Flash Mobs: Power of Social Media Exemplified in Philadelphia-

April 2, 2010

Social Media is taking off among the youth but also within all communities as the popularity of these sites increases. People frequent these new doorways to the internet. As they share their interests and day-to-day happenings with each other, people are flocking to these sites. One can communicate with hundreds or even thousands of friends in a few keystrokes.

Never has the world seen such a network that literally has the power to engage the human spirit so effectively. We may see entire governments overthrown by these sites one day. When it comes to likes and dislikes, everyone is not the of same vein and debate is natural. Entire communities of folks interested in topics that range the gamut, daily communicate on the internet to share information and links to interesting sites.

The power of this raw force of networking has been seen in the city of Philadelphia of late, as in other parts of the country. So called, “Flash Mobs,” are appearing and causing disruption, damage and problems across the city of Philadelphia. Youth that are looking for action and are able to communicate by way of their hand-held devices on the networking sites and gather in mass to disrupt a given area of the city at will.

This is about the power of these sites and that people can communicate with each other in real time. It is no mystery that the sites more fluid in nature like Facebook and Twitter are more poplar to people looking to engage. How can a business harness the power of these sites to increase sales?

These sites like Facebook and Twitter use a global “nofollow” attribute in their “robots.txt” and generally links are considered dead to the machines that crawl the web. My opinion is that they are picked up and crawled anyway by big search. There is some debate about this. The links on many of these fluid sites that use the global “nofollow” designation do not, however get indexed in the search engines. Some sites linked to these sites are indexed by search engines. Take “Digg,” for instance and sites like it that allow spider crawling. These are prime real estate for well written articles and links to interesting sites. Again content reigns supreme and the same link bait ideas are attractive to the social networking folks that share an interest in your good or service.

As stated before, big search will continue to harness the happenings on these social sites so that the search engines remain valid in the internet experience. The power being wielded by these sites has unleashed an attraction to them by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Although the chaff that is known as spam is always going to be prevalent, the social sites are working hard to prevent it and the human element is heavily employed to cancel out the spam artisans. Take “Slashdot” for an example as it marks articles as spam until they are voted upwards by readers to raise them to a page of higher ranking.

So, we must ask if the social sites are helping the quality of big search or are they becoming entities all their own and threatening big search. I think the latter, but as long as people need a place to search for items on the internet, the search engine will remain viable. Google and Yahoo and Bing may be reduced in their ability to garner revenue from pay-per-click listings as copywriting will take on a role that will empower businesses to convey their messages in other ways. One thing is for sure and that is that the old linking schemes are dying a slow death right before our eyes. Another is that quality in site copy will rise to a level of significance never seen before.

Check Your Backlinks for Penalties

Some see today’s search results as tumultuous and uncertain. New sites can break out of the sandbox or completely avoid it altogether and be listed with the big boys without the site age and backlinks. Page rank is being beaten out by content siloed websites with great internal link structure.

For some it is like a wave that the surfer waits for to ride only to be dumped into the sea. For the many that do everything right and then get slammed in the SERPS, there is a reason. These machines that index the web are running on particular algorithms and even though the SERPS may seem like a result of random placement, they are not like 52 card pick-up at all.

The recent trend of big search has been commented upon often on this website. It seems that all that we knew is in a continuous shake-up, but this is not the case because the big search players are moving to perfect the art of delivering truly organic results. Currently great content and internal linking strategy is being rewarded and old spammy schemes are being penalized.

On one hand you have rewards for good and on the other you have penalties for being linked to a site that has bad marks against it. New site owners that have true professionals working the SEO of their sites are enjoying fantastic results. Some websites however, are experiencing penalties by association. Even with established, aged sites we are seeing them being dumped off the first page and sometimes even far lower.

What is it? What is going on is just what I predicted in big search’s strive for organic results. Backlinks, whether contained in news articles, press releases, or raw incoming links need to be checked. Right now, a new link with anchor text placed on a penalized website will tank your site on any search for that keyword or keyword phrase in the given anchor text. New potential links have to be checked and a page rank check is hardly enough.

It seems page rank is an item that is setting idle for now and while it is a factor in the SERP placement, its value is stagnant. A page with high page rank can be penalized to death and you would never know it. Google and Yahoo are very similar in their algo’s regarding the penalty placement in the SERPS. The bar graphs on tracking software shows parallel movement in these two search engines. Bing is another story and we are still trying to figure them out as they seem more stable but a bit also harder to see movement.

So folks, it is your links! If you track your backlinks, you can begin to undo some damage. Visit the Seopenalty.com site and try out their service. You will be surprised at the sites that are penalized heavily for spam and related tactics that have been allowed on the sites. Focus on Anchor Text both within and outside your site. Remember: If it is too easy to develop a link = RED FLAG. As always, develop quality content and keep it fresh. Use the social networks to prop up your links and pages.

Have fun because without challenge there can be no great achievement. Ride the waves and stay on top with a successful strategy.

SEO – Page Rank Fading – Back to the Future – Content

Pie Graph of Search Market Share - link juice provided for SEOmoz.com

The Static Internet was a simpler place where one could enter, search and find information. Back-Links once regarded in this simpler era, as a vote of confidence in a new an emerging internet have been exploited and abused beyond reasonable validity. Links were the way to Page Rank and too easily acquired in the link free-for-all’s all over the web. The majority of the activity was inorganic and sought out by website operators to self-induce better rankings by trading links, etc. This type of self promotion was beginning to pollute the organic results sought for by the search engines. The original back-link idea was predicated upon end users that enjoyed a particular site would vote for it with a back-link. This old idea was all but destroyed by the linked crazed site owners seeking self promotion and the black hat exploiters. The search engines met this challenge with their own methods to filter out these self generated links and the spam that threatened the user experience of the free search engines. The method Google used for tabulating the old link method was called Page Rank.

Page Rank was a system that attributed value to sites based upon the back-linking and popularity as demonstrated by incoming links vs. outbound links. A mathematical equation was used to discern the Page Rank of a given site. This worked for some time but the inorganic use of back-linking was a continuing cancer of which big search spent a lot of resources to control. Page Rank seemed to be the honest vehicle in a dishonest world by which to deliver organic results to the masses.

Big search worked at filtering the junk out of the rankings. Good, unique and fresh content was rewarded not only by the human experience of organic back-linking, but with a higher PR afforded by the search engines. The sites that were deemed “authoritative” received a higher PR. These along with the blogs and forums were positioned by PR higher than sites with less content. The educational sites and non-profits, the respective “.org” and “.edu” sites received higher PR. This was reflected in the SERPS.

A couple of things began to happen with technology and more folks logging onto broadband connections, etc. A more sophisticated end user began to demand a straight doorway to a more personal experience. Blogs were still popular seemingly to spite PR. The natural inclination of free commerce is always for profit. Big search had its eye on pay-per-click advertising and began to feel threatened by building up PR on some websites. Big search did not want anyone selling back-links to the highest bidder. So as the drive for profit rules, some websites that had gained high PR because of great content, being they forums or blog sites with ever-changing content, started selling their links to lower ranking websites. This would have undermined that natural and organic model that propelled Google to the top and made big search the doorway to the internet. Big search wanted to control this selling of links so it moved to devalue the very things it held high, fresh and changing content. Rich content sites & Blogs were downgraded in PR sometime in early ’07 for fear of link selling. Many great sites were whacked in half. I had a few websites that went from PR4 to PR2 in one swoop.

Something else took place of the old PR method however. The results in the SERPS for Google remained for my regional results, but in the national SERPS that are mixed into the results; my authoritative sites fell against some of the larger sites with less content. This had to do with PR and another type of filter or manipulation by the search engines. The end result was a balance for a while until the black hats began to dominate the Adwords and Adsense programs with spam websites and garbage infiltrated the ranks of the SERPS. For quite some time Google’s own model was threatened by the hijacking of its own money making advertising programs. It took some time for Google to get off the profit taking and clean up its act.

Finally, Google policed its results by dumping paid advertisers in order to keep the world of search organic and honest. This had to be done as real people were getting tired of the experience of searching through the SERPS for what should have appeared on top. Black hat paid advertisers were destroying organic search. Thank you Google, even if it was a little late. (I wrote about this before the dumping of advertisers with great angst.) Google’s competitors started to sound off about the actions they were taking to improve their offerings.

In the current state of Googling, PR is outranked by content. What does this say about PR? PR is just an element of the criteria that is weighed for the real ranking, that of the SERPS. PR has its place as it does rule in many areas of search, but when it comes to content and a regional element, PR is not the deciding factor in getting listed in the SERPS.

Shall we consider PR as a fading element of yesterday’s methodology? I think so. I think we are seeing the reemergence of the human element in social media. PR was built upon skewed backlink math and it is not a real measure of a site’s popularity. Social media sites are inundated with garbage and the search engines are easily filtering out the good from the spam. It seems that big search is set-up to do this in an efficient way. So called “NOFOLLOW” links on sites like Twitter are noticed by Google and position well as referred links. The Google machine sees these links and they get into the results in the SERPS. The Google machine also sees content with its artificial intelligence that above all, will reward the true purveyors of interesting information. Real people are beginning to be harnesses to “tweet,” “dig” or “bookmark” their favorites on these social sites.

Google will continue to regard these sites as very important as they represent a threat to big search. As social media continues, it will refine itself into many doorways for many end users on the internet. Big search has positioning itself to not only harness this new media, but to build its own brand of social media. The networking that is currently in place has big search shaking, but there is hope. Search has realized that because it is so big, more leaches can suck its blood (and yours) and it can fall and be hurt terribly if it does not return to the simple organic results of yesterday.

“A hunger for interactivity will prevail…”

Social Media Growing like a weed - link juice provided for wpsmallbusiness.com

Social sites will also continue to refine, but not for the same reasons big search refines. A hunger for interactivity will prevail as real people can interact with each other. This service is unique to social media while search is a more private deal. Social media has its own limits set by its users as to what is visible and what is held back from the public. This is specifically why the social attempts like Google’s own “Buzz,” where the push for one to open their own personal contacts into the open air will not work. People want to keep some areas of their internet experience private and the mix of social with email contacts will be rejected by the masses. For instance: Just about everyone that has a job would want for their personal ramblings and excesses to be kept from public view.

The mix continues and it seems that big search will either rise to the occasion with a truly human experience that attracts people organically, or a new type of social search will enter to assume some of the traffic and to act as a multi-faceted and different kind of doorway to the internet.

-Bob W

Start with Content

Start with Content.

Start by assembling  site content that is unique and cannot be found anywhere but on your site when you put it up on the internet.  There is no substitute for original site content.  SEO efforts will be severely limited if this basic building block is of low quality.

If you try to use freely distributed content from the internet, you will fail miserably at your attempt to populate your website with interesting material that will yield results.  Search engines will negate your site as a mirror of content and probably not only discount your site to the 100th page of the SERPS, but the website where the same mirror image of content is posted will be trounced by the copy and pasting of used words.  Both sites are diminished by this type of activity.

You have to become a writer or encourage someone within your company to write content for you.  You have to tell the story and get it down in writing.  This seems so easy for some of us, but for a large percentage of the businesses this is the hardest thing to facilitate.  Any efforts at SEO will be severely limited by a paucity of original content on your website.

You want to find the people in operations within your company that can provide a good story for your unique content.  Take these tidbits down and with pictures, you have pages that can be written on your business and your industry.  The assembly of the content on subject specific pages is the next step of your design that is very important.  There is a very specific reason for this as the internet is a big place and Search Engine Optimization is a topic specific science that relies upon simplicity in format to attract the machines and the visitor alike.

We can handle all of your SEO needs including writing original site content.

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Spammers are to organic search results what rust is to iron.

Spam Has Reached the Tipping Point

“When was the last time you searched for something only to be sent to a worthless site…….”

Google is the most successful search engine in the business.  It came to its position high above the rest because it delivered what is known as organic results better than anyone else.

It is like going on a nature walk and digging up a real and tangible morsel of nature to bring home.  You visited an organic playground.  All this while your neighbor went trolling for tuna down skid row and brought home some junk from the old city dump to pollute his driveway.  You plant your organic flowers while your neighbor clangs around with his unsightly mess.  Organic vs. in-organic.  Your organic flower is smelling nice and looking good in your organic garden.  Your

neighbor, well he is a spam sniffer and the aura of his frustration is exuded from his noisy driveway.

The best way to describe organic search results is by describing what they are not.   When was the last time you searched for something only to be sent to a worthless site devoid of original content and full of links to similar sites?  The ending cyber squirrel cage of worthless junk is just what the search engines are fighting against every day.

Organic results are the most valid matches for your search query.  Search engines would strive for the best organic results possible, but for balancing of advertisements that fuel the effort.  Google has dominated search with its Adsense and Adwords programs, but the misuse of the programs has contributed to a problem that if left unchecked, would mean the demise of the giant.  This will hopefully not happen because Google will police unsavory SEO and the misuse of its products.

Organic results deliver what the end user desires with efficiency.  Google was founded on organic results.  Google’s popularity was derived from the most organic results in the industry. Organic is currently competing with manufactured results by spammers. Google is not the only player in the game, but it is the biggest and advertising is the source of the big funding behind the behemoth.  Fully automated, the programs are slow to be policed and organic results are affected immensely by fake links, Adwords schemes and worthless websites trying to cash in on the Adsense and Adwords programs.

Advertisers will turn away once they realize that something is not working.  Google is suffering from some pullback as of this writing.  Organic results have been injured by pay-per-click advertising. The search giant knows that pay-per-click can also be abused by competitors that click away on advertisers links in order to raise the costs for their enemies. The real, brick and mortar companies that watch their budgets closely will pull back from Adwords.  This will leave the tricksters trying to trick each other.

The main drive for any real SEO campaign should be for honest and lasting organic results.  This can only be achieved by delivering original content along with SEO techniques that complement the endeavors of the search engines toward organic results.  The weeding out of the leaches on the internet will continue because the very survival of search, as we know it, will depend upon organic results.

SEO tricks will fade and what will be left is real and original content that will propel search to provide a better experience for the end user.  SEO will follow with the embellishment of the real and tangible assets of each site so as to afford the search engines the ease of delivery of organic results.

Organic results will be the target for the SERPS if search is to remain free. Organic is real an non-manipulated search. The SERPS will never be 100% organic, but they have to do better than they are currently as the SERPS are miserably missing the organic results that made the internet great.