Category Archives: SEO

Wired buys votes on Digg, Arrington calls for lawsuit?!

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This story at Wired Magazine is a fascinating glimpse into manipulating social media.    Mike Arrington isn’t impressed though, and suggests Digg should sue Wired because Wired owns Digg competitor Reddit.com.

I don’t agree, and frankly would love to see hundreds more of these “sting” operations which help everybody understand the challenges facing social media and hopefully will pressure sites to clean up the fraudulent stuff going on.

Mike’s right to point out the conflict of interest issue and everybody in this biz could use a transparency injection, but overall we need *hundreds* of times more investigative “sting operations” to show how problematic things have become with payola of various kinds, PPC, and other online scams like Ringtones.

The best response for Digg is to do an insider investigation and root out the abuses and publish it themselves, not pretend it doesn’t go on as they and Mike appear to be suggesting.   Violation of the DIGG TOS by Wired reporter does NOT mean the study isn’t valid.  These are almost entirely separate issues.

Soon I’m hoping to publish my own expose of PPC scams –  I’m trying to get Enhance.com‘s attention right now about the bogus traffic I’ve been paying for and will soon publish the list of the sites from my logs over the past year. If enough of us did that it would go a long way to help clean things up.

Bald Britney Spears busts out of Britney Spears rehab

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Some time ago I was testing how terms are getting ranked by search engines here at the blog and I noted that blog traffic spiked from a simple post about Cicarelli, a famous model.   Time to test Britney Spears which is often at the top of all the world’s internet searches.

This is testing what happens when I mention Britney Spears in a blog post.   I apologize – sort of – to those of you who actually carefully follow Britney Spears news on a regular basis.  I’m not immune to the prurient interest in Britney that has captivated *billions* worldwide, but it really is a sad commentary on the state of our cultural well-being that Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan garner far more news time than, say, Global Health …

….. gee whiz Britney Spears, you’ve done it again!

Britney Spears Shaves Head, scream the headlines, and then in the small print if at all… millions die from lack of oral rehydration therapy.

We should be ashamed of Britney Spears, and ashamed of ourselves.

Pay Per Post Prejudice Pointedly Pokes PodTech’s Scoble

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Robert Scoble is a fine fellow, as almost every blogger knows.  Perhaps it is partly for this reason he’s under an unreasonable attack by many bloggers for accepting an invite to Keynote the upcoming Pay Per Post Conference in Florida.    I’m not a fan of the Pay Per Post concept because it’s probably going to create too much abuse, but it should be discussed and debated rather than thrown out without discussion as many prominent bloggers, many of whom *make a lot of money blogging* want to do.

I  commented over at Scobleizer:

Wow, I’m really disappointed in how hostile people are to you about giving a simple keynote. If Bill Gates keynotes CES does it mean he supports all the violence in GTA and Resident Evil? Of course not.

I’m not currently a PPP enthusiast and don’t plan to blog for them, and perhaps Shel’s even right to call this approach the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere (clever and catchy!).   However if disclosures are prominent and clear PPP people can note that they are doing a similar sort of thing that a *paid* journalist does when they review gadgets or movies or Techcrunch does when they review companies.

I smell a lot of hypocrisy here. Prominent folks who are directly paid very big money to blog in various forms are insisting that stay at home moms can’t pick up a few bucks for reviewing something. And if Shel is right those evil hookers, blogging between tricks, will be denied the money that could get them off the street!

The critics worry about credibility and that’s good, but it’s hypocritical to get paid indirectly by blogging (e.g. TechCrunch, Engaget, O’Reilly, Battelle, Shel, etc, etc, etc) and then suggest without more elaboration that other payment routines are inherently flawed and dishonest. Are you just protecting your turf?

Zawodny to Beal “Spammer!”. Beal to Zawodny “Get a Damn Clue!”

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You’ve got to love these spats between clever and prominent blog dudes. It’s not only the closest onliners generally come to schoolyard or barroom brawling, but often these debates give huge insight into the future of the online world.

When Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, the clever social community application, it fell to Jeremy Zawodny to help refine the project into the robust and scalable environment demanded by the world’s top website. Jeremy also decided to take on a bit of quality control, and accused Andy Beal, a top marketing consultant, of spamming MyBlogLog. Andy had used as his avatar “win a free zune” rather than using the normal convention of a personal picture.

Andy Beal shot back angrily that he was not spamming and even had permission to run the contest from MyBlogLog’s founders. Cheap trick or not, if he had permission I think Jeremy owes him an apology – or at least an upgrade to “officially approved MBL spammy tactic”.

Although I thought Jeremy was too hard on this marketing “trick” by Andy, I certainly agree with many who think that MyBlogLog is now suffering from it’s own popularity. Popularity that has brought a lot of questionable tactics outside of the spirit of a quality community.

There is no great harm in the win a free zune *except* it defeats one of the nice aspects of MyBlogLog which is that you can see the person’s face. Several prominent and clever SEO’s with great blogs like Andy’s “Marketing Pilgrim”, as well as several junk sites and junk SEOs are resorting to similar tactics. The most common is to plant a pretty woman’s face rather than your own face, encouraging signups to your blog community.

Avatars are the heart of this system since they appear at other sites. Therefore to preserve the integrity of MyBlogLog Yahoo should require that avatars reflect either the person or a highly relevant aspect of the community. I’d even consider requiring that if you want to play with MyBlogLog you’ve got to be the real person in the picture.

Andy’s a good guy and a quality SEO, but his claim that he’s helping MyBlogLog with this type of approach rings pretty hollow with me.

Update:  Jeremy retitled his post and apologized.  But hey, it was fun while it lasted!

Xianglu Grand Hotel

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The Xianglu Grand Hotel will be the venue for SES China, to be held in Xiamen China in May of 2007.   The English website for the Xianglu Grand is here.

Major website SEO problems notwithstanding, the Xianglu Grand looks like an amazing hotel.   One of china’s largest and finest this huge hotel in Xiamen is a five-star hotel project by Xianglu China, a business consortium for petrochemical, synthetic fiber, and real estate.   This appears to be the first Xianglu group’s venture into the hospitality industry.

The Xianglu Grand is located in the Huli District and overlooks Hubin, a scenic part of Xiamen.   The hotel is minutes from the Xiamen Gaoqi Airport and very close to Xiamen shopping and attractions.

There are several restaurants including a steakhouse and buffet and a 24 hour lounge.

I’m tentatively planning to go this year having missed last year’s Nanjing event which was the first of it’s kind in China.   There’s a great search marketing tour that surrounds this event and it looks like a lot of fun and perhaps good structure to bring to a first trip over.

Chico the Wonder Dog, part deux

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The Chico the Wonder Dog project is part SEO experiment, part long tail search query, part dog tail search query, and part waste of time. What’s been very interesting is that my Chico the Wonder Dog keeps trading places as Google’s top Chico the Wonder Dog with the Chicohuahua “Chico the Wonder Dog”. I don’t understand this because THAT Chico does not seem to be getting talked about very much after an initial flurry of activity.

What insights into the mind of Google does this experiment give us?

Darned if I know. I’m asking Chico the Wonder Dog. Again.

Editing this Chico the wonder dog listing to include the first Chico the Wonder Dog post to see what happens.

Hey, nice lookin’ website there! Too bad for you.

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Most marketing and advertising agencies are *terrible* at understanding how the internet works – they think that flash elements and print-like approaches are what should drive the projects when the exact opposite is the case.

For online effectiveness in terms of search and usually also for users you want easy navigation, few graphic elements, and most importantly a well-optimized site. The more the biz is online focused the more you want optimization over good looks.

Most SEO sophisticated places are poor at design, and many SEO whiz kids can’t be convincing enough to steer people away from the good looking sites designers tend to do. Yet those good looking sites that sacrifice searchability for beauty should be avoided.

In my opinion the people who say “hey, we can make it look super good and glitzy AND be very well optimized” should be listed online in an “Americas least wanted” list of web people.

Of course you can make sites look “OK” and have great optimization, but it’s impossible to have the classy high falutin’ feel you get from rich, large images and flashy elements and do a great optimization. Disney-like sites can afford this mistake (I think it’s still stupid of them), but most businesses count on good optimization if they are in a competitive field where many companies are trying for many related terms.

There are probably exceptions to this rule of great looks vs great optimization but I think they are *extremely* uncommon. The best simple way to describe it simply is that flash and images almost alway look better than text and almost always lead to inferior optimization than text and hyperlinked text elements.

More Tech Memes

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

Yikes – I leave town for a few days and can hardly keep up with all the interesting tech news items. In addition to the fun Jeremy v. Matt copycat debate we’ve got:

Jason on Digg Rigging This is just a tiny part of the HUGE number of upcoming stories which will showcase how complex the relationships are between SEO, social networking sites, and …. money.   I actually contacted the Digger Jason is effectively accusing of abuse and it does not appear to me he’s taken any money at any time.   Here’s a great summary of that “Digg Ban” case.   But his innocence does not suggest to me that there is not a huge and growing issue with Social media SEO uses and abuses.  At PubCon many were discussing how powerfully social networking can help with organic optimization as well as straight traffic generation to a site that gets “dugg” or creates a compelling (including stupid but popular) YouTube video.

Jim at Microsoft apologizing in a very web 2.0 way. Scoble would be proud of this “naked conversations” approach to corporate blogging. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see how making Robert the semi-official corporate blogmeister with the huge salary increase he deserved for “getting Web 2.0” before the suits did (most MS suits don’t even get it now) would have returned 100x on the investment.

… and speaking of “getting Web 2.0”. Yahoo does but can’t seem to get the mileage they deserve for retooling the corporation as a community internet extravaganza. This set of leaked Yahoo internal documents about the potential Facebook aquisition provides a fascinating glimpse into how big deals are analyzed. As a Yahoo shareholder I think they should save the billion and just get their stupid ass in gear with the excellent social network stuff they already own like Flickr (which should be the template for other social applications, Del.icio.us (OVERHAUL the INTERFACE and yes, you can rename this URL monstrosity! ), Yahoo Video, Yahoo 360, Answers, groups, etc, etc. As I’ve noted before Yahoo suffers from giving people so many options they tire of the decision making and go to Google’s simple interfaces, search, and simpler suite of choices. Google expects us to act like the sheep we are. Yahoo expects us to do too much mental work choosing how we relate to the internet.

WebmasterWorld Pubcon – Danny Sullivan Keynote

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Everybody in search is wondering what Danny Sullivan‘s going to do after Search Engine Watch. Arguably the most knowledgeable guy in SEO and certainly the best connected, Danny is at Webmaster World for the first time I think.

The answer is: Search Engine Land where Danny, Chris Sherman, and Barry Schwartz will be doing “longer, original content on key events, developments, and issues” in search. Feeds or daily newsletter.

He’ll also continue with th daily SearchCast via WebmasterRadio at Daily Search Cast

Pubcon Las Vegas – Duplicate Content Session with Google and Yahoo

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OK, I lost power and couldn’t blog the beginning of the session which is wrapping up but I’ll try to get a link to the simply excellent presentation by Tim Converse at Yahoo which detailed many aspects of the Duplicate Content issue. This is probably a major problem for Travel site Online Highways despite a huge investment in editing over the years. We still have lots of thin content pages and this appears it could be all or part of our problems ranking at Google and (very recently) Yahoo.

Amanda Watlington, Bill Slawski had good presentations and Brian White of Google also gave a PPT with similar but less detailed coverage. Brian did indicate that the info presented by Tim was in line with Google’s thinking about this complex topic that IMHO affects a growing percentage of the web’s total pages, and kills off many inappropriately. It was suggested that the ideal is thought of as a single page, removing all the duplicate content. [I’d argue that queries are too vague to define things this specifically, and often the “best” site will have hundreds of “similar” pages that are best left to user’s choice. Unfortunately this approach would be too spammable so I think lots of collateral damage ensues.]

RE: Citation tag – sounded like Brian and Tim hadn’t even heard of this tag, so I’m now skeptical it’ll help remove duplication penalties for a site that had been scraped heavily.

Wow – It was just suggested by Tim that in some cases it’s best to start a new site if you’ve been penalized, but first he said to clean up the site and then get it reviewed.   This is the first “official” recognition I’ve seen for the idea that a URL can be so poisoned it must be abandoned.

Great session – Kudos to Tim for a super helpful PPT and other presenters for tackling this complex topic so well.