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Shawn Collins: Thank you to Holly Preuss today coming, she is the principle of Granular Solutions and we are going to chat a little bit about some different issues in search. So, thank you for coming here today Holly.

Holly Preuss: Well thank you for having me, this is great!

Shawn: Cool! Let's jump right into it here. One thing I was curious about is the whole thing with social tagging. I was wondering what you thought about social tagging and perhaps the impact on SERPs.

Holly: Yeah, I think it is definitely having a major impact on how people are showing up on the results page. Being able to be tagged with the key words that are very important to your business is just a huge impact to how you show up on at the top of the results page. And it's a very difficult thing for you to manage as a business, or as an individual but I think definitely it's being shown that the search engines are seeing it as a huge positive and pushing people up who have been tagged up to the top.

Shawn: Great, and maybe for the benefit of anybody who isn't totally familiar with it could you just give a ground level view of what social tagging is all about?

Holly: Yes, absolutely. Social tagging is essentially the ability of the user to label something that they are looking at through a variety of different applications be it del.icio.us or digg or something like that, where they basically tell those software programs "these are the keywords that this page is about". And it's great because it's a semantic look at the content of the web verses the individual spiders of the search engines crawling through and trying to establish what these keywords are. It's having somebody read it and notifying these different software programs "hey, this is what this is about". That's essentially what it is.

Shawn: OK, great! Another thing I wanted to ask you about and the issue you are going to speak about at the Affiliate Summit is just basically managing you reputation online. Just curious about some strategies you might have around that, and some tips that you could share with some people here?

Holly: Yeah, absolutely. Your web reputation is a complex thing in search engine results in that you have what we would consider above the fold results on the various different engines. So it's one thing for your site to show up at the top of a results page for a given amount of words. But the next question is is that what is the other four or five that you are seeing right there at the initial stage and how do you control positive references to yourself? In certain instances some people may have maybe a news clip that wasn't flattering or a bad book review that may show up at the top and how do you make sure that at least the first few are very positive about you?

Maybe something negative might show up. A good example of this is a Starbucks.com. If you type Starbucks into Google the first result page is all about Starbucks the corporate parent, but another one that comes up is a site that is being hosted by some people who want independent coffee houses to be the standard and not Starbucks and so it is not a great reference to them and that tends to come up at the top.

So in terms of how do you control it, it becomes an interesting thing because you no longer just have to worry about your first site. You need to possibly have other mini-sites or you may decide that you want to work with somebody like a life-tips and then your name or your companies name then comes up to the top at these other places where maybe you are sharing some content. These are some of the things that we are recommending for people that run into this particular situation.

Shawn: So would you say that you try to control the first five results, maybe the first ten?

Holly: Yeah, you know ten would be ideal, that's really the first page. But definitely the top five, above the fold is really important.

Shawn: Yeah, I forget what resolution I have my screen at, but for me above the fold is the first eight results. I'm seeing almost all the results there. I happened to look at the one for Starbucks there and I see right now for number five is "I hate Starbucks.com".

Holly: Yes, exactly.

Shawn: Well, interesting. And do you have any thoughts on the recent announcement by the FTC about regulations around word of mouth marketing and how there should be disclosures if somebody is getting paid in any way? Like when in instance, I see sides a lot with PayPerPost where people were being paid to evangelize about certain companies?

Holly: Yeah, absolutely. I think on the surface it's always a great idea. If you've brought somebody in to write about you, there are definitely ways to word that so that it's not a, "OK, we just hired a guy off the street to discuss our company and he doesn't necessarily know that much about it." There is a way to disclose it that I think can be professional and let your readers really know what's going on. Disclosure, of course, is always the best approach.

In terms of them coming in and trying to regulate it, I think it's going to become a very difficult thing. It reminds me a little bit of getting a corporate email from somebody. They all have that little paragraph on the bottom, "If you've received this email in error, you need to destroy it and notify us right away." I'm getting the sense that if that were to move forward we would start to see something like that and it would almost become a blur because it gets standardized, it gets posted some place on the bottom, and people are just going to gloss over it. Versus, the community doing it themselves as a best practice, it's going to come out in different ways and it's going to be a lot more cleaner. You've got to rely on the public to vet out this type of behavior instead of trying to regulate it, is my position on it.

Shawn: Yeah, hopefully it will be some kind of a clean solution. I know a lot of affiliates are concerned that it would be very obtrusive in the way that they post to a blog if you have to put after each link, maybe in parenthesis "AFF" or something, to signify that it was an affiliate link. People were a little freaked out that it would ruin the flow of the way they are doing things.

Holly: Absolutely, yeah. I'm in agreement with that. Yeah.

Shawn: Another thing I wanted to ask you about is what do you think about the difference between Search 2.0, which I keep reading about, versus traditional search, and whether or not that would be a threat to Google. I've seen that Search 2.0 is considered the third generation of search. It takes the existing search, say Google or Overture, and it adds various improved relevancy models to it. Do you think that's just a buzzword or is it something people should be looking into?

Holly: I think it has, unfortunately, become a bit of a buzzword. Essentially all of these search engines have got extraordinarily smart engineers who spend their time on the web and looking at how best to categorize all of this information that they are trying so desperately to categorize in a very legitimate way. So there is a little bit of a "we're one step ahead" of people who may be optimizing for words that don't apply or some black hat stuff that might be going on behind the scenes.

But I think ultimately that the thing that is really on the horizon, and this ties back into something that we were discussing earlier, is this concept of a semantic web, where it's not going to be all these spiders trying to read what this website is about, and how it's going to start to incorporate what humans are actually viewing and what humans have decided this is about into their search. I think that's really where the different search engines are going to have to go if they are going to keep up and it's definitely something I think that various affiliates need to be thinking about as they move forward is where the search engines are looking next. I think that this is part of it.

But as an overall thing, Web 2.0 is keep up with what the search engines are doing. Make sure that what you are doing on your site is working for how the search engines are looking at it today. It used to be all about Meta tags. It used to be about other things. Now it's a little bit different in that you just have to keep up with it and make sure that you're following best practices and keeping up.

Shawn: Sure. Just one last question I was curious about whether you have any favorite blogs that you generally go to or any resources you'd be willing to share?

Holly: Absolutely. I'm a big fan of a blog called JenSense.com. It's a really good blog especially for content providers. She just seems to be absolutely on top of those things. I head over to John Battelle's blog pretty regularly. He seems to catch things really quickly.

Generally speaking, I just keep up with any other searchenginewatch.com and those just as a general overview of what's going on. Of course ReveNews.com is amazing as well.

Shawn: OK, great. Well thanks a lot for your time today and all this great insight into what's going on with search. I really appreciate it.

Holly: Great.

Shawn: We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit.

Holly: Thanks for having me.

Shawn: Thank you. Take care.

Holly: Goodbye.

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