[Bump and update: two hours after posting and  we have the number one slot for our own  whois search.  Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the article with some added tips and tricks.

No, whenever I read a google "trick" or "feature" article I always use it on my site name and our key, er, keywords to see what will happen. I can't remember who suggested this to me, but I'm sure it was someone a lot smarter than me (that's a bit set!)

Whois Promote-My-Site.com on Google

So type in "whois promote-my-site.com" in google and see what happens:

Which is accurate and cool and handy - at least a dozen times a year.

But what struck me is that our site did not get even one mention in the results.

Hmmm.

So I tried some other SEO domains (seomoz.org didn't show up in the first two pages, etc...) and found that this is a common issue - lots of mentions of the site from other sites, but no direct link.

Then I bumped into seobook.com having the first four results. And it is because he has a "whois tool."

Not being entirely without wits, I immediately wrote this post about google's whois tool and what I found when I queried "whois promote-my-site.com."

Because now I'll rank with a good article on whois and how it affects my site. Assuming that there isn't some strange search logic going on in google-land.

Ever used Baidu? I haven't because, well, my Chinese is not much better than my French or my German. And without even cognates from five years of Latin to guess my way around a site, heck, I don't think I've ever used it.

And, yes, yes, I know that there are more internet users in China than there are people in the US, blah, blah, blah. I am focused more on the fact that my 12 year old makes more mowing lawns in a weekend than the average Chinese guy working in a factory for a month. And I sell stuff that doesn't cost a dime, so the vast masses of Chinese consumers are worth significantly less to me than they are to, say, P&G.

Logs Are Worth Reading

I was looking through our logs, saw a search string, and clicked on it. It turns our that we rank for:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. This e-mail address is not monitored

Which is the strangest search string I've seen in a while.

Wile there I tried searching on "Promote My Site" - we usually rank between 4th and 6th or so on Google, depending if Matt Cutts had oatmeal or a biscuit for brekky that day. Here is the result for that on Baidu (we are 6th):

Ok, the string they show is:

GOTO=http://technorati.com/blogs/promote-my-site.comblogreactions&&HREF:http://technorati.com/search/promote-...GOTO=http://promote-my-site.com/authtrans.php?authority_string={{!VAR1}} TAG POS=1 TYPE=DATA EXTRACT=...

Perhaps this all makes sense in China. But it really reminds me of the very very early days when everyone was switching from X to google and every once in while you'd get a result where you just had to scratch your head.

I think we forget how much better that all works now.

In one of this week's hottest Sphinn stories, Google to punish pagerank for Digg stories, it is clear that people are really focused on the readers, links, and prestige of Digg and the other top-tier social networking and social bookmarking sties.

Which is fine but the level of upset makes it clear that a lot of people don't have any real diversified portfolio of links and readership. Nothing wrong with making buggy whips, but you gotta watch out for changes in consumer taste.

Let's take a look at what Google (supposedly, it was taken down) said:

We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targeting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detrimental effect on the average internet user.

Let me translate from google-ish

• "level the playing field" means: Make more money over here and get our stock back up from 430 to $700+.
• "pre social bookmarking" means: We used to be able to control what was hot, not Digg
• "use social media responsibly" means: Guess what we mean else we'll make your website disappear
• "new algorithm" means: Anuj and Prakash are going to be busy in Bangalore
• "will likely see a drop in pagerank" means: Let the rending and wailing begin

What will be the most interesting to me will be to see if breaking cover and running to cover your tracks is better than just freezing until the predator flies over.

The Key Phrase Is....

Kind of buried at the end: "we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites." Two. Let me repeat: Two. We took all the lists that we could find on the internet and spent months combing through all 2,162 Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites to see who was alive and who was dead. (And, yes, you can download the list at that link!) We currently have a sublist of over 400 sites where you can create a login, actually login, and post a bookmark or story.

Automation

Really, you're going to need to automate some of your manual habits if you branch out from the tippy top tier players. We've reviewed a lot of the social networking automation options out there for you. It's not really going to be fun - life is easier if you use one or two sites rather than a dozen or more. But if people were using multiple sites then there'd less hyperventilating about this vague but important threat from google.

And if your (natural) competitors are going to have a problem, then that is really signaling an opportunity for you, isn't it?

Bear Stearns Closes at 30

And sells the next day at 2. Bam! Billions of shareholder equity lost. A year ago this would have been unimaginable.

Let's have a though experiment.... Eccentric Saudi Prince buys Digg for $750M, bans all content not involving funny Kitty Pix, Digg'ers flee to Mixx, Prince shuts down site in a huff.

What if all your links were from Digg? Or if all your readers were from Digg? Or if all your reputation in the social media world were resident in Digg.

Oops.

Do Nothing

Two words: Buggy Whip.

If you just keep on using one or two sites and your competitors diversify, then you will lose in the SERPS, all other things being equal. They will have a more diversified and stable reputation base, get readers who never see your stuff, etc.

Find the Niche Sites

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or Voipigg? Who? Voipigg. It's a niche pligg site with good content control. Low volume, like most niche sites, but the 100 or so people who show up regularly are all looking for VOIP related stories.

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit both sites, so obviously digg is a better use of your time.

Think Risk Aversity

Really? Think about what started this whole discussion - threat of wholesale stripping of pagerank for heavy Digg users.

I think the mindset of "only have time for one" is a false dichotomy and that in today's competitive environment you have to make the time to develop and implment a diversified social networking strategy.

I was on the plane coming home and the cat next to me in first got to talking. It seems his son (11th grade) had put up a website extolling the virtues of his plumbing business and they'd actually gotten a customer from a google search the day before.

Needless to say, he thought this was pretty trick. Over the last 20 years he'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on yellow pages, bus signs, bench-backs, high-school yearbooks, little-league teams, etc, etc. He said that he reckoned that the average customer cost around $100 to acquire, the average bill was around $115, and costs were around $75. So each customer basically lost $25.

But return business was 60% and around 30% of customers stayed around, basically, forever. And their kids, when they stayed in the area, used his company too.

But he was really excited by the idea of getting a customer for FREE from the internet.

So we discussed the cost of professional website, getting someone to do the needful with directories, google local search, ranking on organic SERPS, buying keywords, etc. He was ready to whip out his checkbook and hire us, except for the minor problem that we don't do that sort of work, but I was able to give him some names.

It's pretty amazing to think about how many other small business people are ready to drop $20K on the table to the first person who gets to them to help them get "free" customers from google search.

Imagine what the Yahoo Store or eBay Store owner would pay - especially since they already write a check for online presence.  And they already know what google search means, but just can't get the pieces worked our or have other things to do.

Amazing - there is a LOT of running room out there. 

We put up a post yesterday with a cool table of information about social websites and, because I hate having to scrape stuff off the web, we used google docs to store the information. But that is all we'll use google doc's for - because it has kreppy features and google has, or so it seems, reserved the right to use your "private" documents for whatever they please.

Horrible Lack of Functionality

First the functionality. Let's just say if my options were between Google's spreadsheet and a copy of Lotus-1-2-3 running on an Adds Viewpoint under CPM, I'd probably take Lotus. Yes, their stuff has that little functionality.

For example, some maroon at Google (who I am sure is worth 250x what I am, but never mind that) has breathlessly announced that you can build a web form that saves data in a spreadsheet. No, really. Big News at Google.

Leaving aside that people have been saving web form information to disk for, oh, 10 years ... Excel has been able to create forms since version 0. In 1990.

And don't even get me started on formatting, calculation features.

And a TOS to Bind Them All

But, most importantly, scope this quote from Google Doc's TOS :

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Service. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Service for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its Privacy Policy.

I can't tell you what our legal consultant said about that because they might think I was giving legal advice and, frankly, I hate it when they come in my office and slap me around. And then send me a bill.

But I will say that we immediately pulled our important documents off google and started up a wiki behind the firewall. Because while I am sure that some lawyer made them put that in there, it sure reads like they can do what they darn well please ... but not with my document full of account numbers and passwords!