Ten Questions with Ralph Tegtmeier

This is our second interview in a series of interviews we're conducting with leading search industry personalities. Today, it is our pleasure to welcome Ralph Tegtmeier of fantomaster.com. Not only does Ralph have the best beard in search, he's also a damn fascinating read. Onwards....

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Ralph. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What is your background?

My academic background is in Comparative Literature, English Literature and Portuguese Philology, in which I graduated as a Master of Arts at Bonn University in Germany.

Later, I worked as a bookseller, a freelance writer, a translator and a publisher. I became interested in the Internet in 1994 and soon discovered its marketing potential. So I have been an online entrepreneur in various fields since Fall of '94. Having grown up in a multilingual environment in Africa and Asia definitely proved to be a great help when exploring this ever growing labyrinth of globalized information.

In 1999 I teamed up with an old school buddy, Dirk Brockhausen, who holds a doctorate in physics and is a certified SAP Consultant - thus, fantomaster.com GmbH was born. While we are German nationals, we are located in the German speaking (eastern) part of Belgium, just a few meters from the German border.

While online marketing trends come and go, search engine marketing appears to have been a constant. Where do you see SEO heading in the future? Does it have a future?

I'm sure there's a very strong future for search engine marketing - which, of course, is not necessarily identical with search engine optimization, at least not in the classical sense. What with Pay-per-click (PPC), Pay-for-inclusion (PFI), AdWords and related business models having turned into the predominant mode of search engine traffic generation, the conventional approach of optimizing site code, tweaking meta tags, determining keyword density, etc. has effectively been marginalized.

While there are those who believe that search engine marketing is merely a question of slapping your credit card on the table and buying some traffic, matters are actually a bit more complicated than that. This may have been true in the days of GoTo, when PPC competition was less fierce, but that has changed radically in the course of the past two years or so.

Modern search engine marketing requires much more research, e.g. PPC management, search phrase quantification, and in depth traffic analysis, to name but a few important aspects. All of which, it goes without saying, is a very time consuming, human labor intensive task requiring lots of expertise. And this is precisely where SEM savvy consultants are required, perhaps even more so today than in the old days when do-it-yourself search engine optimization was less complex - and less costly - to achieve.

Ever since the dotcom crash clients have reverted their focus on good, old-fashioned return on investment (ROI), and successful search engine marketing agencies must take this into consideration. Mere branding via good search engine positioning, while still quite important to many major corporations, has generally been downgraded in favor of tangible cash conversion models.

So my answer is yes, search engine marketing does have a future, though it will probably be ever more concentrated on ROI requirements. This demands a strong combination of tech savvy and marketing outlook, unlike the classical SEO scenario where technology enjoyed an absolute priority, with marketing expertise playing only the second fiddle.

What's more: the days of the snake oil peddlers who could blithely con ignorant clients into believing that any good search engine ranking would immediately convert into stellar sales are over, and good riddance, too. Search engine marketing, having effectively been turned into a quite cost effective form of online advertising, is rapidly developing into an ever more expensive enterprise and will increasingly have to compete with alternative models of online promotion and traffic generation.

To take a simple PPC example: the higher your bids on Overture, the lower your ROI will normally be. Scrutinizing bids in the $20 per click range in some industries, it only stands to reason that this cannot hold indefinitely. Which goes to explain the high degree of fluctuation in this field - it seems that a lot of companies are simply pumping funds into PPC without a real clue as to what to expect. Then, when their PPC funds are depleted, up comes the next competitor with fresh money to burn. In the long run, I think we may expect far more realistic, generally much, much lower bids. This again is one field where competent search engine marketing agencies will find their market niche. After all, no CEOs worth their salt can afford to sink tons of money into such a venture without achieving decent returns. More often than not, expert search engine marketing consultants can indeed help minimize promotion costs dramatically, while at the same time boosting cash returns at a fraction of the cost a basically uninformed, gut level approach may boast.

You've been a long-time proponent of cloaking. The search engines, Google in particular, have come out strongly against the use of such techniques. Can you talk a little about this?

Well, for one thing the search engines themselves are the Web's #1 cloakers. If you're located in Belgium and enter "Google.com" in your browser, only to be redirected, like it or not, to Google.be, that's cloaking. If your site serves different pages to different browers, that's cloaking. If you serve French content to surfers logging in via a French IP, while presenting Dutch IPs with Dutch pages, that's cloaking, too.
So, as Detlef Johnson doesn't tire to point out, a lot of cloaking is actually simply about customization and personalization - nothing "bad" about it at all, quite the contrary.

The issue here is actually quite simple. If, for example, you have a site selling sports apparel, full of catalogues with two-line product descriptions and some price tags, but little to no text content, fat chance you'll ever achieve a decent ranking in any modern day search engine! Use Flash, and you're out - while engines like Google and AltaVista may actually index your Flash pages now, how well will they rank them? Shockwave, Real Media, video streams, Java, even the most pedestrian JavaScript code - almost everything qualifying for state-of-the-art these days cannot be spidered or indexed efficiently.

Let's face it: search engine spiders are a very dumb lot and despite some interesting exotic indexing models being flaunted occasionally here or there, there's no realistic indication that this sorry state of affairs will be overcome in any conceivable time frame.

The very same applies to most content management systems: while they may help you save lots of time and effort in running a highly informative web site, when it comes to efficient search engine optimization you might as well dump it down the drain and send me your money instead. (laughs) But seriously - search engines are just not up to what current Web technology has to offer and is actually featuring all over the place.

That's mainly because, regardless of much they may hype their own setups, search engines are simply not state-of-the-art. In fact, you will stand the very best chances of achieving decent rankings only if you stick to HTML version 1.2, avoiding all frames, forgetting about animated graphics, and so on, and so forth. Or, possibly, if you subscribe to a minimalist, purely text based web design and layout philosophy as propagated by the likes of Jacob Nielsen and his devotees. All this may be just fine for a whole lot of web sites, and I'm certainly not contesting Nielsen's well meaning crusade for more usability on the Web. However, for very many corporations, for whole industries even, this approach is simply not feasible and does not constitute a viable solution by any standard. How are you going to keep Flash and Shockwave streams from a gaming or a video site, for example? What, if you're in the graphics business, or if your news portal software requires URLs with tons of weird characters and session codes in them on which the spiders will simply choke? And why, for heaven's sake, should you make your site design and layout the slave to technologically challenged search engine spiders in the first place?

So this is where cloaking or, rather, IP delivery comes in. To recapitulate: IP delivery is a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!) to determine who is who or what. The only truly reliable way to do this is by knowing spiders' IP addresses, so what your software will also require is a comprehensive database of verified search engine spiders. That's why we developed our own fantomas spiderSpy™ service which happens to be the world's most comprehensive, with thousands of spiders referenced, updated every six hours.

The advantage of IP delivery is that your don't have to touch or tweak your main domain's source code in any way. As no human visitors will get to see your cloaked content (what we term "phantom pages") anyway, gone are all worries regarding site design, graphics overload, browser compatibility, conflict of interest between aesthetics and search engine spiders' requirements, and a lot of other time wasting issues pulling your resources off your real task, namely driving decent, qualified traffic to your site. You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser.

Also, this is the only safe way to protect your optimized source code from stealing competitors - so let them page jack your main domain's content at will: as you will achieve your top rankings via your invisible phantom pages anyway, little good will it do them.

So can cloaking be abused? Sure it can! And is it actually being abused? Certainly! But so are kitchen knives and pain killers. We for our part have never advocated misleading search engine optimization, if only because it's dumb marketing: if you find a site offering second hand books in a search engine, what are you going to do if you're redirected to a porn site instead? Your're going to get annoyed with the porn site, right - and it's really as simple as that. Will you buy porn stuff there, even if you were into that sort of thing? Most probably not. There's no excuse in the world for misleading surfers like that and it certainly doesn't seem to pay off either, which is why we're actually seeing less and less of that sort of thing these days, and I can't say I'm too unhappy about it.

But let's face realities here: while the search engines may take a strong arm stance against cloaking in public, they don't really seem to worry too much about it in everyday life. One of the reasons being that there's so much legitimate cloaking about, it would simply be impossible to weed it all out. Else, you might well expect the world's top 1000 web properties to disappear from the search engine indices, and where would that leave them, loss of advertising revenue apart?

It's quite important to realize this fact before fretting about the possible penalization of cloaking, as so many clueless SEOs are wont to, scaring the horses left, right and center without a single tangible proof of what they're claiming to know absolutely everything about.

Is it possible to get banned or penalized for cloaking? Yes, it is. But is it likely? Hardly - the search engines are far too busy trying to eke some money out of their services, and, a very few exceptions apart, they don't seem to be particularly good at it, either. Maybe that's why they are hardly investing anything in advancing search technology to make tricks like cloaking obsolete. In any case, you can neatly avoid penalization by working with what we call "Shadow Domains", i.e. domains dedicated to giving the search engines appropriate spider fodder while redirecting human visitors at system level, without delay, to the main domain proper. That way, should you really ever be penalized for cloaking - again, an
extremely rare occurrence -, all you will normally lose is that particular
Shadow Domain. But then, all you'll have to do is register a new one and
start from scratch.

Used responsibly, cloaking will actually give everyone concerned the best of all worlds: search engines will become aware of sites, albeit indirectly, their spiders are unable to crawl properly because of their antediluvian technology. Webmasters in turn will be happy with their rankings. And most importantly, surfers will gain access to web sites they would, to all probability, otherwise never know about.

I'm aware that this may sound a bit optimistic, but let's for a change face the fact that it's actually the search engine spiders, not the users, that are dumb - users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search. By contrast, most if not all search engines seem to be run by people who subscribe to a patriarchal, hierarchic view of human nature, claiming competence on what users are supposed to see and what not. They're control freaks, and that's what the whole issue of cloaking actually boils down to: the search engines, parasites that they basically are, living off other people's (the webmasters') labor, want to retain control over everything including web design and layout. Little wonder that an ever growing number of webmasters and corporations are beginning to resent just that ...

The SEM world exists in a strange place where the relationship between the search engine and the SEM is not clearly defined. How do you think the search engines feel about those who practice SEM and do you ever see a point in time where both sides will see eye to eye?

The way I see it, there's a long, ignominous tradition of search engines regarding - and actually treating - SEMs as mere trash. Here they are with all that purportedly wonderful technology of theirs, with their brilliant ranking algorithms and their chauvinist "my database is bigger than your database" attitude - and along come we SEMs spoiling the show. I have yet to meet a single search engine representative acknowledging in public that search engine optimizers and marketers may actually have something good to contribute to the overall Web ecology.

You can see it ever and again at search engine conferences all those search engine reps admonishing the participants not to do this, not to do that, to stick to this, to only do that, "be a good boy/girl across the board, do what daddy tells you, and we just might be a wee bit nice to you", wagging their index fingers and threatening SEMs with dirty looks - just like a bloomin' nursery! (laughs) And here are all these adult people, webmasters and marketing officers alike, gobbling it all up in awe like gospel. More often than not, it's a pretty pathetic spectacle.

Certainly I would endorse a more constructive relationship between both parties, one which would actually help both sides serve the Web community best. I don't know of any SEM who wouldn't. But is it likely to happen wihtin the foreseeable future? Hardly, I'm afraid. Actually, Mikkel Svendsen had a very good bash at it some years back when he was still working for a major Scandinavian search engine, but little ever came of it. Unfortunately, I may add.

Some hard-line SEOs denounce any technique they see as being outside the published SE terms of service as "spam". What is your take on so-called "ethical seo"?

From a European point of view, the issue of "ethical behavior" seems like a very American cultural hangup. As David Turner and I put it recently at the London Search Engine Strategies conference, speaking on the topic of (surprise!) cloaking: "There are those who would say that 'ethics' is just a cloaked form of hypocrisy."

But seriously - there's a pervading myth in the search engine marketing and optimization industry that if you're a good boy, the engines will pat your head and will reward you with fine rankings, even if it may take an incarnation or two. That's unfortunate because not only does it fuzz up the hardcore technological issues involved, it also attracts all sorts of gut level thinkers to the SEM world, flogging their gut level advice ("content is king" being just one pervasive popular myth in question) and confusing each other and everybody else. This is a basically religious, moralistic attitude, and quite an inadequate one when dealing with technological issues.

A more rational approach would certainly seem in order here. I've talked about abusing cloaking already. Don't do it! No, it won't make you end up in hell, but it will irritate your visitors. Meaning that they will take their business elsewhere, period. So the search engines are devoting a lot of energy in setting up rules of conduct, fine. This may be a sensible thing to do, at least from their point of view. But don't expect them to spill the beans on what they are actually doing. Google won't tell you exactly how it determines rankings, and neither will Inktomi or FAST. Again, this is fine - it's their game after all, so why shouldn't they try to call the tune.

But if you set out to use search engine generated traffic for your business model, you ought to realize that there's a generic conflict of interest being installed: you may want good rankings to achieve good returns, while the search engines couldn't care less about your turnover. All they ever want your content for is to expand their database to become more attractive to surfers. It's a number game, and as an individual webmaster you're always being shortchanged: if your business goes belly up, the search engines will simply feature someone else on their SERPs without wasting one thought on you. After all, they have billions of other pages to choose from.

Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals. So, as a webmaster, are you really an equal in the search engines' view? No, you aren't - the odds are stacked solidly against you, and that's where the fun starts. In fact, as long as webmasters and search engines cannot agree by mutual consent on a rigorously enforced code of standards, worrying about the ethics possibly involved is a mere pastime for self-appointed prophets who love aggrandizing themselves by self-righteously sermonizing others from their pulpits. And yes, this may include many a search engine representative, too!

Take your risks if you must - and don't complain if you happen to lose. Rather, pick up the shards and try anew. And if you should really find this business too nerve racking, maybe you'd be better off doing something else in the first place.

While others are content to follow, you've been an innovator. What have you got in the pipeline?

We are on the verge of launching our latest product, the fantomas shadowMaker™. This is a server based program that fully automates the process of Shadow Domain creation, including generation of topical fillertext related to your targeted keywords and search phrases, implementing predefined keyword densities, randomized page descriptions,
cross linking phantom pages and even submitting them to the search engines without requiring any human monitoring. It will most certainly change the way we think of cloaking or IP delivery.
With a capacity of creating 10,000 absolutely unique, interlinked phantom pages per hour, it will cut the process of creating highly optimized Shadow Domains from weeks to mere hours. Currently, we are conducting beta tests (and no thanks - our quota of beta testers has been filled months ago, so please don't apply!) and expect to launch the release version in the last week of November 2002.

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