace.

Dave is the UK version of Greg (or maybe Greg is the US version of Dave?), and they have done some successful projects together for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Stephan Spencer

Stephan Spencer branded himself as being an expert at ecommerce SEO. And, rare amongst SEOs, he has the technical chops *and* the marketing skills to sell to big companies (speaking their language & touring the world speaking at dozens of conferences each year).

They built a software program which is almost as sweet as cloaking would be (if you could get away with doing it constantly with no risk), but partnered with the right kinds of (big brand) companies and branded their GravityStream solution appropriately such that it was never viewed by Google from a negative lens. This created a business model where they could get paid based on performance (like many affiliates do) but be paid for the performance of the core brand website!

NetConcepts was sold to the SEM company Covario, which will be able to benefit from tying the GravityStream technology to their predictive analytics and Google’s quick-indexing caffeine search results.

Patrick Gavin & Andy Hagans

As people, at this point I don’t really trust or respect them (and feel that those who do might be in for some eventual bad news). But as far as being efficient at running businesses, few can compare. Patrick took a gamble and build the Text Link Ads link brokerage into a company he was able to sell for mid 8-figures. And his latest venture in the SEO space was so bold as to call “ensure you are not buying any links” an advanced SEO tip. Meanwhile on Andy’s personal site he recommends iAcquire for your link buying needs

Not content with sitting on the results from TLA, they invested the proceeds (and other investor funds) into building a domain portfolio that even Kevin Ham or Frank Schilling would admire. But they also turned those domain names into functional websites, and have kept cost structures low, while creating blogs with more top x lists than the rest of the web combined and sending out millions of “congrats” emails at potential link sources. The net result? They have built a lead generation business that has been rumored to be pulling in 8 figures a year.

Wherever there is an economic distortion in the economy leading to a large bubble you can bet these guys have at least a half dozen to a few hundred sites, chipping away at the markets 24/7/365. And the only thing increasing faster than their scale is their efficiency!

Matt Cutts

I always hate when I see Matt Cutts listed on top SEO lists and think “hey he is not even an SEO”

…but…

how many SEOs have seen Google’s source code? How many have written a good chunk of it? As one of the top few search engineers at Google, Matt not only has a pulse on what is changing with the web, but he constantly tracks & battles the evolution of spam. His knowledge and experience set allows him to just look at a search result and be able to spot the algorithmic weaknesses & exploits at a glance.

Further, Matt Cutts is better at public relations than 99% of public relations experts are. He is able to constantly promote Google products and engage in issue shaping while rarely being called out for it. And he rarely makes *any* mistakes on the public relations front, even when defending some of Google’s most bogus & hypocritical policies.

Imagine if your company had a b/s slogan of “don’t be evil” while operating with the above strategy. And yet he somehow manages to make it work.

Jason Callus Anus

Imagine entering an industry pulling in attention by calling everyone in the industry a bunch of scumbags – stating that you will clean things up through the use of manual intervention. Then imagine using the economic downturn to fire almost all your editorial employees and leveraging your built up domain authority to create a low quality automated general purpose web scraper, which stuffs Google with indexing their own search results (heavily wrapped in ads). And then imagine link farming to build authority, then using the leverage of that platform to start selling SEO services to corporate clients & selling links!

When Matt Cutts described scraper sites a few years back he said they were “shoot-on-sight“. And yet Jason’s crappy site keeps gaining traffic while almost never adding any value anywhere.

Whenever I think of Mr. Anus, I picture a used car salesman who moved to the state which doesn’t have a lemon law just so he could get the enjoyment of duping people with broken cars. And yet somehow he manages to pull it off. For public relations brilliance he gets a +1. And the same goes for claiming ignorance of SEO and claiming to be anti-spam so he can get away with passing his spam garbage off onto everyone else while rendering Google’s spam team flacid.

Richard Rosenblatt

In 1999 Richard Rosenblatt was able to sell iMall (have you ever heard of it?) for over a half-billion Dollars. He then sold MySpace near the top for $580 million. Trying to strike gold once more, he formed Demand Media and bought eHow.com to build a search-arbitrage content farm. Once growth rates began to slow he then created a controversy by trying to legitimize his model in the media, building his site tons more links. He then used that platform as a success story to get other publishing websites to engage in profit-sharing partnerships where he posts articles on huge trusted authoritative domains like USAToday.com.

Now Demand Media is rumored to be gearing up for an IPO or sale:

Demand Media, a closely watched startup that mines online search engine data to generate thousands of videos and web stories a day, has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an initial public offering.

People familiar with the plans say the company could file for an IPO as early as August. Details have yet to be finalised, but the discussions involve pricing shares around November in an offering valuing the company at about $1.5bn.

A little known fact amongst the SEO industry is that Richard also is the chairman of iCrossing, which is currently being rumored for sale to Hearst Publishing for ~ $400 million:

Under the deal, which is in the final stages of negotiations, iCrossing, one of the nation’s biggest independent digital-marketing shops, is likely to fetch about $375 million, plus bonus payments if it reaches certain targets, these people said.
…
One person familiar with the matter cautioned that iCrossing, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., could still decide to remain independent if it doesn’t attract the right price.

Nice side gig!

That guy flat out prints money. If he keeps it up, in a few years he might put Ben Bernanke to shame.

Honorable Mentions

Over the past few years certainly Jeremy Shoemaker, Brian Clark, and SugarRae have built up some nice empires – each with a vastly different approach. The Caveman is great at tying SEO metrics into real world marketing advice, and has the cashflow to prove it. In terms of being great at building on the consulting model, Bruce Clay comes to mind. Tim Armstrong is tasked with turning around AOL, and if he is successful with it he would deserve a mention. I would also put Cygnus high on any SEO list, but he tends to be a bit shy, and is not very boastful in terms of what he has accomplished. John Andrews would make the list too, but then he doesn’t like lists!

See the original post: Who Are The Top 10 SEOs in the World?