I Told You So
Posted On: 2007-06-05
Last week I suggested that some of the Webmasters who once told Steve and me that helping newcomers to this industry was wrong because all it did was increase competition were not entitled to say 'I told you so'. Actually the more we've thought about it over the weekend the more we think you're entitled to shout it at us.
But also over the weekend I was reading some posts on Search Engine Land and found that I have the right to say the same thing to some webmasters too. Years ago I wrote a piece in another place where I wondered about whether or not we were using the right techniques and design to market to people from different ethnic backgrounds.
In particular I used the example of a Chinese shop window that Steve and I passed quite regularly. That window was an absolute mess and the shop behind it was even worse. There was no order, no co-ordination, just stuff crammed into every nook and cranny. At the time I wondered if presenting products like that was appealing to Chinese and now the 'gurus' have decided that it is.
In particular they've been looking at the failure of Google to gain traction in the Chinese market while Baidu, with its jumbled design and sometimes bizarre search results continues to go from strength to strength. So pardon me if I feel a little smug and suggest that I might know a bit more about marketing than Steve might think.
One down and millions to go
I'm sure you saw the headlines late last week that gleefully announced the arrest of a major spammer. There was the usual lurid details of the amount of spam he sent out every day, week, month or whatever. There were all the details of his rich and luxurious lifestyle with a wonderful apartment, glitzy cars and all the other things that evil spammers can afford. There was the list of charges he was facing and it was a very impressive list indeed.
And what did all that noise and fanfare achieve? Did you notice a drop in the amount of spam hitting your inbox? Did the Net run faster for you because that evil spammer had been cut off from his even more evil empire?
Of course not! In fact in the general scheme of things this guy was just another one of the little fish out there that the authorities can cash so easily. There may have been a time when he was considered to be one of the big guys but that certainly hasn't been the case for some time. It seems that the top 10 spammers in the world are all well outside the jurisdiction of any court that has the power to do anything about them and arresting this guy did nothing to stem the flood of spam.
One email security company suggested that on the day this guy was arrested there were 70 billion spam messages sent out and that just goes to show how ineffective the anti-spam laws in various countries really are. If you remember they were all introduced with a great deal of hype and spin but they've really done nothing to stop spam at all. In fact the amount of spam being sent each day has almost doubled in the last year. On any given day in May last year around 36 billion spam emails were sent out and now we're looking at that 70 billion number I mentioned a moment ago.
Down sizing
No I'm not talking about laying off any of the people who work for me, in fact I'm probably going to be looking for more in the near future - a certainty if Steve has his way. But we are starting to see several search engine marketing companies beginning to shed staff ... and large numbers of staff at that. And it's quite possible that we will see more companies doing the same thing in the near future.
Late last week Geosign let over 100 staff go and a day or so later iCrossing dumped a large proportion of their staff as well. It was interesting to watch the feeding frenzy as a number of small search engine businesses (often so small that they had been one-person operations) go hunting for staff and even now there could be some highly qualified people out there who might be still looking for work.
So if you were thinking of employing someone to help with your search engine optimization work then there could be some real gems out there eagerly looking for the type of work situation you have to offer. I'm not quite ready to employ a search specialist yet but Steve was hinting that it won't be long before we could use one or two.
Even if you can't afford to employ someone full-time there's always the possibility of employing them on a consulting basis.
Anyway I'm off to Brisbane today for another crazy round trip and I'm sure Steve will use the time to bend my ear about doing more local search optimization. Sometimes I think he even dreams about search engines in his sleep.
I'll be back to talk at you tomorrow.