Despite a hurricane nearly hitting the islands, my 10 month old being crankier than usual and being swamped with backlogged work, I give unto you;

10 Questions With Michael Gray

10 – Some people get really hung up on Pagerank as the “be all, end all” for determining a site’s value and potential link-juice. What’s your take on it?

Anytime we have a discussion about pagerank we always need to clarify things a bit. Many people in the industry, including myself, believe there is more than one pagerank measurement, there’s internal pagerank and toolbar pagerank. The people at Google are a smart bunch, but being locked up intellectual playpen that is the googleplex, where everything is taken care of for them (see The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids ), cuts them off from “normal society” where people have less altruistic motivations. Places like that are perfect for intellectual pursuit, but they pretty much guarantee that your development team is never going to figure out pagerank will become a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded before it’s too late (see How Can So Many PHD’s Be So Wrong). The genie got out of the bottle, and the only way they could slow the underground economy that sprung up around it was to obfuscate it as much as possible. While they maintain that they update it daily, they only publish the updates every few months. IMHO what you see in your toolbar is really a shadow of internal pagerank, and should be used for entertainment purposes only.

As an SEO you really shouldn’t focus on getting the little green pixels. What you really need to focus is building is domain trust and authority, by getting links from as many other trusted and authoritative websites as possible. Again IMHO domain trust is the single largest factor in your sites ability to rank for it’s desired terms. Focus on the links, the really good ones, and the trust, and green pixels and traffic will come naturally.

9 – What’s the one thing you wish Google would improve upon when it comes to Adwords?

I really wish they would take the “quality score” factor and throw it out like last night’s leftover fish dinner. The quality score serves two purposes. Number one it allows them to charge as much as they want from your maximum bid price, without your ability to understand or control. You can’t see the factor and you have no idea what it’s comprised of, so it can be raised or lowered arbitrarily.
It’s second purpose is to keep out the riff-raff. What you don’t think Google wants everyone’s money? See people who have been doing PPC for a long time figured out how to maximize the adwords system and make lots of money spending pennies with things like thin affiliate landing pages. Google really doesn’t want those people as advertisers. They keep profits low, and in Google’s opinion create a poor user experience. So they apply a little of the organic algo to evaluate domain quality for PPC and bada-boom-bada-bing, you can peg the “low quality” thin affiliates easily and price jack them to $5-$10 per click, and subsequently price them out of the market.

This is what a lot of people who work in SEM, miss. They concentrate on organic or PPC. If you don’t understand both sides of the field, you won’t know when pieces of technology cross over. Notice how the quality score “updates” every few months, can you think of anything else that does? If you said pagerank go back to question 10 and read where I said toolbar pagerank isn’t real. Domain trust/authority gets recomputed every few months. It’s when sites that were “sandboxed” pop out, and start getting rankings, all on the same day

8 – What other PPC provider or ad network do you think is overlooked but is one to keep an eye on?

I’ve tried Yahoo, but it just never converted well for the KW’s I was going after. Despite having an Ajax interface and not enough support I like MSN. my biggest problem with them is they just didn’t have enough volume. If you’re a bargain hunter, know how to use stats programs really well, and can track things down to the KW level, you can do OK with Adbrite too.

7 – You’re pretty well known for social media advertising and dissecting the real value of potential places to advertise on. What’s your top 3 favorite sites?

I really like stumbleupon, you can get lots of traffic, and convert people into blog subscribers, if you understand the stumbleupon users, and spend some time to get into their heads and give them what they want. I also like Netscape however they’ve got a bit of a spam problem right now. They really are being overrun with lots of low quality submissions that are going to turn off regular users from visiting the site. After that we really start to get niche level, personally I like Hugg.com and Sk-rt.com (pronounced skirt). I think the days for building a successful “general” social site are gone, to be successful it’s all about finding a big enough niche.

Since some of your readers are out there wondering why I didn’t mention Digg, to be completely honest I think they are on the downslide. They profess to be user generated and voted however they have “secret” stealth editors or programs that kill stories based on URL’s and submitting profiles. Basically they are lying to their users and people are starting to catch on. If they don’t become more transparent about their voting, burying, and editorial process they are going to become the “lost boys club” for young men who refuse to grow up and never catch on with the main stream public.

6 – Is MySpace really worth advertising on?

Unless you are advertising entertainment, music, ringtones, or similar products and services no. If you sell something like after market parts for a Toyota Scion I’d definitely try it, but if you’re customers isn’t under 30 it’s not worth the trouble.

5 – Strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, or a whole scoop of neapolitan?

Ok this is going to get complicated. First are we talking about Philadelphia style ice cream or French Style ice cream? French style is egg/custard based and has a “meatier” texture. Philadelphia style is cream/milk based and has a much smoother “mouth feel” which I really prefer. Now if we’re talking supermarket bought it’s going to be strawberry, and it has to have strawberry chunks. If we’re talking Friendly’s then it’s chocolate, preferably forbidden chocolate. Now let’s talk home made which is hands down the best. My favorite ice cream recipe comes from Alton Brown and is for Vanilla Ice Cream. The difference between home made ice cream and store bought ice cream is like the difference between a BMW and a Yugo, they aren’t in the same league.

Neopolitan is for indecisive wussy’s who can’t make up their mind. Plain and simple it’s an abomination to the culinary world and should be eradicated from the face of the earth permanently.

4 – What the hell is the deal with Jason Calacanis?

See a lot of people misunderstand how I feel about Jason Calacanis. I think Jason’s a smart, charismatic, and very successful businessman and entrepenuer. He also happens to be a bit of an egomaniac.

See here’s what Jason get’s that lots of people don’t understand. The economy of the blogosphere is based on two things attention and links. If you can command attention in ways that get you links (see New Calacanis link-baiting rules) you rule. You’ve got to be an attention whore. Old school people who come strictly from programming backgrounds without any marketing savvy get frustrated and pissed off in those scenarios, because they don’t have the skill set to compete on that playing field.

It absolutely makes sense for him to pick fights and say things that ruffle feathers from time to time. Jason’s got a prison mentality, pick a fight with the biggest, baddest, person you can find, because if you can hold you’re own you instantly going to elevate yourself above the lower level players. In the blog world it’s effect is exponential, for example pick on someone else who commands attention and use their fame and sphere of influence to grow your own.

3 – What websites totally dominate your time that we should check out?

Maybe it has to do with me officially becoming old a few weeks ago, and trying to compensate for it by living my digital life like I’m 20 again, but I live and breathe getting my info via RSS and podcasting. The online world is changing and publishers have to give up some control. If you aren’t watching or tuned in to the changes you’re going to get left behind.

As far as search I get my news/info from places like WebmasterWorld , Search Engine Land and Sphinn (a moment of silence for Threadwatch.org). My top suggestions for SEO feeds are Aaron Wall (who miraculously survived my partial feed cut), SEOmoz, Stuntdubl, Sugarrae, SEO Black Hat: SEO Blog, Andy, Brian Provost, and ShoeMoneyâ„¢ . I also get all goose pimply when theLisa is let off the collar and writes with passion (see Finally, I get it! I get the Wikipedia!). If you want to make your way into my feed reader you’ve got to have passion, a fire in your belly, have something intellegent and articulate to say, and don’t be afraid to speak your mind and step on some toes now and again. Politically correct SEO bloggers need not apply.

Stepping outside of search, some of my favorite sites are The Superficial, it’s a celeb gossip site, while it may not be news breaking, the writing is some of the funniest, snarkiest stuff out there and makes me laugh everyday. Another big favorite of mine is Styledash. Which is odd … because well I’m totally not a woman, and my fashion sense consists of choosing which t-shirt with a logo I’m going to wear that day. But the writing is good and like the overall approach. I’m also a Disney fan and my main sources of news/info are The Disney Blog (not mine so don’t even go there) and the Inside the Magic Podcast (again not mine).

While we’re talking about podcasts I recently got a video iPod and totally love it. I really wish there were more high quality video podcasts. I love GeekBrief.TV with Cali Lewis. Buzz Report with Molly Wood has that nice combination of biting sarcasm and tech news. Video Podcasts are perfect for short attention span users and trust me they are growing in numbers and income levels, and the space is wide open waiting to be claimed.
Speaking of short attention spans you can follow me on twitter (because pownce just sucks and jiaku has like what 7 people using it). I’m also all over Facebook.

2 – Since you’re original and popular post about SEO Plugins for Wordpress, ever consider updating it with new finds (if any)?

Ok I love wordpress, it single-handedly brought CMS systems into the hands and within the technical reach of everyone. That said it has some major issues as far as search engine friendly-ness. So if you want to use it you’ve got to use plugins and get your hands dirty. The few people who I work with on projects or who have hired me to manage their blogs, get an amazingly pimped and tricked out wordpress install (kind of like the Millennium Falcon which had some special modifications done to it). The problem is because they keep updating the core program the plugin’s keep breaking with the upgrades. Secondly developers stop supporting plugins and things fall apart, it’s a vicious cycle. So the problem is if I do an updated post it quickly becomes outdated within a few months. I’ve been thinking about it and I’m not promising one, but I’m not ruling out the possibility either.

1 – Who do you tap for me to interview next?
Let’s kick it over to the two phone, two laptop, two iPod, and two vampire stake wielding Vanessa Fox.

Right on Michael, I appreciate you doing this interview with me. By now Michael should be on vacation, or at least close to it, so everyone raise your drinks (goofy umbrella drinks included) and wish him the best on that. I’ll start tracking down Vanessa and keep you posted on that.