Google's Webmaster Tools Enhance Backlink Information

One of the holy grails of search marketing is to capture backlinks. It's hard to find the quality ones, it's hard to get some good (I hate the term) link bait, and it's hard to develop a backlink strategy that involves a ton of directories you've never heard of before.

Now that Google's added backlink information as a part of its webmaster tools, people like Matt Cutts and Andy Beal are reiterating the following:

- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

So, if you can assume that viewing more backlinks that may or may not carry any ranking weight is inherently a good thing, the first question I had was what's the point? Why would Google add the links that they would essentially consider to be dren, when a simple link:searchintelligence.blogspot.com will actually give me some of the links that actually lend weight to the ranking relevance.

To tell the truth, I havent exactly figured it out yet. I'm not sure what the real value is, but I do know that the more data revealed, there's a potential that more useful revelations can be made, however, it also carries the potential that data-overload and perception blindness might set in.

I'm definately going to play with this for a while and write again on how it can be turned from raw data into actionable intelligence.

Hard Facts: First Section Review

This book is organized into three sections, for this post, I will be talking about the section called "setting the stage" in Pfeffer and Sutton's book.

Pfeffer and Sutton start the book by describing what evidence based decision making is. It's essentially defined as a process to find the best evidence that you can. Through primary or secondary research, collecting the data and acting on that data. They say that there is an inherent perception blindness when making decisions from what you've always done, what you thought was true, your personal philosophies or beliefs and what ever fad is gripping the business world at the moment. I was impressed with the description of evidence based management or decision making is not a "thing you do", it doesnt have discreet boundaries, it's a process, it's a way to make decisions with a little data to help you out.

One of the examples they explore is how mergers and acquisitions tend to show strain about a month after the merger. Cisco has a great record for mergers because they measure several aspects for its merger targets, not just product or service, not just market share.. but culture as well. They've walked away from deals when the culture didn't match.

Pfeffer and Sutton identify common problems that consistently cause failure.

• Casual benchmarking
• Repeating what's worked in the past, or what's worked for others
• Following deeply held, yet unexamined ideologies
• Substituting facts for conventional wisdom
  

Each of these common problems can cause failure in strategies because they either ignore the data that's there, they fail to take into account new, unmeasured data or they assume that their belief is enough to make decisions. One of my favorite quotes (which I have in my quote generator) is David Hume's quote: "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence". It's not wrong to believe, but in business and strategy, you need to have evidence to support those beliefs.

They provide logical and interesting anecdotes (which, in and of themselves are not evidence) that elucidate some of the principles, and they do an excellent job in documentation and referencing the examples they provide.

In my niche market of "search intelligence", I live and breathe data. Whether it's analytics or mined data, I try to be very careful to either only say what I can prove, or qualify any statement that has more intuition than data.

I just finished the second section, and without finishing it yet, I can say... buy this book. Read it, and let me know what you think. It's good.

Perception Blindness and Competitive Intelligence Methodologies

For those of you who know me, you know that Michael Shermer is one of my heroes. Ever since I read his book "Why People Believe Weird Things", I realized how much of my life I had spent being a pattern seeking animal. I loved science, but never took it to be much more than a series of facts or theories. In fact, I couldnt even define "theory" very well.

It is due in part of Shermer and the Skeptic Society and Magazine that I live and breathe evidence. I need evidence in life and evidence in my work. Analytics seem to me a perfect example in marketing that evidence is needed. Before I do that, I wanted to show you a video... and you must watch this before you read on... from Michael Shermer's talk at TED - (it's short... less than 3 minutes).



Did you watch that? Did you miss it? Did you see it?

Perceptual Blindness hits all analytics readers at some point or another. Often times, when I'm speaking to a client about competitive intelligence, they think that it's a "thing" that I do. In reality, it's a process... like science is a process. Competitive Intelligence is a methodology and a way to process information in order to make predictions about something. Often times, it's about M&A's... in my line of work, it's about looking at an existing strategy of a selected sample of companies who dominate a keyword marketspace and determining what they're doing and potentially, what they're going to do... then comparing that against the goals of the client and the trends of the industry and making recommendations.

Simply put, it's multivariate research and statistics with evidence guided intuition and theory... and this is the important part - It has to be measurable. Perception blindness occurs when the analyst goes into the research with more than just the goals of the clients. The client often has their own expectations of what you can do, or what the industry is like. I used to tell people that "you know your business, I know your business online". It's two different animals.

One of my old clients wanted me to do an intelligence report on some of their competitors. They gave me a list of competitors and I went to work. When I finished it and presented it, they were impressed, they loved it and all was good. However, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my head. I felt that I had missed something. When I got back to work, I used a program we developed called the "competitive analysis baseline reporting tool". While it was a fairly simple scraper and easy to program through an excel macro... the reporting capability was, in my opinion, very powerful. I found that looking through their online competition, only one of the competitors they mentioned even had a presence (from a search engine marketing perspective). As soon as I found who their online competitors were, I was able to do some more research, report it, and the result was a 20-40% increase in all of their benchmark analytics. If I hadn't done that, if I hadn't recognized my own perception blindness, I wouldn't have done everything I possibly could to help that client.

In the future, I will be talking more about perception blindness in analytics and how to avoid some common mistakes.

For now, if you liked the 3 minute clip... here's the entire lecture from Michael Shermer from TED. It's brilliant.