Leveraging Mechanical Turk for SEO

Leveraging the Crowd for SEO
SMX Advanced
June 8, 2011
Natala Menezes
Sr Product Manager
Amazon Mechanical Turk

What is Crowdsourcing? Distributed problem solving
Mechanical Turk makes crowdsourcing easy.

Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work.
Mechanical Turk gives businesses and developers access to an on-demand, scalable workforce.
Flexibility: Scale your workforce up and down quickly
Accuracy: Get high quality, efficient and cost effective results.
Price: Pay only when you are satisfied with the results.
Speed: Start receiving results in minutes

How it works
Micro payments through Amazon Flexible Payments
Huge workforce: Over 500,000 Workers, 190 countries
Platform can handle millions of tasks, via Web or API

Business Use Cases
Categorization
Classification
Tagging
Sentiment Analysis
Data Management
Data Verification
Data Entry & Collection
Data De-duplication
Algorithm Training
Content & Media
Moderate Photos & Content
Content Creation & Editing
Transcription
Business Services
Search Relevancy
Product Usability Testing
Research

Search Experts <3 Big Data
Search Marketing: Keyword expansion
Adding attribute tags
Pulling lists from publicly available tools
De-duplication / data cleanup and organization
Search query research “How would you search for X?”
Web Research
Competitive research – What is the tagline for this company?
What is the SEOMoz Score for this website?
Search Results Analysis
Of the two results shown – which is the best result?

Content Creation
Article writing & editing
Write a caption for a photo
Summarize the benefits of a product
Write a story about a specific topic
Edit the grammar & style of an article
Photo selection
Find a creative commons photo for an article
Transcription
Transcribe video or audio content
Tip: Always collect content in your HIT, never have Workers post directly to a 3rd party website.

Content Management
Content Moderation
Is this photo appropriate given our guidelines?
Is this a good question or article for our site?
Content Discovery
Do these photos have useful meta tags?
What are the keywords used during this video?
Content Analysis
What is the sentiment of this tweet?
Is this tweet positive or negative?

Use Case: Lead Collection
The Problem:
Needed to create a list of local business contacts that met certain criteria:
Review rating above 3 stars
Vertical focus – family friendly restaurants only
Within a certain distance of downtown
The Solution
Posted tasks to Mechanical Turk to gather information about potential contacts.
Used this data to prioritize their list, then took the smaller subset for additional data augmentation

Case Study: Magnum Photos
“An image sent out through the new system will come back, having been keyworded by up to eight people, in less than a minute. After piloting small trials last summer, images are now being sent out in batches of 20,000.”
"You can keyword an entire archive within weeks.“
-- Meagan Young, Magnum's Web Content ManagerQuickly removed their backlog through access to on-demand workforce
10 x more cost efficient than an in-house solution

Things you can’t do:
Disrupting or degrading the operation of any website or internet service
Ex. Generate "referred" site visits or click through traffic
Go to this website and click on the most valuable ad
Ex. Ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website’s behavior or results
Go to X search engine and search for “Danny Sullivan is Awesome”
Violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something) or that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion or ask Workers to solicit third parties
Ex. Ask a Worker to perform a marketing activity on your behalf – for instance voting for something
“Tweet This” or “Like”
Ex. Ask a Worker to write a review on a 3rd party site
Go to Yelp and write a review for this restaurant
Capturing PII
Ex. requiring disclosure of the Worker's identity or e-mail address, either directly or indirectly
Ex. requiring registration at another website or group
https://requester.mturk.com/help/faq#restrictions_use_mturk

Applications & Solution Providers
Mechanical Turk supports a robust ecosystem of providers that have built or can build solutions to meet your needs.

Thank you.Natala Menezesnatala@amazon.com
@amazonmturk
Facebook.com/amazonmturk
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Leveraging Mechanical Turk for SEO

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