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This is a parable in two parts. Story and the Moral. If you are in a hurry you might want to skip ahead to the moral (But you miss the beautiful story).

The Story

Long ago was the kingdom of Foobr, a kingdom mostly of shepherds, who grazed their sheep under the benevolent but watchful eyes of their King Oggle. There were all types of shepherds in the kingdom, some had only a few sheep, and some had a few hundreds. The sheep too were of all types and varieties, some gave a ton of wool, and some only a few bales.

What man webmaster of you, having an hundred sheep sites, if he lose one of them gets one penalised, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?
Luke 15:4

For a long time the kingdom, and its economy based on wool prospered well. It was not a very efficient marketplace, though, as the shepherds who had more sheep grazed more of the common fodder and pastures, and these shepherds got rich. The shepherds who had a single but more productive sheep could only make so much wool!

The king though of himself as hard but fair. “Ah! I need to overcome this inefficiency in my kingdom. I need to reward those who use resources judiciously, and punish those who have a lot of inefficient sheep.” he thought. He asked his Sages to get to work to determine which sheep were inefficient, and needed to be killed! “This will increase the efficiency in my kingdom, and make the kingdom happier overall.”

The sages worked hard, analyzed millions of records and found out that red sheep were less efficient than other sheep. “If we kill all the red sheep, the efficiency of the kingdom will go up by 10% and in two years the production by 5%.” The king was duly impressed and ordered all the red sheep killed. As promised, the efficiency increased by 10% overnight!

****

Ramu was a simple shepherd. He had but one sheep. It was efficient, but as luck would have it red in color. The king’s decree left him without a means of income. “I guess this was my bad luck. I will not buy a red sheep next year, and buy only the most efficient sheep.”

For some reason, unexplained at that time, the quick gains in efficiency were not maintained. “I know, we need to kill the least efficient sheep again.” So the sages went back to their laboratories again, and found that now the pink sheep were the least efficient. The king ordered all pink sheep destroyed. Guess what was the color of Ramu’s sheep?

Ramu was not alone in this misery of his. Many other people, who had but one sheep had their sheep killed, and went to a starving condition. The real culprits, the people who the king wanted to target, the people who had hundreds of sheep, lost many of their sheep as well, but only a percentage of their total sheep. Everyone saw this happening, and even those people who had only one efficient sheep decided to hedge their bets, and started having many inefficient sheep. The more sheep the king killed, the more prudent it became to have many inefficient sheep. In no time efficiency had plummeted, and total production of wool was a fraction of earlier.

The Moral

Spam in webpages is a major problem facing search engines. For long the Search Engines have tried to counter this problem by algorithms in which nobody knows which website will be classified as spam. If the algorithms decides that your website is spam, boo, it is toast.

With Google driving most of the traffic to most sites, no webmaster can afford to have his only source of income depend on Google’s whims. This means that they must hedge their bets against the vagaries of Google’s changing guidelines, and instead of building one kick-ass website must build a large number of websites. Bye-bye engaging content, welcome mediocrity.

For trade to flourish, and for wealth to be made there must be a set of rules which everybody knows, a priory, and if they hold themselves to these rules they must be assured of their safety. This is not the case on the Internet. On the internet, rule of man, not rule of law works. Google is the judge, jury and executioner. This leads to a wild west landscape where webmasters must hedge their bets by having a large number of so-so websites.

In security, for long we have known that “Security through Obscurity” does not work. I postulate that even in fighting spam, “Security through Obscurity” does not work. After all for ten years Search Engines have tried fighting spam though Security through Obscurity, is it not time that we rethink the strategies?

One of the biggest inventions for English society, which allowed their citizens certain inviolable rights, and which allowed them to build a strong society on rule of law, not rule of men was the Magna Carta, which proclaimed,

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, … but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land….

We need a similar proclamation

No Website shall be taken or penalized, or be relieved of its Ranking, or Traffic, …. but by the lawful judgement of the Law of the Land which are known to all ….

This will give the webmasters the peace of mind to focus their energies on one website, with deep and engaging content instead of making them hedge their bets on many mediocre web site. It will give the peace of mind that they will not be penalized by an ever changing law, which will make some of their tactics shady, and take away their only source of income.

Here is to a better internet.

If you liked this, you might also like Parable of the Captcha or Parable of the Nofollow. The name is of course stolen from Parable of the Lost Sheep

Oh and yes, 42topics is live now. Did you know we have an SEO section, and that you can create a topic about topics you care about?

Bob Massa is a pioneer in the field of Internet marketing. He has been working on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Placement since 1997. He has operated Magic-city.net and SearchKing. He gained both fame and notoriety when he sued Google, which is a classic case study in PR stunts. We talked about the importance of SEO and Marketing for startups. More information about him can be had at bobmassa.com or his blog at Ask the SEO guru.

Shabda: Would you tell us a little about yourself. How did you get started with SEO and Internet Marketing? What is about this field which keeps you inspired?

Bob Massa: I’ve always been a modest sort of person and find it difficult to speak of myself without being self deprecating. So, instead of blowing my own horn, I’ll use some of the things others have said about me.

1. Bob Massa has been one of the more respected figures in SEO & Internet marketing since before my time. He originally gained fame - or notoriety - for suing … v7n blog
2. Bob Massa is one of the most eloquent people in the search marketing industry. I have wanted to interview him for a long time, and finally got around to it. He was probably one of my favorite interviewees. Aaron Wall - Seobook
3. Bob is one of the Internet’s most recognized, leading experts on top search engine placement. i-cop

I have been in sales and marketing most of my life and in 1996 my wife and I owned a printing company. Each day more and more of our customers wanted us to “get them on the internet”.
I was killing myself trying to make a living in a small printing company. I was working very hard. It’s tough making a living when you’re selling sheets of paper for a penny each. Especially when Kinkos sells them 5 for a penny.
Then in ‘96 the 14 hour days, fast food 2 meals a day and the three packs of cigarettes caught up with me and I had a heart attack at the age of 41. It was a mild one, (something only a doctor would say), but it did force me to take a hard look at my life and cut back to one greasy burger and two packs a day. I’m not much of a take-it-easy kind of guy so while I was recuperating, I put in the AOL disk I’d been spammed in the mail with and got online, (even back then knew that sucked). BUT, since we already had customers coming into our print shop asking us if we did “websites”, and I couldn’t sell them printing, I talked my wife into reading Webpages for Dummies and we were rolling.
I’d write the text and she’d build the pages but it didn’t take me long to figure out, “Ok, there’s the webpage, now what”? That led to me reading everything I could get my hands on about search engines and search engine placement. Back then there wasn’t much, it wasn’t called SEO yet and what was there was wrong. It was great. I enjoyed the challenge but even more the confidence and sense of accomplishment from seeing my efforts go to #1 spots. It was fun and it was easy to sell.
As for keeping inspired, that isn’t really the thing. I have done so much SEO for so many clients over the last 11 years that most of the time I see it as simply my job. Every so often a project comes along that gets me excited at the challenge again but most small businessmen don’t stay in the same business for years because they make so much money they want more. Most of them stay in the business because they can’t afford to get out. I’m no different. I have a lot of people depending on me, it is a good business, I’m good at it, I’ve built a good team and I still get excited at the challenge. So is that inspiration or just not being able to afford to get out?
And then there is always THE question. If it is this good now, what’s it going to be like in 10 years? I like the feeling of being a part of that and even in my own small way helping to define that direction.

Shabda: In many circles SEO or Internet Marketing is equated with spam. Why is this impression of SEO and what can Internet Marketers do to counter this reputation?

Bob Massa: The negative impression comes from a LOT of people talking about it but few really understanding it. The more people that understand SEO is not about being #1 in a search engine rather it is about increased awareness of a product, service or concept that generates traffic that converts into a desired action, the sooner the industry will be able to serve more people better and at a better return.
I’m not really sure internet marketers can counter anyone’s reputation other than their own. In my opinion, any professional needs not concerns themselves with others but instead focus on what they can control and strive to learn more, manage better and exceed their clients expectations . Delivering excellence will always be a viable product in any industry. To say it is easy. To deliver it is hard work BUT once delivered trust is established and that can not be discounted.
There is nothing in the world that can not be made with a little less quality and sold at a lower price. He who considers price alone is this man’s legal prey.

Shabda: Talking about startups, many startups I talk to believe that if their product is any good, the marketing will take care of itself. “After all Google grew this big on word of mouth“, is what they say. What would you say to this and what would be your advice?

Bob Massa: I would say that nothing sells itself and to believe that Google relied on word of mouth alone is a mistake of epic proportions. There can be little argument that Google actually built a better mousetrap at a time when the world was overrun with mice. BUT, the better the product performs, the more need there is to market it effectively.
If you think for a moment that Google was not as brilliant at marketing and PR as they were at mousetrap building then you really should read The Google Story. That book will clearly illustrate that a LOT of marketing went into all that free word of mouth. They worked hard at getting early adopters and that coupled with a value rich product is the formula for success with any business.
By the way, early adopters are the ones who tell the communicators who are the ones who get people searching for information about you. To learn more about how that free word of mouth thing works, read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It will make you money!

Shabda: Say I am a small tech startup with a budget of 10000 USD only. I can spend this to make a kick ass product, and hope that marketing take care of itself, or spend 5000 for making a so-so product and spend 5000 on marketing. What would you recommend?

Bob Massa: Spend $1,000 building a kick-ass product and $9,000 on marketing. Marketing NEVER takes care of itself.

Shabda: You have sometimes mentioned the example of one of your clients, who used to post post-it notes to public restrooms, and got a ton of leads this way. How can startups use these types of unconventional marketing to get users?

Bob Massa: There is one indisputable fact. If you believe you can’t afford any marketing —- you’re right.
The smart thing is to develop a strategy, set a goal and a budget and then spend that budget and hit your goals.
I have no idea why, but it seems most startups do a LOT of work and planning on almost every aspect of building their company except marketing. It seems so strange to me. Sales are the MOST important aspect to any start up because you may have invented the world’s greatest mouse trap but if you don’t sell them, you go broke and a year from now no one will even know you ever existed. A sales strategy should actually be the first thing you plan for.
You should hire professionals when you can because in the long run it will be cheaper by delivering results faster, but for many start-ups funding and capital is a major issue. That does not change fact you market well or you die! The world doesn’t care whether you’re underfunded or not. Consumers don’t need you nearly as bad you need them. You can blame everyone but yourself for failing but the reality is that regardless of what your budget is, it is up to you to move your product or service. If you don’t —- you die. That is just the way it is and the sooner you accept that reality and deal with it, the better your chances of success.
There are a LOT of ways to get the word out. Read that book I mentioned “The Google Story” for starters, but even beyond that, there are bathroom walls, there are taxis always looking for money, there are events, conferences, rally’s and get togethers everyday. Maybe you can’t afford an ad at the conference, but could you afford to put a poster in the coffee shop next door to the conference hall? Could you pay a guy to circle the block on a bicycle with your ad on a trailer?
Could you put a monkey in a T-shirt with your ad on it?

Shabda: For a startup which is just starting out, would you recommend focusing their marketing spend on PPC (which will give them costly but predictable returns) or focus on organic results, which have a bigger upside but higher risks?

Bob Massa: Well, every business is unique and every business owner’s objectives, (And budgets), are unique, so there’s no perfect answer that would be the “right” thing for every business.
PPC is good for generating traffic instantly, split testing ads and potentially burning through a lot of cash fast. If the business chooses to implement a PPC strategy, it is very important to set strict budget and stay on budget.
To me, there is no such thing as either or. I believe every website should always be focused on building organic traffic. You may choose to use PPC but you should never choose NOT to include SEO.

Shabda: What are the resources which a novice to Internet Marketing, but an accomplished technology person can use to come up to speed on SEO/SEM?

Bob Massa: Try to spend a little time each week reading your favorite seo blog or forum and of course the more time you spend, the faster you learn, but outside of that, you really don’t need any resources other than simple common sense.
Make sure your site is getting spidered and indexed, try to stay focused on appropriate content for the appropriate page or section and most importantly, always be looking for linking relationships and try to stop thinking like a technician and think like a customer.

Shabda: You have a long association with Internet marketing. What are the broad changes you see in Internet marketing landscape today, compared to say 5 years ago. Compared to 10 years ago? What is the direction this industry is moving into?

Bob Massa: Compared to 5 years ago, I would say it is blended organic results. 5 years ago you only had to compete with other people in your field. Now you are competing with Wikipedia, Youtube, books and news at least on virtually every keyword.
10 years ago it was Google and their Page Rank algorithm.
And where is moving now? PERSONALIZATION. Showing a specific set of results to you based on your online history, (which includes a LOT more than just search history), and then showing different results to me based on my online history.
I also think this next two years is going to explode in wireless. As more and more carriers offer web services on mobiles at a fixed cost, literally billions more people will start accessing the web. Remember a lot more people have cell phones than computers.

Shabda: How do you see the Social aspects of the web, and in particular social media affecting the search industry?

Bob Massa: To you and I, social media does us little good outside of just hanging out and/or trying to make links “look” natural. There is tons and tons of data on every social media site and the vast majority of it inane. We would go crazy trying to find anything other than our circle of friends we like to play with. However to a Google who is very interested in personalization and with the resources to index and cross reference all that data now they are in a position to know much, much more about you and better know what ads you would most likely respond to favorably. Increased return on their ads, that how I see it affecting the search industry.

Shabda: Would someday Google be dethroned of their prominence in search space? Would social search play a part in this, and are you bullish on the social search?

Bob Massa: It is always possible. There is always someone capable of building a better mousetrap and unseating the established leader. I believe if MSN acquires Yahoo, that could pose a threat and I also believe Google pushes the line and I could see a time when the US Government may step in a do to Google what they did to Microsoft.
I’m not sure what you mean by “social search”. If you are referring to social search as the wiki refers to it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_search , the no, not really. Unless you are able to index and cross reference all that data and assign it to an individual, then I don’t see it having a lot impact other than research.

Shabda: Before we leave, would you like to share some insight, hard to find information, or quick tip for the small tech startups?

Strive not for adequate, strive only for excellence. It is wonderful to dream big and shoot for the moon but you build a business one customer at a time. Focus on the little stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself.

This was the interview of Bob Massa. You can read more of Bob’s insights at 1, 2, 3. This is part of our series of interviews about “SEO for Startups”. So subscribe today and stay updated.

Oh and did you know that 42topics is live now? And we have a startup and a SEO sections. Or you can create your own! So join now and lets get rolling.

(A story about Captcha, and why they do more bad than good. You may also like Parable of the Nowfollow)

Part 1: Captcha and Spammers

In a time not so long ago, and not so far off existed a country called Theweb. It was a well populated place, populated with upstanding citizens who called themselves Webpage, and lived together in harmony.

For long there was no conflict in Theweb, but where happiness resides can evil be the far behind? The evil S.P.Ammers infiltrated Theweb. They were able to bend a Webpage to do their bidding.

Of course the Webpages were enraged. How dare the evil S.P.Amers do their evil in the fair land of Theweb? So they developed a weapon called Captcha. The S.P.Ammers evil weapons were useless against Captcha, and so Theweb had a period of peace and prosperity.

But of course the S.P.Ammers were not waiting during this time. They had developed huge weapons such as Botnets which broke Captcha, and rendered it ineffective. Chaos reigned in Theweb, while the Webpages rushed to build bigger, stronger and better Captcha. Ah a war it was! The Webpages building bigger and stronger Captchas, the S.P.Ammers building bigger and stronger Botnets to fight them.

And yet, Webpages had a single purpose, a single Raison d’entre. They wanted to serve TheHumans, who seeked information the Webpages had. TheHumans were affected less than S.P.Ammers, but Captchas made it difficult for them to use Webpages as well. As the Captchas got bigger and stronger, it got harder and harder for TheHumans to use Webpages.

Part 2: Sometime later

The Captcha-Botnet arms race heated up. TheHumans caught in this crossfire, had so much trouble talking to Webpage that they stopped using all together.

Part 3: The Moral of the story

As I argued in Parable of the Nofollow, some social problems have no technical solution. Trying to beat automated spam using automated methods is a very slippery slope. There is one area, where spam is even more rampant than comment spams - Email. Just wonder if you needed to crack a captcha, each time you needed to send a mail. And captchas, have been getting stronger, and more difficult to crack for humans. And yet spammers can crack the hardest captchas with greater than 10% efficiency. How long till the efficiency of humans and bots start to converge? Of course Spam is a problem, and we need to find a method to combat this menace. Akismet does a very good job of identifying comment spam, and it is free or extremely affordable, depending on your needs. Of course it can have some false positives/false negatives, so human some intervention will be needed.

By now, we have a very good idea how to fight spam unobstusively, using lessons we learnt in fighting email spam. Let us use these techniques to fight comment spam and give captcha a rest.

If you liked this parable, you may like to read, Parable of the nofollow, or subscribe to the feed so you can stay on top of such stories.

Part 1: Webpage and the Umans

In a time not so long ago, and not so far off existed a country called Theweb. It was a well populated place, popluated with upstanding citizens who called themselves Webpage, and lived together in harmony.

Each Webpage knew some other web pages in Theweb, and though well of them. You could ask a Webpage if they knew another Webpage, and they always replied truthfully.

Next to Theweb existed another country called Realworld. Its citizens, called Umans started to trade with Theweb, and Webpages. When Umans wanted any information, they traded with Webpage which had the information. This trade of information for time worked well, but for one problem.

For Umans finding the Webpage they wanted to Trade with was hard, as there were too many Webpages. Asking each page, if they had the information the Uman seeked, or knew a Webpage who did, was difficult for the Umans.

Meanwhile some Umans had created a Deus ex machina to solve this problem. Called the G.O.Gle, it had knowledge of each Webpage from Theweb. Umans could ask the G.O.Gle, which Webpage had the information they seeked, and the G.O.Gle found the correct answers.

Yet the G.O.Gle needed to find which Webpage was more important. For this it devised as system, where it asked each Webpage about the other Webpages they knew about. The Webpage which was known by many Webpages was deemed to be important, and the G.O.Gle asked more Umans to trade with that Webpage.

This system seemed to work well, with trade between Umans and Webpages flowing freely. Yet when trade starts, can corruption be far behind? Unlike Theweb, Realworld had evil citizens as well. Called S.P.Ammers, they wanted to divert the trade to the Webpages they wanted. S.P.Ammers could hypnotise a Webpage into telling the G.O.Gle about pages they did not know about.

This baffled the G.O.Gle. Earlier each Webpage told about the other Webpages it knew about truthfully. So using popularity of the Webpage, it could find which Webpage was important. Now it could not be sure if the Webpage was telling the truth, or it has been hypnotized by any S.P.Ammer. The G.O.Gle was stumped, its results started getting flawed, the trade between Webpage and Umans was disrupted.

Part 2: Revenge of the G.O.Gle

After trying to find a solution to this problem for a long time, the G.O.Gle had a brainwave. “Why not solve this problem at the source. Let the Webpages deal with this problem.” So G.O.Gle, who now had a huge say in the trade, asked Webpages to deal with other Webpages in a different way. Earlier, when asked if a Webpage knew another Webpage, they could have said “Yes, I know her” or “No, I do not know her”. Now when a Webpage knew another Webpage, but was not sure if it was work of S.P.Ammer, it could also say “Yes, I know her. NOFOLLOW.”.

Everyone was amazed by the great wisdom shown by the great wisdom shown by the G.O.Gle, and praised this solution.

Part 3: Collateral damage

A few years had passed, and the work of S.P.Ammers was still relentless. They were still busy hypnotizing Webpage, to suit the trade to their liking. What everyone seemed to have forgotten in the affair of the Nofollow, was that there were other methods of trade apart from going via G.O.Gle. And for S.P.Ammers hypnotizing the Webpages did not take any work. Given enough volumes, they could still mould the Trade to their liking.

And also by now Webpages had become very wary of other Webpages. If they were not absolutely sure about the other Webpage, they were telling, “Yes, I know her. NOFOLLOW.”.

The whole Theweb was build on the premise of one Webpage knowing many other Webpages. They even had a name for this relationship, Hyperlinks.

Influencial citizens like Ms. W.I.Kipedia, refused to know any one. Even if she knew a Webpage, and being such an upstanding citizen, she knew all the nice people, she told “Yes, I know her. NOFOLLOW.”.

For the G.O.Gle also this proved to be can of worms. The basic information using which they were able to find which Webpages were important was skewed, and so the results with G.O.Gle were skewed as well.

Part 4: The Good news

Unfortunately there is no good news. The few years have passed, and S.P.Ammers have been winning. More people are falling back behind the wall of blanket Nofollow, without regards for whether this will deter spammers. There is less data avaialable for the G.O.Gle to find important Webpages, which maens that unimportant ages are considered important. Trade between Theweb, and Realworld is happening, but spammers can turn the flow of trade to their will.

Moral of this Parable

There is no parable without morals, is there? Nofollow, of course, have not been as successful as first promised. Sites with clean link sources like Wikipedia label all external links as nofollow. This means that useful webpages, which Wikipedia links to(and hence are important and useful), are ranked lower than a page which a spammer creates, and which are linked from a link farm.

So what is the solution? As argued in The Tragedy of the Commons, some social problems have no purely technical solution. This problem falls in one of those problems. A much better solution is to use something like Akismet API to check if a link looks like spam, and let user handle the few false negative which happen.