Page 2 - Hit Tail Update for ney-sayers

Yea I see where you get that from my post.

No, forums aren't to scrutinize, they are a place to share knowledge, test theories, run tests and provide logistical and pooled theories. Scrutiny is providing valuable perspective and/or opinions, your not doing that. If the point discussed isn't valuable for you, or you can't leave relative feedback, then move on to somewhere you can.

People like you seem to be trying to increase rep and your score rather than contribute. And besides that what you do isn't called scrutiny in any place apparently but Canada. Everyone else calls it criticizing and placing false blame...blind blame at that.

Look at my posts, including the one your criticizing. If you spent the time you might find a value in them. I don't do it for any other reason than to help someone else. You have turned this in to am embarrassing fiasco and a ridiculous blame game.


Regardless of your intentions, that's no reason to throw around accusations.

Do me a favor and turn on your ignore button...the name is GaryTheScubaGuy.

Unfortunately I get the same impression.



A smallish point... you contradicted yourself.



hmmm...

That's a pretty big assumption - it isn't shared knowledge, tested theory, and certainly not scrutiny as you defined it: providing valuable perspective and/or opinions.



Granted - and the discussion is of enormous value but I do have 2 problems:

1. Originally posted in Google optimization for reasons of better eyeball value - but your discussion was 100% irrelevant to what people are wishing to view there... not only that - those searchers that come into SEOChat via search engines looking for PPC or Google Adword [and even of more value Google Adsense] would go direct to those forum and likely deem your discussion enormously valuable to them - and you did a dis-service to them because you believe the Google Optimization forum was better -- "For You".

2. More importantly [since I use to mod here] you create extra work for mods, whom are also here voluntarily and move your 1st thread, 2nd thread, and this thread to a better match - and you slammed them for doing so.

In short - you are making it pretty difficult for yourself to get "qualified discussions" and diverse insight/knowledge & opinions - because the wrong people are finding the thread.

That said: I have 6 websites now running it [for organic optimization purposes]. Will see if it aids to performance "quickly" as you are seeing in PPC course your changes are near immediate where organic results are substantially longer to establish "if a quantifiable enhancement is available". [I suspect it will but no evidence of that as yet]

In my practice, I don't use Overture/Adword tools, wordtracker or any other tools. I merely "GUESS" and my guess 99% is more accurate than any of the previous.

Course after-the-fact I use Hitslink as real-time tracking to identify queries over time [trends etc.] which is what MLT does as well - but I also get to match to sales conversions which is far more powerful tool [thus I won't be giving up the cost neither].

I don't think anybody actually disputed the tool, it's sitll inprecise and nobody really knows what it's measuring. Gary took advantage of it and shared, hooray, power to the seoer.

We're very thankful to SEO Chat for allowing the beta launch and discussion to occur in public. The scrutiny has been helpful, as has the advocacy of users such as Gary and David. But in particular, we're thankful to SEO Chat, and the broader community of SEO forum administrators for the leniency they have cut us. We don't intend to abuse it, and apologize for any perception that we have.

As far as advocacy, the dice are cast, and we'll either catch on, or it won't. We totally understand and appreciate Gary's excitement, as many aspects of the tool are totally counter-intuitive and need to be explained, re-explained and re-explained. It's still a mystery to many why this thing works.

And we've learned a lot from Gary, and are indeed on our way to repositioning our message so that we live in better harmony with the paid search services that are out there. That will be my main thrust at the Search Insider Summit next week. But proactive online outreach through SEO forums is over, unless direct invites are sent.

In fact, I'm only answering this thread because I found it in a Google search, and felt it needed to be answered. We hate Gary catching heat for advocating us. If anyone wants to discuss, advocate or slam the tool further, we've got ways now that put less burden on the wonderful community of SEO forums.

Regarding the "what the tool's measuring" and "what we're doing with the data" questions, I hope it will be refreshing that we're only recording search hits per domain--not even using persistent cookies for user tracking. And we're not doing anything with the data other than processing and giving it back to each respective site owner. Our privacy statement explains why trust is vital to us and the success of the service.

when i refer to 'waht it's measuring' is the point where long tail becomes hit tail. That value is entirely ambigious to a percentage ??? Or does the real stats man take the info, disregard where your program makes the break, and run his own intervals? Just thoughts, I'm not knocking it and you should appreciate the 'scrutiny'

djstreet, we totally do appreciate the scrutiny. That was a big part of holding a public beta, and it has really helped a lot. Absolutely everything on the forums has been well received here.

There's a discussion going on for how to make those long tail percentage numbers more meaningful. To separate the red head from the green tail, we chose to use top-10 keywords for the head. It's just such an easy mental model, even if somewhat arbitrary.

The beta tester requests are now to show how ones' own site stacks up to the average of all other sites. This goes for both the Top-10 and the long tail. Then, they want to see the total length of ones' tail vs. the world average tail length. There's a real sense of people wanting to be put in competition with eachother, growing the biggest head and the longest tail possible.

The notion of being competitive with each other both in terms of growing a big head and a long tail is starting to emerge, now that we've put the beta testers in communication with one another. Public betas are awesome.