1. Veil of Darkness
2. Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission
3. Group key
4. Tacca leontopetaloides
5. American Culinary Federation
6. WCTI-LP
7. Eric Marshall
8. YAF
9. Line by Line
10. Tolleson Union High School
11. Ken Kocher
12. Riskbase
13. Rae Valentine
14. Fire Prevention Week
15. Win My Soul
16. Chewy Granola Bars
17. United Nations Security Council Resolution 31
18. A Single
19. Jean Étienne Bercé
20. Isaac Fraser
21. FICA (disambiguation)
22. Lance Broadway
23. Victoriana
24. UC San Diego School of Medicine
25. Gordon
26. Whipped Cream & Other Delights
27. With This Ring
28. Spinsterhood

Comments

Tag:

Tag:

That’s the Internet Way. We think we communicate better online, but I disagree. I think we bitch easier and with greater freedom. I think we create drama for the sake of getting attention. We use the Web to show support only if the situation is a major disaster or matter of the heart. But on an every day, routine life basis, far few have the nerve to drop by to say they read or participate in your “thing” and are glad it exists.

Such is the case of Threadwatch and Aaron Wall. It’s hard to read the Threadwatch goodbye thread because support is coming in now, at the end, and even some well known figures in the industry have dropped in with their shows of support and thanks. You can’t argue with statistics and the data says TW was losing its fire power. Despite that, it had a following.

In October of 2004, Nick Wilson, at the time unknown to us, came to Cre8asiteforums for help with a new website he was launching. He posted in the Website Hospital, www.threadwatch.org – Site Review Please.

The thread is a great memory and tribute to TW’s birth; a beautifully descriptive example of what it feels like to start a new web site. Nick’s courage, energy, ambition and devotion proved to be unstoppable. TW did so well that later, Aaron Wall bought it and for awhile, it was an island with its own SEO/M tribe, its own language, and its own personal code.

Less than 3 years later, Cre8asiteforums members are discussing the closing of Threadwatch. It’s like watching a comrade in arms. Some wish to offer salute, some will continue to find fault, and some will be utterly quiet, not knowing quite what to say.

I think it took incredible courage for Aaron to present his reasons for wanting to close up shop. I dread the day I decide to walk away from Cre8asiteforums. It’ll be a nightmare. Even though I know it will passed on to friends who love it, the loss of a site founder always causes distress to people. We become attached and like them to be there. I felt that way when Nick passed TW on to Aaron.

TW has the last hope that it can be saved or morphed into something new. Whether or not that actually occurs is anyone’s guess. TW was an interesting ride. The one place SEO’s could go and pound down shots in a virtual pub and not give a rat’s behind who saw them there, or heard what they said. If one of their own was ever in trouble, the troops were rallied in mere seconds. Otherwise, it was where you went to be in the company of those whom could care less what you wore to the party.

Sometimes I needed exactly that.

Comments

Tag:

I’m sad to see ThreadWatch go. As long as I’ve been blogging, it’s been there, and while it was never a place I hung out, it was always worth checking out, usually with some good commentary you didn’t get anywhere else, and more edgy and adult than other sites dared be.

As you can see in the Alexa graph, after Aaron took over ThreadWatch in late 2005, traffic seemed to have increased, but this year has been a particularly bad one for the site. I wonder if that had a lot to do with Aaron’s decision, and if he’d be interested in sharing some site stats now that it’s over.

Hopefully, there’s some exit strategy for ThreadWatch. Certainly, a website with a lot of backlinks and community is worth something, even if just sold off to someone who wants to use it as a link farm. I’d love to see a new owner keep the site as a community, but give it the support to help it grow again. As one farewell comment said:

Another site that dared to be unique gets unplugged.

Comments

Tag:

According to Yahoo! Search Marketing:

The Certified Ambassador tier is designed to meet the needs of high-performing agencies, search engine marketers (SEMs) and other resellers who channel large amounts of business to Yahoo! Search Marketing. Prior to attaining Certified Ambassador status, all program participants must prove their success as Ambassadors.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Certified Ambassadors receive prioritized service.

The Sponsored Search Certified Ambassador designation is designed to enable search engine marketing companies to list their clients in sponsored search results across the Web. It allows the search engine marketing company to control their clients’ position by the amount the client bids on keywords and pays only when a customer clicks through to the client’s web site.

Did-it is a full-service online advertising and marketing services firm and the industry leader in search engine marketing. With award-winning expertise in search engine marketing, auctioned media management and targeted online advertising, Did-it has been leading the evolution of online marketing with its blend of technology, intelligence and passion since 1996. Through its multi-disciplinary methodology, Did-it combines top-tier Search Engine Marketing Strategy, sophisticated analytics and modeling, and best-of-breed technology to produce unmatched SEM results for its clients. Did-it was co-founded by Executive Chairman, Kevin Lee.

Did-it recently caught a considerable amount of attention from their peers (other search engine marketing consultants and other search engine marketing firms) when Threadwatch, a popular marketing and technology web site, sponsored a contest which involved one of Did-It’s employees, Dave Pasternack. The goal of the contest was to see which search engine marketer could “outrank” others in a SEO contest. The winner of the contest was later announced.

Comments

Tag:

Base bids’ seem to be of little relevance, with actual average cpc’s being reported to be much higher. It seems whatever Google do, Microsoft soon follow…

Although I think most advertisers would of preferred Microsoft to just rename ‘Orders’ to ‘Ad groups’ and provide some decent volume…

A screen shot as below -

As you can see, this advertisers base bid was 0.50 cents and was charged an average cpc of £281.58.

After looking through a number of my own campaigns, I can see quite a few bids in excess of their base bid when they should not be. Bare in mind – Not all the examples I found are as outrageous as the above, so keep an eye on your campaigns.

I have heard from a Microsoft rep that its just a reporting issue, rather than a bid management problem. But who knows? Advertisers will of course be credited back any overpayments, but it would be advisable to keep an eye on terms you think you have been overcharged on.

More chatter over at Threadwatch.

Comments

Just wanted to say a quick thanks to all the folks who took the time to let me know there was a problem (and to Mike for helping me get up and running quickly – it probably would have taken me weeks). To the folks who thought it was linkbait, I can appreciate skepticism, but you might want to tip your BS meters a bit further back towards “faith in humanity” – life is more enjoyable that way. Ironically enough, I was having lunch with Michael Gray when I got the news, so I’ll let him tell the story (or you can check out the blow-by-blow at threadwatch, so I can get back to work:)

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences.

Andy Hagans posted a quiz about defensible traffic sources, which is a way of testing how stable your income is. After you have a few years experience on the web, forward income stability becomes far more important than how much you are making from a project right now, especially as you transition from an SEO mentality to a CEO mentality.

Comments

Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.

“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?

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

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.

Given how much the search engines already trust the Wikipedia imagine how much exposure it will be getting if the mainstream media regularly cite it and deep link at their biographies!

Just the fact that the mainstream media would link at articles that anyone can edit shows a big shift in power over the last couple years.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.