Las week Sycara President Dan Boberg and I sat down wiht Ray Torres for his points of view show to disuss the SyCara Tallwave relationship. Tallwave is a venture accelerator company which provides starts ups and entrepreneurs with start up services. They also help companies navigate the sometimes daunting task of raising capital.
This is part one of the interview and you can see the rest at the SyCara Blog….
The French Open kicked off on the 17th at the Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. The start of the summer Tennis Season always reminds me of Europe and the summer. This year however I am not sitting in 110 degrees in Phoenix we are having unusually cool weather for May much to our relief. However I digress as the main purpose of thi post if to talk about the really “”important stuff” which is Nike’s video about Roger Federer’s oufit!!!!
On the 1st of June I will be presenting a workshop on Online Reputation Management as part of Instant Training’s Social Media Training Workshop. I was honored to be asked byBob Tripathi to be one of the presenters in this workshop. Bob is working with an incredible line up of presenters all with a passion for education and thought leadership in our ever evolving space. The workshops run from the 25th of May until the 22nd of June and given Bob’s commitment to excellence and quality are ideal for anybody learning social media and its application in business. There is a huge difference between effectively managing social media in a business environment and having a facebook, linked in and a twitter page of your own.
Bob has written a great post which decribes the event here Social Media Training Workshops The cost of these workshops is $299.00 and there are also group discounts available.
Social Media conferences can cost thousands of dollars to hear the same speakers this is incredible value and you do not have to leave your desk or get out of you pyjamas for the early morning sessions.
In this video Bob Interviews Social Media Expert Li Evans
Politically illustrated www.politicallyillustrated.com claim in this article that Google made a deal with the OPA to give higher value to its members content. The results certainly reflect this and I can see why a conspiracy theory might be hatched. I would like to see the proof that they say they have because if its true then Google has finally turned evil and although many people believe they are already evil I don’t. I think they are sort of evil. They are one of the best search engines in the world and an amazing success story but since they became public and Wall Street started running the show clearly they have lost some of their authenticity. This story if true would convince me to move from ‘sort of evil’ to full blown on the axis. It would be like finding out there is no Santa Claus!!!….okay I am kidding a little but I do know that I have sites with completely original content which no longer rank. Its tempting to jump on the conspiracy theory but I would like to see the proof.
On the 27th of April SEMPO Airizona will host an event with Frederick Vallaeys on Google Local. Frederick is a brillant and engaging speaker and given the importance of Google local in search campaings this is a must attend event for anybody who participates in Google local. Anybody online who does not have a Google local strategy are missing out on a very effective tactic but I wont spoil the event, better to hear from the expert and Frederick is certainly that.
To sign up for this Spring Event hosted by SEMPO Arizona click here.
I recently launched a blog about womens hair loss called mybigfathairloss.com. The blog journals my own story and struggle with severe alopecia in an attempt to help other women who are going through the same problem. I am also looking for guest posts from women who are willing to tell their story, and share any useful information which will help other women manage the condition.
This weekend has seen articles about Online Reputation Management on Gawker.com and The New York Times. Both articles talk about managing Online Reputations and companies who offer services to” fix” online reputations. What they both missed is the opportunity to look at the dark side of ORM which is deliberate Online Defamation and slander. The US has no protection for innocent victims of anonymous and malicious online attacks. I hear all the time that you can go through the legal system to prosecute the person posting the defamation. This does not work, takes a very long time, is very expensive and typically leaves the victim back where they started except a lot poorer. The legal process for online defamation is woefully inadequate and the repeal of CDA 230 is way overdue. Internet sites cry no “we need immunity from others posting slander and defamation on our sites we cannot be held responsible” And the one I really love “we cannot interfere wth freedom of speech” on the web. There are no issues with freedom of speech if its the truth, or if you are expressing your opinion. However, when the information posted is slanderous defamation making outlandish untrue claims publishers online should be held just as responsible as publishers offline. This double standard has gone on long enough and since online publishers refuse to verify allegations or information even when challenged then the law must change to protect the innocent. Many people attacked online do not have the financial resources to go through the woefully inadequate legal process.
This article by Robert D Brownstone and Chad Woodford describes the complexity of CDA 230. CDA 230 was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 designed to protect children online and the irony of it is that subsequently, the CDA provisions regulating pornographic content were struck down as unconstitutional, but this CDA 230 provision stayed. The law is blatantly exploited by ruthless sites to create content which they make large amounts of money from.
Due to the abuse of CDA 230 this very bad law needs to be amended or totally scrapped and I as an individual want the same rights online as I have offline. Other countries do not have CDA230 and it has not affected the growth of the Internet. These arguments are old and tired and the law needs to catch up with reality. This great post discusses the unconstitutionality of CDA 230 and the 14th amendment.
The Vertical Measures full day workshop: Search, Social & Content Marketing – is coming fast! April 7 in Phoenix. (40% discount below)
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If you are one of the many ecommerce sites which dropped during Google’s Panda Update or the Farmer Update as it’s also called there are some clear clues to look for to bring back your rankings. It is very normal for sites which are not doing anything wrong under Google’s guidelines to get hit in the fallout of a major update. There is now a clear pattern for sites which dropped and this excellent article from Practical ecommerce explains it much better than I could. Excellent job and very accurate. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2657-SEO-Case-Study-One-Store-s-Struggle-with-Google-Updates
This is exactly what we are seeing with our ecommerce sites. One client who is the original manufacturer of the product has seen huge jumps in their traffic. Their distributors did not do so well and many of them dropped. Our client is picking up the extra traffic. This is exactly what Jill Kocher describes in the article above. Another client is a reseller of the original products and did not do so well. Individual pages targeting the products with just the original manufacturer’s information on those pages fell dramatically. Some of their competitors who were using snippets of original content at the top of the page did not lose rankings and some did much better due to others dropping. We are currently adding unique content to each page targeting the resale products and will report back on progress when that content is picked up and indexed by Google. None of our B2B sites dropped as they have unique content on their own sites.
So if you are a reseller and not doing anything against Google’s guidelines scrambling to find out what happened then look at your product pages and check for unique content. If you only had the original manufacturer’s information on there then that is the first place to start. Add some new unique content to the page and wait for it to get picked up. I also strongly recommend that you take a look at linking, if you were buying links from linking companies stop it immediately. I will write another post specifically as it relates to linking when we complete more research on the role that linking may have played in dropped rankings.
Despite Google’s advice that there is practically nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings there is another deadly loophole which can be used with brutal effect against a competitor. In the last 18 months a competitor of Elixir Interactive has been targeting us in a smear campaign. We documented the entire story here www.elixirinteractivecomplaints.com. This company has created dozens of pieces of content most of it duplicated and distributed it on the web. Because of our own online reputation they had not penetrated the top results with the false information until they exploited Google and Bing’s weakness when it comes to spam linking. The false information about us appears on the site pissed consumer.com and by using a deliberate very inexpensive linking campaign they were able to rank the article about us at the top of Google. Here is how they did it.
The false information on pissed consumer.com has many links from spun content posted various blogs. Below is an example of this spun content. Notice how the articles simply replace a few of the words with synonyms like ‘promoting’ with ‘advertising and marketing’ and ‘higher education’ with ‘college’. The anchor text “elixir interactive” is pointing to the pissed consumer article. They have used just two articles in this way to create multiple links.
There were also many spam comments posted on blogs pointing to the false information on pissed consumer.com with targeted anchor text.
By using spam comments by the boatload on other blogs and spinning articles and posting them on their blog network they could create enough of these links to rank the page. Google recently created a lot of controversy by penalizing JC Penney for bad linking. When I see how effective this spam linking still is I feel that Google must have removed JC Penney manually. They are not even close to catching this type of link spam and it is a major factor in influencing Google and Bing’s rankings. If this type of spam is allowed and with great efficiency then why go after paid links? Why are paid links demonized by Google and this type of link spam rages on? Google has known about this for a very long time and there are people out there selling content spinning software, comments by the boatload and Link Wheels. Why? Because it works you can see just how well from this example.
By exploiting this deadly loophole to gain top rankings these attackers have been able to place very damaging and false accusations about us at the top of Google and Bing. When the search engines tell you there is almost nothing that a competitor can do to hurt your rankings that may be true but there other ways they can hurt you which are just as damaging. If the person doing this had to find quality editorial earned linking to gain these rankings to the article it would never have seen the light of day. I do not expect Google and Bing to police the lunatics on the web but I do expect them to know the difference between a good and a bad link. There should be an appeal process to remove something this blatant and clearly deliberate. A blog post talking about how reputable we are pointing to a link on pissed consumer containing false and derogatory content is a very obvious attempt to influence Google rankings with malicious intent. If Google and Bing knew the difference between a link placed with intent to influence their results and an editorially gained link it would not happen. Google has wall to wall PHD’s why can’t they work this out?
I am not naïve enough as to think this is simple I realize it’s not and Google in particular already do a good job with its results but its loopholes like this that need to be addressed to make Google even better than it is today.
