isos, on yet another bandwagon, officially release our 2006 search industry predictions. Drum roll pulease.
- Google will get bad press.
- Yahoo will continue to fail to capitalise.
- MSN and Bill Gates will “drop the ball” on something new, admit it, and then pick up the ball and stand around going “OK, is this a basketball, football or cricket ball? Someone tell Bill we have the ball, we just aren’t sure what to do with it”.
- Search will be integrated with everything from mobile phones to microwaves, but people will continue to use their browser to search, their mobile phones to make calls and their microwave to reheat 4 day old pizza that is “still good”.
- Toolbars are yesterdays news, wiht only 99% of online businesses releasing a toolbar, down .9% from 2005.
- LookSmart continue to be a word that invokes sniggers amongst SEM community.
- Kanoodle and others will continue to promote the idea there is a second tier, start own trade organisation. Current working titled “What About Us?”
- The Hilton in Paris will continue to pay well over the odds for PPC traffic, and leave many punters bitterly disapointed when they arive at their site.
- Ditto the Lindsay Lohan Hotel in Dubbo, Australia.
- Podcasts provide bored Geeks with 10 minuites of laughs, followed by months of indifference.
- Google attempt to Trademark the word “beta”.
- The meta keyword will make a stunning comeback and be voted “most improved ranking factor 2006″.
- Blackhat will use “all SEO is spam” in forum debate before 6 pm January 1st, breaking the 2005 mark by 2 hours.
- Whitehat Supremicsts will make wild accusations against unamed Black Hats.
- The WMW robots.txt blog will be described as “Web 2.0 at its most cutting edge”, draw rave reviews, and then somehow end up forgotten.
- isos will release poorly thoughtout blog post that neither invokes laughs nor provides insight.
- Link buying voted “Most Likely To Cause Ruffled Feathers” in 2006 Yearbook.
- The numbers 11, 12 and 13 sue Google over second page position, demand Google expand front page listings to 13.
- Google release rel=”this_link_is_not_paid_I_promise” link attribute.
- Yahoo and MSN release products eerily like Google offerings from 2 years ago, yet still proclaim releases “breakthroughs”.
- Froogle rebranded as “wanton, wasteful spendingoogle” in hopes of increased sales leads.
- Simpsons’ cretor Matt Groening sues isos over Grandpa Simpson Letter To DMOZ podcast (Thank you Timmy Whalen. You gotta hear Grandpa say “geriatics-on-heat.com - Champagne comedy
)
- isos break own search prediction record by releasing a list of 1,000,001 search predictions for 2007.
PS: Merry non-denomenational period of joyousness, and a Happy Gregorian Calendar changing numberness
December 24th, 2005
In further proof of the mainstream growth of SEO, Santa, speaking via webcast from his new ADSL 2.0 connection in the Arctic, has revealed exclusively to isos some of the SEO requests little children of all those Mom & pop sites we hear so much about have sent to him.
“The little kiddies really are hilarious.”, Santa said. “Last year, they all wanted one number one ranking for a ‘Prime Keyword term’, but this year it seems that the message has got through, and the kiddies are asking for more specific terms, and more of them, better conversion rates and improved ROI.”
Santa, in an isos exclusive, has provided us with a sample of the letters he has received this year:
==========================================
Dear Santa
Please send Daddy 100 new anonymous proxies for Christmas.
Love- Amy “Black Hat” Ames
————————————————
Dear Amy,
Anonymous proxies are useful aren’t they? Uunbeknownst to many, Santa’s little elves have been busy laying fibre optic cable in the North Pole this year. The reindeer are quite upset, because flying with cable attached to the sleigh is hard work. Rudolf almost quit, and the reindeer union is in a bitter battle with the Telecommunication union and the Elvish Union over who has jurisdiction and it all got terribly messy. But never mind, cause now Santa can give all the little Black Hat boys and girls Mommy & Daddies all the anonymous proxies they could ever ask for.
PS: the full list will be in the card that comes with the Gift you really want. No peeking though, or it won’t be the Pony you really wanted.
==========================================
Dear Santa,
All I want for Christmas is my dad to get back his number one ranking for “miniature light rail models london” so that he can spend some time with us, instead of on the forums all day long obsessing.
Thanx,
Spike Spencer
PS, if I could have a pre-launch Playstation 3 with the optional Linux kit, keyboard and hard drive as well, that would be nice.
—————————
Dear Spike.
Ho Ho Ho, Merry Xmas. So daddy isn’t spending time with you eh? Santa isn’t sure that will actually be solved by a ranking, but it isn’t Santa’s job to judge, so consider it done.
Love,
Santa.
PS Those @%#$ @ Sony hate Santa, and won’t even let him have a pre-release Playstation 3. I am very upset, cause I think Cell is the chip of the future, especially now that floating point calculations are more important than integer operations.
Oh, and the elves! If I hear one more request for a Playstation 3 from those irritating little Hobbit wannabes I am going to scream. So sorry, but no can do on the Playstation3. How about an X-Box 360 instead?
==========================================
Dear Santa,
Please send Daddy 100 free links with the words “cheap tickets major events’ as the anchor text, all from PageRank 4 or higher pages with less than 12 outbounds on the page, without nofollow attributes, tracking or redirection and all on .edu or ,org sites. Daddy says that is the only way I can get a Puppy for my Birthday next year.
Love,
Simon Simonsen
———————–
Dear Simon,
Kid, Santa is good, but he ain’t that good. Will you settle for a link from Santa’s own home page, currently a PageRank of 8, as well as my 6 elve’s sites (mostly 4 and above) as well as Rudolph’s site, which is currently a 9 or ten, depending upon the datacenter?
All these sites are good, well trusted authorities, so Santa feels this is a really good deal, and much easier than conning a bunch of .edu sites into doing something they will take away in the New Year anyway.
I hope that is good enough!
PS, hope you get that puppy. Puppies are fun. Santa has had a few, but most are so freaked out by Rudolph’s red nose they run away and never come back. Santa was really sad the year Tiger ran away. He was a Shi Tzu, and Mrs Clause really loved him as well. Stupid Rudolph, I almost had him dog meated over that!
==========================================
Dear Santa,
I am appalled at your attitude to weight. I believe you are a heart attack waiting to happen, and a very poor role model for youth who already lead a slothful existence chained to a chair by a growing culture of computers and digital media. My debate team and I also feel that, as a fictional character, your offer of fleeting rankings, crappy corporate consumerism presents and false hope to Mom & Pop sites is an indictment on our the current state of denial griping our planet, and that you should be removed from our cultural lexicon and replaced with a more appropriate figure, such as Santa Ghandi.
What I and the Affirmative humbly ask for Xmas is for you to lose some weight, lose the beard, stop exploiting the “little people” you work with and for you to start championing causes that really matter, like Nuclear non-proliferation, getting the Kyoto protocol ratified and help stop the spread of globalisation and exploitation of the third world by rich, 1st world countries and ensuring that hate sites never again rank well on major Search Engines for terms like “jew” and “holocaust”.
Cordially,
Sarah ‘Concerned’ Smith.
———————–
Dear Sarah,
Ah, um…. Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas! That seems like a lot of work. How about a pony instead?
Love Santa
December 15th, 2005
In response to growing discontent at the state of search engine spam on many SEO forums, the FBI has bowed to intense pressure and released a new 10 most wanted list, that includes 8 known Black Hat spammers, as well as inconsequential mass criminals such as Usama bin Laden and Drug Lord Diego Leon Montoya Sanchez.
An FBI spokesman said it had become “… increasingly clear to us that SE spam is as bad as crimes such as Bank robbery, murder, drug dealing and organised crime. As such, we have decided to make SE spammers our number one target for 2006, and we will stop at nothing to capture the offenders.”
Amongst the rewards offered are the usual $100,000, as well as “… upto ten backlinks” which the FBI has promised will be on “…high PageRank FBI pages, with the inherent TrustRank benefits that offers, along with the anchor text of the informants choosing upto and including 100 characters.” The FBI further guaranteed that these pages will stay live indefinitely, further boosting their SEO appeal.
Whilst many in the industry have appluaded the move, and see this as a validation of years of pressure about the ills of SE spam, not everyone is happy. Said a noted Victim’s Rights advocate, “SE spam is as bad as mass murder? Man, methinks the FBI has been smoking some of the Crack they impounded from Latin America.”
December 7th, 2005
