Danny Sullivan (Pioneer In The Search Marketing Industry)

Danny Sullivan founded Search Engine Watch in 1997 and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the search marketing industry. He covered all aspects of search at SEW until 2006 when he cofounded Third Door Media. Sullivan joined Google in 2017 as a public Search Liaison, where he now helps people understand search and helps Google better hear public feedback.

“Honestly I think there is no master plan other than ‘Let’s put this tool out there and see what people do with it,.’”

“SEO isn’t about ‘how do I get keywords into Google,’ it’s about understanding how many people search for information and finding a way to get in front of them.”

“SEO is only not seen as rocket science by those who already know it.”

“Heck, Google Talk doesn’t even feature a box to let you search for things, as rival products from AOL, MSN and Yahoo do.”

“Search has his cousin called discovery… and social is very strong at providing that.”

“Search is doing fine. It depends on how you do it.”

“Users will be the best judge of which search engine is the most appropriate.”

“The whole world over, there is only one thing that separates ‘haves’ from ‘have nots’: establishing and achieving personal goals.”

“Some pages are deemed more trustworthy than others. If those pages link to other pages, then what they point at gains reputation in Google and Bing’s ranking systems.”

“Social networks are a digital expansion of ourselves. If you look at search, it is a digital way for us to do what we always did, which was ask questions, just more efficiently. I think social is the same kind of thing. It has digitized us. It has allowed us to connect.”

“Two things: first, when a pipe breaks in your house do you go onto Facebook and ask friends who you should call or do you go to Google and search for a plumber? You search for a plumber. It’s an on-demand need. On the other hand, you need a dentist, it’s not an emergency, and you need a good recommendation. Tapping into your friends is very powerful. How the search engines figure out a way to integrate that is the next big step.”

“If your technology can tell you about things, then someone’s going to have a marketing message they want to tell you through that technology. In particular, location-based alerts seem likely.”

“What I’ve really realized in the wake of Penguin is that a lot of people’s ideas of SEO are how they were brought up on what SEO is. Apparently buy some software that takes an article and spins it into 500 different versions, then go over to some new blog network where we’re all linking together thing because that’s link building. Fire off to a bunch of directories that nobody on earth actually uses to find anything, and now I’m ranking, and apparently, it worked.”

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