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Mike Grehan Interview
Mike Grehan is most definitely a colorful and well respected SEM expert. To me he is just one of those guys who always makes perfect sense so naturally I like to read all his stuff. Instead of filling this interview with fluff let’s get right to the good stuff, if you are interested in Mike’s bio you can take a look at it here. Let’s find out more about who Mike Grehan is today.
I do not want to start this interview off wrong but has anyone ever told you that you look a lot like Jerry Springer?
Frequently, first thing in the morning, my wife tells me I look like shit (doesn’t have to be the morning, come to that). But no, she never mentioned Jerry Springer yet.
I wonder if anyone has ever told Jerry Springer that he looks like me (or shit, if it comes to that)?
I just do not have the time to visit forums these days but check in
whenever I sense a buzz. You make good sense to me in your “Goodbye, SEO Push. Hello, SEO Pull” article in response to people who believe that there is a sandbox. Obviously many have missed your great follow up in your blog, tell us more about all this?
I think my blog post helped to sum up a few misunderstandings about my thoughts.
In the first instance, I don’t believe that there is a single thing/symptom which affects all new domains and penalizes them for a period of time. It’s simply not true that ALL new web sites launched under new domains suffer this.
For instance, take my own blog. I’m late in the game. So, I registered the domain toward the end of September last year. I made the first post to it in the first week of October. Five days later it was in the top ten at Google and heading for number one for a search on my name. As an aside, that same week it went into the top ten at Yahoo!, Jeeves and straight in at number one at MSN.
Anyway, it’s not a big-deal site. It’s just my random musings thrown into a very bad template full of very buggy code (as most people have spotted). I haven’t done anything special with it. There’s no “on page” optimization of any kind. There was no press release, no fanfare, nothing other than a couple of links it got from my book site and my newsletter site.
Interestingly, a back-link check at Google shows that it only has 12 links (without showing the two initial links I gave it). But since it was launched, I can tell from my referrer stats that in a short space of time it has accrued a much larger number of links.
Sure, I’m very lucky that some people writing for authority sites have found the odd tidbit in it interesting enough to want to link to it. It’s true that it does have that advantage, even though it’s my personal space, it’s still connected to my business.
But for a tiny little site what really got it off the ground was when it was leaking around the SEO community that I’d started a blog. One of my colleagues pointed out a much higher number of searches on my name around that time.
Not everyone is going to make the assumption that my blog is named after me, so the best way to find it is to search on my name, right?
The combination of a little bit of genuine link equity and a small but detectable trace of an increase in the query stream, I believe, is enough to let a search engine know that its end users may be interested in it enough for them to want put a gentle gust of wind in the sails.
That aside, I’ve worked on mini-sites for sales promotion purposes which are literally days old but linked to large brands and they swoop in at real speed to number one for relevant searches. Of course, they’re backed with PR campaigns and other forms of advertising and promotion. But this also proves the point at the other extreme of the power of the “SEO pull” analogy I use.
On the other side of the discussion, there are many reasons why you may not be found in a search engine index. There are the obvious technical issues that SEOs deal with every day of the week to make having a site crawled easier.
Most people talking about this “sandbox” issue are SEOs, so we can assume that they have eliminated any technical barriers. But there again, crawling the web is a monumental task. Even with the search engine wars with claims of huge index sizes by the major players, it’s estimated that they still have less than one third of what’s available on the web. So there’s no absolute guarantee, even with technical obstacles overcome, that you’re going to get crawled and indexed anyway.
Not only that, search engines now work with a tiered index. There are levels of priority based on certain criteria for specific queries. So if you are indexed but still can’t be found on a keyword search, is that really the “sandbox”? What if you’re so low in the index that specific words simply do not scope to your pages? And what if you’re so insignificant or unpopular that nobody with any importance in the grand scheme of link analysis can think of a reason to link to you?
And what if there’s no end user “pull” of any description to generate a query stream that a search engine could recognize as a signal of a degree of interest?
You know, Google can discover a huge amount about end users from activity around the interface. But they also get huge amounts of end user data away from the interface, as transmitted by the toolbar. Plus they have access to other end user data such as Alexa and A9 as a “for instance”.
I don’t think the “sandbox” issue is going to go away anytime soon though. My views won’t change. I’m simply asking people who think they have this situation to stand back and ask themselves “what’s so great about my site that anybody would want to go to it anyway?” If you don’t really believe that you can compete and earn that top 20 position, what difference would it make if you are in Google’s index but can’t be found?
Somewhere in the, rather heated debate, as it became, there was a mention of mom and pop sites which “deserve” to be found in Google’s index. And that made me raise an eyebrow, I have to say. For sure, every one who has a web site deserves to be found on the web. It’s open territory and everyone has a right to be there.
But nobody “deserves” to be in Google’s index above and beyond any other. It’s their database and you have no more right to being in there than you have of being in any other company’s database.
At a tangent for a moment.
It’s interesting how desperate we are to be in Google’s database and how desperate we are, generally, to be OUT of so many others!
You have to keep things in perspective. Google and no other search engine are the gatekeepers to the web. And the service they provide is for their own end users. And that doesn’t necessarily mean your potential customers. It means people who come to visit their web site. After all, big as it is, Google is just another web site.
I think it’s possible that sometimes people may have fused Google+world-wide-web as one and the same thing in their minds. And if that is the case - the “sandbox” issue will be around for the next 20 years or so, I guess!
SEOBUZZBOX is only a few months old but I find it ranking for all kinds of things. What is even more surprising to me is that I am competing with people who have been blogging for much longer than I. What do you believe it is that allows one blogger to go forth and prosper while another seems to not get any love from the search engines?
You have the answer in your domain name: buzz.
It’s not too hard to see that you do a lot of networking and you have quite a unique voice. There are zillions of blogs and many, many about search engine marketing. However, most of them are just littered with posts linking back to their buddy’s recent blog post.
It’s like a SEM merry-go-round sometimes. I have someone email a link to me and I follow it. I end up trailing thru five or six links and end up back where I started and none the wiser than I was when I read the first blog post.
You have original content and you picked out people in the industry who have opinions which are valued to interview.
There are business blogs and personal blogs all clamoring for attention. But the one that gets the respect of the surrounding community and generates a bit of buzz is always going to stand a better chance.
I feel that something major happened in the serps since the dreaded Jagger updates, what kinds of things are you seeing on your end that you can tell us about?
I think something major happened to those people who totally relied on reciprocal linking. But for those sites that are the real deal, it’s business as usual.
I work with clients who have top ten ranking positions which they have held for years. Throw Florida, Jagger anything you like at them. As I said in my ClickZ column a while ago, the Gods themselves can throw freakin’ lightning bolts at them and they’ll still be there.
I spoke with a guy from the research side at a search engine and we talked about faking linkage data. He had a good analogy for it. He said: “You can walk around pretending that you’re a brain surgeon when you’re actually a plumber. But pretty soon, someone is going to find out.”
I think the overwhelming desire that some people have to get links of any kind, from anywhere at all, looking for a quick fix is a real danger.
Like any other business, your presence should have a natural growth curve. Search engines have enough data about communities online to spot spikes in them. I just never really understand the lengths that people go to get as many links as they can as quickly as they can, when working on how to get two or three great authority links is much more beneficial in the long term.
I have a so called “mom and pop” business and luckily have a few computer skills, so I marketed my product to page #1 in Google, but I know for sure there are many who can’t afford services beyond a couple grand. You yourself mention that it is not about doing manual tweaks, it’s about the searchers. Can a regular person with a gift for writing create a buzz large enough to succeed without any knowledge of SEM?
I’m writing the follow up column to my “A grand plan for SEO” article this week. So I’ve been looking at the many emails I received from readers when I asked for their thoughts on budgeting.
It’s split about 60/40 between those who think you couldn’t get value for a grand from an SEO and those who think you could. Most of those for and against arguments came from practitioners of all sizes.
However, I was surprised by the number of emails I got from actual mom and pop (small businesses) who told me they had parted with cash to so called SEOs and got absolutely nothing in return. They were in the search engine dungeons when the SEO came along and they remained there with no change at all after parting with their cash.
And then they’re told by the SEO it’s the “sandbox”. Yes it’s becoming a real chestnut to hide behind that one.
With the rapid rise in awareness of SEM the industry has grown at a phenomenal rate. And it has brought with it more than its fair share of dilettantism.
So not only are some smaller companies not getting value for their money, they’re being serviced by complete amateurs too.
What’s a mom and pop supposed to do? Well, there’s something else I learned from my feedback. And that’s that we need to be careful about terminology. There’s a great deal of difference between creating your own job and paying yourself, which is effectively what pure mom and pops do. And the decision to start a small company and grow it. It’s a very big difference and very different approach.
You have to be realistic. If you’re a mom and pop and you have no business plan, no idea about marketing and no ambition to grow and compete for market share, you’ll get exactly where you’re going: nowhere.
So maybe you are just creating your own job. Fine, no problems there. Just don’t expect to be found in the top ten at Google for anything worthwhile.
If you are an ambitious small company looking to grow but only have a small marketing budget, no problem there either. Marketing is not just about how much you spend - it’s about how best you spend.
If you understand communities and the power they have over brands for instance, you can start and tap into that.
Think about this. Two college kids in a garage in California running a tiny business. We now know this company as Google.
What about a kid who names his company after his nickname and changes the direction of an entire business sector. We now know this as Napster.
Or how about an Austrian guy who creates a sticky fluid with a not so favorable taste and changes the way things are marketed in that sector, forever. We now know this as Red Bull.
The aforementioned were nothing more than the dreams and ambitions of tiny start-ups which have had a huge impact worldwide. And yet none of them had huge advertising and promotion budgets. Most of the awareness was based on pure “buzz”. And that’s the power of communities.
I am going to stop here so hopefully you will drop back in for a chat the next time people need clarification as to what you were getting at, sound good?
That was very polite for shut up, Mike, we’ve heard enough already.
I do actually have to call that wrap, as I have a job and I seem to have been neglecting it for the past hour!
Nope, you do not bore me and I will also be looking forward to your follow up column on the “A grand plan for SEO” article, thank you Mike.
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January 31st, 2006 at 8:17 am
As always great interview ! :-)
January 31st, 2006 at 9:48 am
You always do great interviews - how do you carry them out? email, MSN, phone etc? If phone could you release them as podcasts?
January 31st, 2006 at 10:19 am
Thank you WebPro.
Fraser - What I do is drive people completely nuts and do not take no for an answer. ;)
Podcast, hmm, thanks for the idea…
January 31st, 2006 at 10:53 pm
great interview :)
February 1st, 2006 at 9:30 am
Thanks Aaron, it’s nice to know that you visit my blog without me having to spam your inbox! ;)
February 12th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Nice interview and excellent to hear that SEOBuzzBox is enjoying some high rankings this early in the game. Hats off to the content you’ve been publishing Mr. Pratt.
December 22nd, 2006 at 7:38 am
Agree, Mike always makes SEM interesting and so nearly always agree with him ;-)
Lee