Over Ice Creamized

The last week has been full of speculation, hypothesis, and outright guess work by many people in the SEO industry. Suddenly years of supposedly acceptable link building tactics are coming back to haunt thousands of websites. Right or wrong, it appears that the sins of the father are coming home to roost on the sons of today. Setting aside the larger discussion of whether Links can hurt you, negative SEO works or does not work, or even if link building is black hat or white, let’s first discuss several ways you can tell if a link is good or bad, assuming that links can be “bad” for you like a triple fudge sundae made with chocolate ice cream and stuffed with brownies. 

Nature vs Nurture

Search engines that rely on link profiles have traditionally been easy to game by throwing more and more links at them. This is why there are so many “guidelines’ about the types of links you should try to acquire and why the number one guideline tends to be create great content and people will link to you. Unfortunately that isn’t necessarily true. With so many websites using nofollow by default, and site owners becoming terrified about linking to other sites for fear of being penalized themselves, natural linking has been harmed in a way so deep that I seriously doubt that it exists in the way it did before search engines started sculpting the internet to suit their algorithms.

Over time two types of “bad links” have evolved, those that are simply born bad and those that become bad over time for various reasons.

Born That Way

Some links are simply born under a bad sign.

Cute kid, but do you want to babysit him?

Paid links: We used to call these advertising. But along the way someone figured out that those bits of advertising helped in natural search and the flood gates opened. Blogroll links for $10, footer links for $100, and thousands of variations popped up. Since they were easy to get, and site owners were willing to nearly anything for a buck, they were all dumped in to the same bucket and made verboten. Never mind that fact that many “paid links” are also the most relevant links out there.

Automated Link Building: There are various levels of automation, screwing a cap on a bottle is good automation, letting Skynet control your weapons and manufacturing, not so good. When most people think of link automation the latter comes to mind, and they are usually right. Tools such as AutoPligg and XRummer have been around for years and used surgically they may provide some benefit, but most users use them like a tactical nuclear device with little regard for the devastation they can cause to both webmasters that own the sites being abused and their own link profiles.

XRummer is typically used to create thousands of profile links on unsuspecting forums and social sites. They sign up for the signature and profile and vanish, never to return. We so so much abuse at one SEO forum that we wrote a script that deleted any new user with zero posts after x number of days. Not to mention the nofollow attribute applied to the profile pages.

AutoPligg is even worse in my opinion. It was written to take advantage of people trying to create and run sites with a Digg feel to them. AutoPligg faked being social by posting links to stories and blog posts by the thousands. But AutoPligg isn’t the only guilty party here, many Pligg site owners are just as guilty of running sites created just for link building. Take http://03m.info/ for example.

This site serves no useful purpose. It exists only to have links placed on it. This is obvious by the total randomness of the ‘stories’ posted there. On the front page alone they range from Pokemon toys to business class airline travel. This is obviously not being treated well by it’s owner.

There Goes The Neighborhood

There Goes The Neighborhood

I’m a marketer and sometimes marketers make me sick. There is this genetic predisposition to blowing things up in the interest of making more money, driving more traffic, and simply to sound important and in the know. And marketers have ruined many great things over the years.

Reciprocal Linking: Early on Google actually told webmasters that going out and asking other webmasters for links was a great way to promote your website. And they were right to do so. Unfortunately, link many things touched by marketing, if 10 is good, 10,000 must be better. This led to massive reciprocal link pages with hundreds of links on them and in due time less and less relevance to the topic of the site.Sort of like this http://www.somethingaboutbeads.com/linkresources.html

Now Google has said that over doing reciprocal links is a bad thing and people are using the “new” rules to point at others and claim that they are “spammers” simply because the rules changed and they haven’t been able to keep pace for whatever reason. Reciprocal links have their place, but like hot fudge, too much is not a good idea.

Guest Blogging: Guest blogging started out as a great way to get your message in front of a new audience. It still is when you can get your message posted to great websites like Search News Central or Marketing Land for those of us in the search and marketing fields. However, outside of search, most popular portals no longer allow links for authors which is the coin of the realm. They won’t even link to your Google profile so you can get some author rank going for yourself.

Then sites like MyBlogGuest appeared. On the surface, and for most people, this is a great way for content creators and publishers to get together to get great content out there. Unfortunately the quality of many sites and most authors on these sites is subpar at best. Downright horrible at worst. You can join, and we recommend that you do, and participate, but be very diligent when considering using content from those sites or allowing your content to be published on blogs looking for content there.

Unfortunately guest blogging devolved to mean sticking a keyword stuffed article on a junk blog with thousands of other junk blog posts all hitting random topics. Take http://360commercials.com/ for instance. Just a quick glance at the home page and you see blog posts on a variety of topics. Depression, hair removal, Pinterest, wait, maybe they are depressed that the hair removal picture they pinned on Pinterest didn’t get any repins. In any case, blogs like these are a result of search engines making in content links more valuable than other types. People created these blogs to gain toolbar PR so that they could sell space. A $5 blog post on a $5 blog and Bob’s your uncle, instant authority. Except it doesn’t work like that any more.

Blog Networks: This is another example of 2 being good, 200 being better. It makes sense to have a network of blogs work together. A fashion portal that focuses on everything from hair care to shoes may not do as well as a collection of sites that focus on specific topics in the same niche. Then you have the other end of the spectrum, groups like Build My Rank. Thousands of blogs where you can pay to have your “guest post” distributed. Unfortunately you could end up on a blog network without even realizing it. You may find a great blog to have your information written about only to find out that they are part of a massive network later.

The New Guy, or the ME TOO! Syndrome

The New Guy

Our industry has a habit if discovering a new technique and burning it to the ground just as fast as it can. We’ve seen them all come and go, some more useful than others. Pixel links were a cute gimmick the first few times it was done, and then someone wrote a script to make it easy for anyone to sell pixel links. Suddenly the new kid that was an original idea had thousands of imitators.

Sponsored themes (for various open source platforms like WordPress) became hot. Pay to have a developer create a new theme, embed your anchor text rich link in the footer and hope the theme becomes popular.This makes great sense if you are actually a theme developer or graphic designer, not so much if you sell reusable baby diapers.

Web page gadgets quickly followed. You could create a gadget that people could put on their website and in the bottom there would be a link to your site. Again, this is great if you are creating a calculator to determine body fat on an exercise site, not so great if you are creating that same calculator for your auto detailing shop.

The latest to enter the fray are all those wonderful infographics. You know, those amazing graphic representation of data that almost always are unreadable and provide very little real or useful data? If you decide to make an infographic, make it useful to your viewers, not a source of links from unrelated blogs that happen to repost it. Much like sponsored themes and gadgets, we have seen unrelated companies sponsoring infographics in an effort to get easy links.

So What Now?

In the end, all links are good, and all links are bad. It is a matter of intent and execution, and I personally find it hard to believe that an algorithm can measure intent. So they must fall back on trends and patterns. Unfortunately trends and patterns can, and do, create false positives and miss actual positives. The best thing you can do is ask yourself, if the link I’m trying to get placed on someone else’s site were to come to me, would I want it on my site?

Reports should be opportunities to inspire confidence in your work at best, warn clients of potential issues at worst. They should not be a massive spreadsheet of seemingly random data that in the end means very little to the “business” you are trying to help.

Link Reports

For those of you that do link building for clients how often are you asked for a list of all the sites you got a link, tried to get a link, wished you had a link there? We still do a fair amount of foundational link building for clients. You know the ones, directory submissions, article distribution, easy to get links like those. Generally, when someone does a link building campaign like these they generate an excel spreadsheet with a list of several hundred URLs as proof that they did the work.

Unfortunately those spreadsheets aren’t really worth the bits used to create them. A link submitted to a directory may take days, weeks, even months before it is actually listed in the directory. Even worse, the page it is listed on may not even be in the search engine index! So what happens when a client picks a link at random to check up on only to hit one of the many that simply haven’t been updated yet? you guessed it, you get an email from the client wanting to know where their one directory link it.

Did you get a link on a truly newsworthy site? Tell the client about that one, but don’t bore them with all the others.

Ranking Reports

SERP (search engine results page) Ranking Reports are the report that simply won’t go away. It is our fault, as an industry, that we even created this monster to begin with. Clients are fascinated by them and SEOs live and die by them. But do they really mean anything?

There are hundreds of data centers, geolocation issues, even personalized search that enters in to every search these days making a true ranking report nearly impossible to generate. Then you have the less than ethical SEOs that have clients log in to Google before checking rankings just to get that personalized search bump. But in the end, does a ranking report really mean anything to the bottom line for a client?

Analytics Reports

The reports that we live and die by are analytics reports. What really matters to a client is whether the number of people that see their site is increasing and if they are making sales. Everything else is a distraction. You could track 50 keywords and phrases for a client, see half of them move up and half move down but still see an increase in overall traffic and sales. You could see all of them go down for that one hour you spent checking the SERP rankings and still see an improvement in traffic.

A ranking report won’t show you the hundreds of search terms that send traffic to a website that you know nothing about, but are affected in a positive way by the marketing that you are doing. An analytics report will. There is nothing better than showing a client that their natural search traffic is increasing 15% to 20% each month for months on end while the generic SERP rank report shows minimal movement for 2 or 3 top tier terms.

Conversion Reports

Combined with analytics reports, These are the true lifeblood of a website. All the traffic in the world isn’t worth a dime if no one actually “buys” anything. Unfortunately, this is the weakest area of almost every “SEO” out there, and even more so for those latching on to the new darling term “Inbound Marketing”. They tend to stop when the traffic hits your site. They feel that their job is done. From a marketer’s point of view we are only half way there.

We try to provide our clients with conversion rate data, what products are converting best, and how we can improve those conversion points. Conversion rate data tells us if the traffic we are getting worth continuing to chase or if it should be left alone. Take Pinterest for example. we love it for driving massive traffic. But that traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as other types do. So we take that in to account when planning future growth.

The show runs about an hour and you can listen to it here or find it on iTunes (search for Search Geeks Speak) and download it to your iPod.

Search Geeks Speak: Ecommerce

Brodi

We are very involved in helping animals in need through our Animal Charms jewelry web site. But we also have a business to run, so we tend to help charities that can help us raise even more money for them than those that are either indifferent to the needs of business or even worse, go out of their way to make it hard to help them. Over the last few years however, we have made a list of seemingly simple things that can, and should, be done to make it easier for these charities raise money.

1. Make the fact that you are a 501(c)3 obvious. I can’t tell you how many hours we have spent over the years trying to figure out if we were looking at a ‘real’ charity or just someone with a good heart trying to help. If you want businesses to donate you pretty much need to be a registered charity.Many businesses take advantage of the tax breaks that they get from donating. So be prepared to offer a receipt for any donations, but especially those over $250.
2. Make sure that someone monitors your charity’s email account. We send out a lot of contact emails to discuss ways that we can donate or help and more than half of them are never replied to.
3. Understand that businesses want to work with you, not take advantage of you. A large percentage of charities treat businesses as if they were ATMs. When we ask if we can co-brand on something, or get a mention in your newsletter, in exchange for a donation we are not trying to take advantage of you. We are looking for ways that we can all benefit from working together.In the end, if we make more money, we have more money to give. We are also more likely to give to those that work with us rather than those that don’t.
4. Search out, and reach out, to business that are likely to help. At Animal Charms we have three different ways we can help a charity raise money. Not once have we been contacted first by a charity. We help plenty of charities, but always have to seek them out and ask if we can donate.
5. Offer something to businesses that donate to you. It could be as simple as a mention in your newsletter, or even a sponsor page on your website that links back to the business thanking them, or it can be as complex as a full marketing campaign complete with press releases and interviews.
6. Create a sponsors page where you can list all of your business sponsors in one place. Great three levels of sponsorship and give each level a little more than the previous level. For example, a Silver Level donation gets a link to their website, a Gold Level donation gets a link, a banner and a short paragraph about them and Platinum Level donors get the previous perks plus a paragraph in your newsletter. (You do put out a newsletter don’t you?) But most of all, let your donors know how much you expect for each level of donation in an easy to find location.
7. Bonus Tip! Make sure that your charity is represented on sites like Charity Navigator or GuideStar. While this isn’t mandatory, larger companies like to have outside assurance that they are dealing with charities with proven histories of helping.

Businesses want to help. We help by making more money so that we can donate to charities.  If you can help us make more money, we can donate more to the charity so that it can focus on what it does best, fulfill its mission.

what is pinterest?

Pinterest is a sharing site. Similar to sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit where you can bookmark and share your favorite things on the web, it allows you to primarily share, or pin, photos and videos. Using the Pinterest Bookmarklet or iPhone App, people can easily post their favorite sites and pictures as they find them. Once something is pinned it can be liked or repinned by your followers and their followers and their followers. As you can see, the right image or video can very quickly be seen by a large number of people.

One of the biggest differences between Pinterest and other sharing sites is the large number of people that will follow you if they like your pins. This creates a potentially huge audience for things that you find interesting.

getting your site ready

To get the most out of Pinterest you need to make sure that your site is prepared to be easy to use and pin.

1. Install a Pinterest button on your site. There are already Pin button plugins for most of the major CMS platforms. Get one you like and install it.
2. Every blog post or article or page needs to have a great, not average, not generic, but GREAT picture or video on it. Pinterest is a visual sharing site, if you don’t have great visuals to pin, they won’t be.
3. Provide great content. This has been important for a long time and you should already be doing this anyway, but with Panda targeting weak content, and sites like Pinterest targeting great content, it’s more important than every to have great content.
4. Some “marketers” are suggesting plastering marketing info on your images. Do NOT do this. After some very limited testing branded images get shared significantly less than non-branded identical images.

Now that your site is ready to promote Pinterest, it’s time to set up your Pinterest profile.

setting up your pinterest profile

Right now Pinterest is invite only, if you aren’t already there, or don’t know someone who is, leave a comment here and we’ll send you an invite based on the email address you leave. Pinterest also requires you to use Facebook or Twitter to log in. I prefer Facebook for this, but either works.

Pinterest

1. First you will need to set your Pinterest URL. If you are doing this for your business we recommend using your business name.
2. Next you will want to set up your boards. These are the different categories that you will be using to share things from your business and others. If you are a brick and mortar business include boards for your state, or city or local college, include boards for your various business categories as well. If you are a jeweler you might include one for gemstones, one for rings, one for necklaces, possibly even a fashion and wedding boards.
3. Be sure to include things that interest you as well. Pinterest isn’t just a broadcast medium, it’s about sharing things that you enjoy and like. Being “real’ will also encourage more people to follow you because you are a person and not just another business trying to make a buck.

pinning

Pinning is where you will either win or lose opportunity on Pinterest. The audience is significantly female and if they are like my wife, they hate to have product shoved at them every time they do something, so don’t do that. Be a person. Interact like a person. Don’t be a greedy marketer or business person and try to use Pinterest as a one way broadcast platform. It will not work. This doesn’t mean that you can’t promote yourself and your products, it does mean that this shouldn’t be your only reason to participate.

So what should you pin? Anything that you like. But when pinning your own content consider if it is content that others will want to repin, or if it’s just something you want to sell. If it isn’t something worthy of being repinned, it won’t be and you will end up simply filling your boards with things no one cares about. This will cost you followers in the long run.

However, there is one thing that Pinterest is really great for. Re-introducing old content or products. This is a new medium and many of the people here will either have never seen it before, or have forgotten it. This is an opportunity to introduce your pin to an entirely new audience. Our friend Mike Wilton (@MWilton13) wrote a great piece about resurrecting old content at Search News Central and is worth a read.

To give you some inspiration, here are a few of my favorite Pins for inspiration:

1. Christina Gleason: Be a curator. Mixed in with her personal pins is a great board for Creative Commons photos that you can use.
2. Whole Foods: Promote a lifestyle. They created a fabulous business Pinterest presence and should be held up as a model for doing it right with 11k followers.
3. West Elm: Promote a style. This furniture store doesn’t just post products for sale, they promote styles and their followers seem to approve.
4. Etsy: Go wild. The big dog right now on Pinterest seems built to take advantage of everything it has to offer.

the take away

Pinterest has great potential to be a huge traffic source for the right website. We already have clients seeing 400 to 500 visits per day naturally with little tweaking from us. But like any social media interaction you need to temper your desire for new customers with being a real person. People online are bombarded every day with massive amounts of advertising and have gotten quite savy at spotting a shill verses a real person. So be real, have fun, and enjoy pinning.

MingleWing

Everybody seems to be sharing everything these days, from news stories to videos, from pictures to the smallest details about their daily life. The only problem is that with most social communities you are limited to sharing with people that you already know. This limits your ability to reach new friends, followers and readers to your immediate circle and anyone they happen to share with.

MingleWing is trying to broaden your reach by allowing you to share with everyone. By using the MingleWing toolbar, the one real weak spot in the process, you share things using the toolbar. The toolbar then places your share on the MingleWing site and your Facebook page at the same time. Unfortunately when it posts to your Facebook page it links back to MingleWing instead of to the actual story adding another click between the share on Facebook and the actual story. This is a deal breaker for me. Why would I want to do that when I’m sharing things? I want to share it, not share a link to it.

But the real question to me is, will anyone ever actually use it? Other than spammers that is. With the problem of adding another hop to the story, I see no real reason to use it at all. While this is potentially a great place to get links to things you share, the user experience pretty much sucks IMO.

Call To Action

With any marketing attempt one of the most important aspects is a clear call to action. In this campaign the call to action was vague at best, except for the changing of a profile avatar. The stated goal was to “raise awareness” of a difficult subject, child abuse.  This left me wondering, how effective would simply changing your avatar be at preventing child abuse? Or even make more people aware of it? With the way some of the conversations turned on Facebook, I had to wonder if the abuse heaped on people for doing nothing more than “just” changing their avatar, I admit to doing it a bit, was justified or if this now viral action was actually having a positive effect.

PreventChildAbuse.Org

Quite a few people were declaring the entire event a useless waste of time. I spotted @sugarrae on Twitter giving to preventchildabuse.org and challenging everyone else to do the same. In a moment of clarity I agreed, sent in my donation and began a campaign across Facebook and twitter challenging others to do the same. On Tuesday I began to wonder, did this moment of slaktivism really make a difference? Or were we really just tilting at windmills making ourselves feel good without actually doing anything meaningful.

I talked with Ben Tanzer at PreventChildAbuse.Org and put the question to him, did this avatar changing drama on Facebook make a difference that they had noticed? While he only had anecdotal data at this point, Ben informed me that they were seeing an estimated 4x boost in donations over the last week. Four Times. Let me say this again, FOUR TIMES their normal donation levels. Ben also pointed me to their blog where they had posted about how they viewed the event.

Awareness Equals Branding

One of the things we preach as marketers is that building your brand is one of the most important things you can do for your business or organization. Anything that you can do to build awareness for your organization improves your brand, even slaktivism. While this may be a unique situation, it may just as easily be the norm for viral slaktivism. Can your organization benefit from a viral campaign like this? Anecdotal evidence says definitely.

So the next time you see a silly campaign happening on Facebook, or any of the social sites, don’t pass it off as a waste of time, study it and and see how you can use a similar campaign to build awareness for you and your brand.

Fortunately this is a relatively easy fix.

As installed, the Home link in the breadcrumb navigation is the rather unweildy /index.php?route=common/home instead of pointing to the clean URL of your choice.

You will need to edit the following pages:

• /catalog/controller/category.php
• /catalog/controller/manufacturer.php
• /catalog/controller/product.php
• /catalog/controller/search.php
• /catalog/controller/special.php

Find the following code in each file:

$this->document->breadcrumbs[] = array(
‘href’      => HTTP_SERVER . ‘index.php?route=common/home’,

Replace it with this code:

$this->document->breadcrumbs[] = array(
‘href’      =>  ’http://www.domain.com’,

Obviously you will need to enter your domain name.

This small change will go a long way toward cleaning up your URL structure and reduce the potential impact of having the Search Engines finding what they see as duplicate content.

You will find other pages where this needs to be fixed. Simply replace the code as needed.

The biggest weakness in viral marketing is finding a topic that will actually go viral. Sometimes the best ideas go nowhere while some random thing on the net goes absolutely nuts. The second biggest weakness in viral marketing is that you can often leave your potential customers wondering what they are supposed to do after they see your video or event or whatever you did that went viral. So, how do you find a topic that fits you?

Go for a world record

The folks over at Guinness are the go to guys when it comes to world records. They currently track a few thousand world records and are always willing at accept new record attempts. All you need to do is find a record you can break, or invent a new record to attempt and get started.

Gourmet Gift Baskets tied together two very marketable ideas and have just set a new world record as I type this. Their goal is to break the old world record of largest cup of coffee by more than doubling it from 911.5 gallons to 2010 gallons of fresh brewed coffee. That’s more than 32,000 cups of coffee. Additionally, the goal is to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure by selling cups of coffee and opportunities to be photographed with the world’s largest cup of coffee.

Of course they haven’t done this alone, there are plenty of corporate sponsors helping make this happen. And the event is taking place at Blog World Expo, one of the largest conventions for bloggers, so it is getting plenty of exposure all across the net.

Make it easy for me

So how do you kick off your own viral marketing world record attempt?

1. find or create a record you can actually break
2. find corporate sponsors to cover the parts that you can’t cover yourself
3. tie the attempt in with a charity or event that already has national exposure and a large fan base
4. promote the attempt early and often using twitter, facebook, blogs, tv (local news), radio (local radio stations), and anything else you can think of
5. invite local and internet celebrities to participate
6. finally, get the record

With the right record, event, and charity, you can turn this attempt in to a marketing home run while doing some good at the same time. And you might even be able to get other people to pay you to do it if you market it right.