April 2009 Archives

The stupidest part about it is the reason: "the severity of the economic downturn." Cutting these sports will apparently save $485,000.  Compare that to MIT's endowment of $10B (yes, that is billion). And MIT's endowment actually rose in fiscal year 2008 by 3.2%, or $88M!

So let me get this straight. MIT has $10B and recently made $88M on it, and is cutting something dear to the MIT community that costs a meager $485K. That is pure insanity. What is the endowment for if not to protect things in uncertain times that people care deeply about?  Adding insult to injury, it was only a few years ago that MIT spent over $50M on a new athletic center. So you spend all that money and then cut sports at a small fraction of that cost?

Not only that, look at what they are cutting. Among the sports is MIT's pistol team, which has historically been one of the best performing MIT sports. In 2007, they won the national championship, beating out Army and Navy! And that is not the first time. Yes, you read that right--Army and Navy...

To some, perhaps most, this may not seem like a big deal.  MIT students don't play sports, right? Wrong! MIT has long prided itself with it's sports offerings and participation. It is also used as a recruiting tool. I've been interviewing students for admission for several years now, and it pretty much comes up in every interview.  That stat about our breadth of sports quickly puts to rest any doubts that MIT students do nothing more than academics. Believe it or not, this is paramount on most prospective students' minds.

I guess the bottom line is I just don't get it. It is a trivial amount of money compared to the MIT endowment. I can understand that bureaucracy may have created this problem. That is, the administration asks every department to cut 15%, and this is what the athletic department came up with. But then the administration should step in and revoke this short-sighted idea. 

MIT is almost a 150-year-old institution and they are managing it like a public company who are slaves to quarterly earnings. The endowment has been growing steadily for decades. Yes, this might be a bad year. But there will be good ones again soon. Just the same as you shouldn't over-spend in the good years, you shouldn't under-spend in the bad ones. MIT should take a long-term view and consistently maintain the average MIT experience and culture. Why would anyone want to donate to an institution that is managing their endowment so poorly?

At first, I too was skeptical.  It took me a while to adopt and then even longer to make regular updates.  Even now I've only made 322 of them.  

Recently I had a long discussion over email about the value of this type of technology.  The short version is, upon reflection, I've really come around to its usefulness.  So I thought I'd enumerate the use cases where I've found twitter particularly helpful, both personally and professionally.

Skype says this is what you need to make it work: 

1. External link (anchor) text is the most important factor.  Google often repeats that they use more than 200 ranking factors.  I'm not disputing that :).  I think they repeat this, however, so that people won't concentrate on the few factors that really matter more than all the others.  In my experience, external link text matters way more than anything else.  That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.  
   
   
2. If you get link text right, link back sites' pagerank matter way less.  Usual SEO advice is to contentrate on link backs from high pagerank sources.  If you want to improve your overall rankings I think this is good general advice because pageank is logarithmic, such that a link from a higher pagerank site will have more of an effect than one from a lower pagerank site than you might otherwise think.  
   
   However, higher pagerank links are much harder to get than lower pagerank links.  And what is often missed is that if you can get even a few lower pageank sites to link back to you using the key phrases you want to rank for, you can rank highly on those search terms even with little or no high pagerank link backs.  
   
   
3. Widgets are great strategies.  As a result of the above, widgets are great strategies because they help you get link-acks from a variety of sites, often on their front pages and often on multiple pages within the sites.  That is, it doesn't matter if they are all low pagerank sites because you can control the link text.  But be careful.  Google is all over so-called "widget bait."  
   
   If you do a widget, don't forget you need that static link in it.  That is, it can't all be JavaScript.
   
   
4. Don't guess search term volume.  Use Google's Keyword & Trends tools.  
   
   
5. Select terms that convert.  Ideally, don't guess here either.  Use Adwords or another PPC service to test out which terms convert best, and then try to get rankings for them.
   
   
6. Don't bother if you can't get in the top 10.  People usually revise their search terms instead of clicking to page 2.  So if you don't think you can get in the top 10, try something else, ideally something more specific that would convert better anyway.  A good thing to do is to add one more word to the general term, so if you end up ranking well for the specific term you are helping your rankings for the more general one as well.  Then if it turns out the specific one was easy (you quickly become #1), you've already gone part way on the general one.
   
   
7. Don't pay any for any general SEO service.  Not only do you not need to (because it isn't that hard) but you don't really know what you're getting and as a result you will risk getting blacklisted.  The worst is signing up for paid link services.  Note I'm not saying don't pay anyone for SEO, because if you need basic help, a consult from someone in the know might be helpful to, for example, tell you how to re-layout your site and to explain this post to you :).
   
   
8. Beware of nofollow links.  Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them.  To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it.  You don't want to waste time getting links on sites that use this attribute.  The canonical examples are popular blogs and Wikipedia.  Don't waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won't help you.
   
   
9. Don't waste your time with Google Sitemaps.  Google encourages you to submit sitemaps of your sites.  In theory this seems great because you can specify site priority and refresh time.  In practice, I've done this repeatedly and seen no change in rankings.
   
   
10. Don't ignore the long-tail. People often concentrate on getting rankings for specific keywords.  But I've been just as successful building lots of pages with unique content that end up ranking high on the most random things.  Often such pages will be the only things that come up.  
    
    How do you do this? First, make sure you have a static site.  Sometimes startups don't.  Second, look at all the content you can produce or have produced.  Can you combine it in interesting ways that people would find useful?  For example, at Duck Duck Go we have category pages. 
    
    
11. Make as flat a site hierarchy as possible.  Pagerank seems to flow logarithmicly from a homepage to its internal pages.  So if you have pages you want ranked highly, either you need links back to them directly or have them linked directly from your homepage.  And if you take my long-tail advice and make a lot of pages, make a directory of them as flat as possible.  For example, if you have 10,000 pages, make 100 pages with 100 links and link to those 100 right off your homepage.  Ideally those 100 links would make sense, e.g. categories or alphabetical or something (and not just random).
    
    
12. Use directories instead of subdomains.  For example, domain/blog instead of blog.domain.
    
    
13. Less is more.  Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.
    
    
14. Don't do anything black hat.  You will get caught, you will not pass go, etc.

Update: additional comments can be found here.