I think that SEOs have such a small amount of actual advice that they never say anything in these panels/clinics because if they did you wouldn’t need to hire them. I’ve seen a half dozen SEO-related panels over the year and it’s always the same thing… like some infomercial where they will tell you their five secrets… IF you give them $199.95.

Well, them’s more fightin’ words. Michael Gray, also known as GrayWolf, decided to give the SEO treatment to Mahalo, free of charge. Gray found numerous SEO mistakes in his detailed and lengthy report (which becomes a great tutorial, too).

The fun part of Gray’s post is where he calls out code that shows an interest in being ranked in the search results:

It’s kinda hard to make the claim that you aren’t interested in SEO when this is a comment on your page <!– Main Content for serps ***********************–>

Gray concludes with this explanation:

Why did I spend the time writing this? I know you’re a smart guy, and just because you happen to have run into some sleazy SEO’s in the past doesn’t mean we are all bad. We’re no different than any other profession, there are good people and bad people, but it’s unfair to critcize an entire industry just because of a few bad apples. I also would like to think that you’re a big enough person to realize when you’ve made a mistake, and aren’t afraid to admit it.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

More MSM foolishness and incomplete reporting at Forbes, “Condemned to Google Hell“. Yeah, that’s right. On this one I am drinking the Google kool aid.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Greg Jarboe reports on a recent Hitwise report about emerging trends with online news in a SearchDay article, “A Perfect Storm Hitting News and Media“. The affect of video on news, Topix and local news as well as the non-effect of sites like Digg on news are revealed. Interestingly, a recent study by the Newspaper Association of America reported that the average daily circulation of 745 newspapers reporting data fell 2.1% for the six months ended March 31, compared with the year-earlier period. There are huge marketing opportunities with online news folks.

Google blog search ranking algorithm explained, I mean speculated, by Alister Cameron at Problogger.

Google web history insights from what is now one of my top 5 favorite blogs, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog.

Bruce Clay has announced a SEO contest with a focus on helping non-profits.

Comments ]]> http://www.webpronews.com/happenings-in-the-industry-2007-05/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/learning-from-leading-edge-seo-bloggers-2007-04 http://www.webpronews.com/learning-from-leading-edge-seo-bloggers-2007-04#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:30:15 +0000 Michael Gray http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36857 Here’s a question what are you learning from leading SEO and internet marketing bloggers? Are you hoping one of them drops a thinly veiled, or rather obvious tip that will let you set a “virtual cash machine” on your front lawn? If you are you just might be ignoring the real pearls of wisdom that are right there in the open.

Use a “dot com” domain without hyphens, funky misspellings, or other associated nonsense. Keyword domains are great, and exact matches do help, but non misspellable made up, or seldom used words work just fine too.

Limit the the blog to 6 or 8 real subject categories. Okay 10 if you like but that’s it. You can go to eleven if you need a miscellaneous one but that’s it, I mean it really.

Try to imagine if you are ever going to take client jobs and if you do blog from your company domain. It’s saves some explaining and weird glances down the line.

Women, don’t even try and understand them, it’s just not possible, all the software in the world, can’t override the male hardware, and make it work. The best you can hope for is knowing when to do or say absolutely nothing.

Choose a unique and non common nickname and stick with it. It’s really annoying to have to wonder if those embarrassing pictures finally managed to get on the web, or if someone really is looking for Graywolf Corsets.

Keyword centric nicknames are iffy. You’re going to have to put up with a lot of crap, in the begining, and actually know what you are talking about if you want any street cred.

If you are going to do email marketing use a generic address. Don’t spam from your main address. People get annoyed and flag you as junk and the real email messages never get answered.

Build every website with the intention that you might have to/want to sell it some day. Really, you may never have to but if you “built it” with that as an option it saves some headaches if you ever decide the price is right.

If you end up in jail, don’t call me.

Trademark domain names, just say no. It’s all fun and games and easy money, until some corporate tight ass attorney who gets paid by the billable hour starts hounding you down, and is less than amused by your confusingly similar domain name, and purely co incidentally similar look, feel, and color scheme, on an MFA site. The last one was actually interested in being a real hard nose and inflicting pain and suffering and not not satisfied to just have the domain transferred over for free within 24 hours and putting the issue to bed quickly and easily.

Don’t be a jerk, doofus, idiot, schmuck, dingus, dingbat, or less than considerate person. If you make a mistake apologize right away, and in public if need be.

It’s better to have people love you than hate you. It’s better to have people hate you than not know who you are. Once they know your name then it’s time to work on making them stop hating you, and start liking you.

Don’t be afraid to try new things, and experiment now and again. Unless of course it could result in you burning the entire second floor of your house down, because chances are your parents will not be amused, and you might actually get first hand experience with the phrase grounded for life.

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Well last night I was pinged by a few people @ SES London and also a few emails pointing me to the searchenginewatch article on Nick Wilson’s presentation @ SES London in which he let it be known that he had the deal all wraped up with Pay-Per-Post and left the company to start a new venture. Nick went on to say that when his partners let the deal slip they were just ready to pack it in and let everything fall apart. That is when Nick said he returned to salvage a deal for Performancing.

No specific numbers were disclosed to me.

Thanks to graywolf for pointing out the sew article and others in attendance at SES London for dropping the skinny.

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About the Author

Years ago I found myself on unemployment and in debt but with many service oriented websites. Determined never to work for "the man" again over the next several years I learned how to monetize those websites through donation, subscription, direct sales, contextual advertising and affiliate advertising. People say that I have a knack for seeing marketing angles that most people do not. I work hard, party hard, and have a relentless work ethic when something catches my interest.

http://www.shoemoney.com

“When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise.”

SoooI thought it would be worthwhile writing a post that looked at social marketing, with a particular focus on Digg.

First of all, some background reading if you feel like it:

• Threadwatch – Growing list of domains getting banned at Digg
• Lee Odden – The hypocrisy of Digg and spam
• 10e20 – List of domains banned by Digg
• V7N – URL banned by Digg.com
• Graywolf – How to be a dirty Digger
• Digg – FAQ

The difference between social marketing and SEO

I think this is core to the issues facing a lot of sites that have been banned by Digg. An SEO strategy is a very flexible thing. You can take your broad strategy for any site (or page for that matter) and apply it to other sites (or pages). Of course, this is an over simplification – there are obviously differences from industry to industry and site to site, but generally, what works for one site can more or less be applied to another site for similar results.

You optimise the same core areas, write content in a similar style and build links from standard sources. It’s a very transferable strategy.

Social marketing has largely been adopted by the SEO community due to the fact that “buzz” and “viral” campaigns can result in some sweet links, which are great for SEO. But more and more, SEOs are beginning to appreciate the traffic and brand value from this form of marketing – the problem arises when the SEO mindset is applied to this emerging channel of marketing.

Simply put – a social marketing campaign needs to be tailored to your specific objectives and although certain aspects are “standard”, each strategy isn’t as obviously transferable as SEO is.

Example 1 – an innocent mistake

A blogger who has been banned from Digg had posted on his blog that he had “only” submitted each of his 30 or so articles to Digg once. Not gonna name names at this point because I do think it was an innocent and non-malicious action intended to “seed” the stories on Digg in the hope that they would “grow” in popularity. However if he reads this and doesn’t mind being named, I’ll happily add in links, etc to his posts.

The problem here is not his intention – just the implementation.

When devising a social marketing strategy, we need to look at the big picture, particularly when exposing our sites to a large community. As with forums or blog news sites such as Threadwatch, there are different levels of issues and etiquette we need to consider. For Digg, I would make the following assumptions:

• They receive a lot of rubbish submissions
• Most of which probably come from the SEO community (or at the very least, people with a knowledge of SEO)
• As such, the Digg community may frown upon SEO flavoured submissions.

So, in this example, submitting every one of his blog posts, the author has applied a SEO mindset by creating a social marketing strategy that isn’t entirely appropriate to meet his objectives. By submitting so many of his own articles, the community system (a combination of human and automated factors) has flagged his domain as spam. The number of submissions as a proportion of the size of his site were so high that Digg has banned his site (as most articles would have been buried).

The point here is that not every post made on a blog actually deserves to be added to Digg. Most blogs cover niche topics and in the grand scheme of things, it’s unlikely that everything you (or I) write will be “Digg worthy” – remember the community out there is much larger than just SEO.

A more appropriate strategy for this type of site (a blog) would be to submit ONLY articles that high quality and are likely to appeal to a broader community, or at the very least just space out your submissions (as submitting an article from your own site as and when you post them could trigger a spam flag).

Example 2 – social bookmark buttons on larger sites

Another domain that has been banned from Digg is the popular business networking site ecademy. This is an interesting one, because it is an active site with a vibrant community of it’s own.

Of course, I can only speculate as to why they were banned, but I would assume that the following factors are core:

• Lot’s of user generate articles (different authors), each with a Digg It link.
• Authors most likely Digg their own submissions.
• AND / OR regular users Digg the story.

Why is this a problem?

Let’s put it in context. The site receives 100,000′s of visitors each month and as a networking site, a high proportion are likely to be returning visitors and as such they will be familiar with regular authors.

The chances are that even if the author doesn’t Digg their own story, some regular users will. Only one person needs to do it, but given the scale of the content being generated this could lead to a lot of submissions on a regular basis. Again, as with example 1, lots of submissions + low Digg count could lead to spam flagging.

But surely sites shouldn’t be banned because users Digg their content?

No, of course not. But what we would like and what happens in reality are two different things. I’d love for Google to not index the site belonging to the guy who is copying my content, but here we are!

As I said at the beginning – we need to look at the big picture. Where do your articles fit into the grand scheme of things? Generally, not where we would like, but then that’s why we’re developing a marketing strategy, right?

The reality of the situation is that Digg receives a lot of spammy submissions and as such we need to factor this into our strategies. Some people will spend time working out ways to get around this – fake usernames, pay to Digg, etc. Personally I think this is a waste of time. It is social marketing after all and if you can’t embrace the community for what it is, then you have a larger problem that won’t be solved by a short term burst of traffic from social media sites.

Tips for smaller sites and blogs

I would be inclined to avoid larger social media sites such as Digg until you can get yourself some decent professional kudos from fellow bloggers and industry professionals.

Basically, if you are considered to be a nobody, then your submission isn’t really going to carry the weight that it otherwise would. But if your site or blog has a lot of blogsphere / press / authoritative exposure, then the articles you write a much more likely to stand up to close inspection. Plus it’s useful for smaller sites to have an established user base that can support submissions by Digging them – that will mean there’s less chance of your submission fading away into nothingness.

Also, think about it before you Digg something. Does it really warrant the submission? Is it a topic that would spark a several page discussion on a forum or be covered by industry news sources (or is sufficiently sensationalist for neither of those to matter)? If you can’t answer yes to any of those questions, then why would other people Digg your submission?

Tips for larger sites

If your site generates a lot of content (larger forums, sites where users can submit articles, etc), then consider how you will approach social bookmarking buttons. Do you really want every piece of content to have a Digg button on it?

In my opinion, a good strategy for larger sites would be to have some mechanism to monitor and list popular topics – either by comments, replies, page views, etc. If you can shuffle these to a “popular page” and then ONLY add social bookmark buttons to these pieces of content, then there’s more chance it will be accepted by the Digg community.

Basically, for most sites, the onus is on the site owner to filter out the crap content and promote selective social bookmarking, instead of broad based bookmarking with a “let them sort it out at their end” philosophy. This will give you the best return on your efforts, while minimising the risk of a ban.

Now

should I Digg this post?

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Scott Boyd (aka Marketing Guy) is an Edinburgh based online marketing consultant with over 6 years experience in the industry. He is the founder of SEO agency eFlaunt, where he mixes a
blend of traditional marketing and SEO.

Scott’s musings relating to the marketing and SEO industries can be found on his blog – Fused Nation.

In case you missed it, an e.coli outbreak in the Northeast of United States, most likely the result of tainted lettuce, left a reported 71 Taco Bell customers ill. Obviously, these events are what led to the current Taco Bell campaign.

In order to provide additional support, Taco Bell turned some of their attention to search advertising, targeting their brand name and running ads that navigate interested parties to this page – The Taco Bell press page featuring the release addressing the situation and the Centers for Disease Control’s “all clear” announcement.

Of course, they also remind visitors to “Think Outside the Bun” (developing a brand is important, regardless of the situation).

A link to the video of the CEO’s announcement can also be found at this page. However, one blogger in particular asked whether or not Taco Bell’s PPC campaign was effective and decided to scrutinize it for future emergency response purposes. The blogger I am speaking of is Graywolf and he thinks while the effort is commendable, Taco Bell nevertheless missed the boat on this one:

Online video is not the only social media mentioned in the write-up. Taco Bell’s lack of a blog, something that’s imperative during a viral situation – good or bad, is discussed as well. A well-maintained blog, regardless of how hard it’s going to be hit with initial negative comments, is a great tool to address situations like these and to perhaps influence the viral message being spread about your company.

However, we shouldn’t discount the fact a company the size of Taco Bell did try to leverage the search engine industry when it came to presenting their side of the story. This just reinforces the idea of search as a marketing juggernaut, even if you can’t remember the text ad you clicked to get to your destination.

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Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

Wikipedia defines cloaking as:

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.

Basically, you are presenting search engine bots with a certain kind of content while delivering different content to the site visitor. Normally, the cloaked pages are created to fool search engines in order to get better result rankings. However, what if you are using cloaking procedures for legitimate reasons like protecting paid content or serving different content based on the visitor’s IP address? Should sites doing this be subject to the same penalties? It depends on whom you ask.

On the Graywolf SEO blog, readers are asked how they save articles from the New York Times because they are only available to the public for a limited amount of time. Once an article gets to a certain age (2 weeks), the NYT hides it unless the Google crawler (or other search engine bot) requests it – fitting the definition of cloaking, something Graywolf takes the search engines (and the NYT) to task over.

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped also has some issues with Google seemingly allowing WebmasterWorld to cloak their pages, which goes against the search engine’s webmaster guidelines. For his post, Philipp conducted a search related to CMS and PHP and a WebmasterWorld post held the first position. However, when Lenssen tried to access the page from the search results, he was taken to a login page – another example of cloaking in action (unfortunately, when I try to duplicate the search, I am taken directly to the content).

Both Lenssen and Graywolf wonder how these otherwise legitimate sites get away with these cloaking exercises when Google and the rest are explicitly against the act. However, the examples given by both bloggers represent the “white-hat” side of cloaking in the sense they are not trying to game the search engines. These sites and companies are merely trying to protect their content.

However, this does not matter to either Lenssen or Graywolf. Because Google has actually addressed this issue in their guidelines, both believe there should be no quarter when it comes to punishing the guilty parties, whether the sites have a legitimate reason for cloaking or not. They also feel Google’s Matt Cutts should address the situation so there will be no more confusion.

At the Chicago SES, while it was never explicitly stated (at least in the sessions I attended), there seems to be a growing sentiment that as long as the webmaster isn’t trying to be deceptive, search engines will tolerate some cloaking. The Wikipedia page discusses delivering content based on a visitor’s IP location (IP Delivery) as one of the instances where cloaking is indeed accepted. Although, the explanation also points out IP delivery isn’t the best example of cloaking because the content in question is not being hidden from search engines or users; it’s just being manipulated based on the visitor’s location.

The question remains, however – should the search engines punish pages being cloaked for content protection reasons? If you follow the two bloggers cited in this article, then yes, all sites doing so should be punished. If they are not going to punish these sites, then the search engine spokesmen and women should speak up and address the confusion.

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Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

Many marketers are concerned about sensitive data that might be used by Google as an alternative or in addition to landing pages to somehow effect paid as well as natural rankings.

A post by Graywolf talks about just that. At a recent Las Vegas PubCon conference he approached Google’s Engineer Matt Cutts with this question and to no one’s surprise Matt did not provide a clear answer.

“When I spoke with Matt in Vegas I unashamedly admitted that I don’t want Google to have all of that user data, because I think they will “use it against me” to make things harder for me (not personally just sites in general). I know I’m in the minority thinking that Google is currently using user data in any meaningful way, and in true Matt Cutts form he neither confirmed or denied my suspicions”

I am not surprised that Matt avoided answering this question. Google has all that data so why wouldn’t they use it to better their results (organic and paid).

The main objective of a search engine is to make the USERS happy. If users are happy, they come back. The more they search, the more ad $ Google gets. As simple as that.

With my PPC campaigns I did notice major changes in the PAID section. Did not however see a major change in organic listings.

Paid became a lot more expensive even though I have dedicated landing pages for each keyword used. So if Google is visiting those pages and looking for keyword relevancy we’ve got it.

This bring us back to what Google has been preaching for years. . “Better your website for better results from Google and thus your visitors“. It’s just that now Google can/is enforcing it with their algorithm.

With time site managers will have to focus more on their own sites and less on the Google algorithm. And finally the war between “Tech SEOs” VS. “Marketers SEOs” will be won by Marketers!

P.S. No one should be surprised that Google is not confirming this information. Why would they? It’s the same thing as if they would reveal 50 of the 200 things their algorithm looks at when ranking a site. Google has massive amounts of data from the Toolbar, Adwords, Analytics, Search, etc they’d be dumb not to use it to better themselves.

We should not be crying about it. If we do, we become hypocrites. It’s OK for us to use the analytics data that we gather from our website visitors and thus change our site but it’s not OK for Google to use this data to better themselves?

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Igor Mordkovich is an in-house marketing director for a NYC based online company. He also writes a personal blog on search marketing and advertising.

Igor’s Blog: http://www.bizmord.com/Blog

“Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party.”

You can try it yourself with a search on Google for “New York Hotels“. See screen shot below:

Pretty interesting keyword phrase match on the part of Google, since the Search Engine Strategies conference is coming up in New York at the end of the month. Or am I giving Google marketing too much credit?

Hat tip to Graywolf at Threadwatch

Seth Godin puts in his two cents on Google’s Click to Call as well.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.