Social or SEO – Which is better?

There has been a lot of talk about social media and social book marking as taking over the tradition SEO industry. While it is true that some of the major social media sites are taking over the top listings in Google.

These days it isn’t unheard of to see multiple listings for the same content that has been linked to from the various sites like Digg and Boxxet. Sure these sites will help you get your content spread all over the search engines but is it the same as getting your page to rank high in the search engines? The short answer is no.

You see the reality is this; your content will rise to the top of the engines quite quickly but not for your site, it will be for the social sites that are hosting the snippets of content from your site. Good for the social site and if anybody actually visits those links, it could be good for your site as well.

Another way that this is different is in the amount of time that your content stays at the top of the search engines. At the time of this writing these social sites usually were ranking for about 2 weeks before they disappeared from any meaningful rankings. This is not too bad for content that has a short shelf life but what about content that has a longer shelf life… not so good.

Also, how long do you really think it will be before Google steps in to the fray to deal with what in essence is nothing more than duplicate content diluting their so called “quality results”? Does anybody truly need 20 or 30 listings to the same story spread over just as many social domains? I think not. Do I take advantage of it? I sure do!

Now what about SEO – is that going to disappear as a marketing tool? The quick answer is hell no. If you were given a choice on getting your site/pages to rank at the top of Google for years or weeks I am pretty sure which of way you would go.

Back in 2004 I obtained top 3 rankings for some fairly competitive gambling related terms in Google and those sites have had almost no updating or link building since then and yet they remain at the top of Google. You are not going to get that kind of sustained ranking with social book marking.

At this time the best thing one can do is to use the social book marking while it still works, to help your sites gain some ground in the search engines by combining it with solid SEO tactics.

Yesterday I wrote a quick little tongue in cheek article about the alleged Jessica Simpson Curse. Fairly topical these days given the NFL playoffs are quickly well underway. I added this to my sports betting blog and then I added the article to some social book marking sites. Within an hour not only was my blog ranking in Google but so was the social book marking listings.

When my blog got listed in Google there were a few sites that ranked higher for the search term “Jessica Simpson Curse” but not for long. Within 24 hours my blog page took over top spot in Google* for that term and the social book marking pages started to slide in the rankings. While it was good to have multiple page 1 rankings for my blog, I think I still prefer to have my actual page ranking in number 1 rather than somebody else’s social media site.

Social Media is the buzz right now but it can’t last as it is way too easy to exploit just like some of the other techniques of old – can you say keyword stuffing? Use it while it lasts but trust me – it ain’t going to replace solid SEO tactics. That will come later when there is a breakthrough in artificial intelligence brought on by semantic search but that is for another rant.

* results may vary depending upon datacenters

Google Dance – But Who Pays the Fiddler?

November comes around and once again we all get our annual unwanted invitation to the Major Google Dance. It doesn’t matter if you had intended to join in the festivities or not as for all indexed websites; attendance is mandatory

The term Google Dance refers to a period of time when the algorithms are fine tuned in an effort to allegedly give a better result to searchers. As of late I am not so certain that this is the reason behind the updating. Prior to this last major GD the previous one brought us something Google likes to term “Universal Search”.

Universal Search, this was supposed to be something that was going to improve the quality of the results as it brought more options to the results such as Maps, Books, Video and the like. Interesting thing though is that all of these so called enhancements were nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to force feed us more of Google’s products instead of actually giving us results that we were looking for. Sure these things are all good and fine if you are actually looking for News, Books, Videos or Maps when you started your search but if you weren’t then these things are just in the way of you finding what you want.

Anyway, this latest Google Dance seems to be concerned with visible Page Rank. There are a lot of theories as to what the point is behind the down grading of the PR. Some folks think that it has to do with devaluing paid links in an attempt to quash the link economy while others think that this move was geared towards transferring Page Rank into something called Trust Rank.

Seeing as sites can easily influence search rankings through links the whole PR model is kind of useless so the theory is they changed it over to Trust Rank. Sell or buy links and guess what, you loose your trust rank. If you loose your trust rank well then you can’t affect other sites with your links. Problem is, how do you filter out the links on a website as paid links; who makes that decision and what if that person is wrong? The whole theory smacks of censorship to me

Regardless of the theory that you are following these days it seems that Google is up to something once again and as usual, we are supposed to accept it and for the most part it seems most of us do.

Over the years I have watched many a Google Dance unfold and as the dance continued to drone on, I would often go into the posting forums to read the threads concerning lost rank and SERPs. As I read the posts I always sat and marvelled at the fact that while Google was pounding out the tempo for their dances; it never was Google’s algorithms that were dancing, it has always been the webmasters who were the ones actually doing the dancing as they tried to stay in rhythm to Google’s cacophonic beat.

The only real question is how long are webmasters going to let this massive corporate entity rule their businesses? Google doesn’t care about your business short of wringing out as much money as they can prior to bleeding them dry. If Google was concerned about what actual people were searching for they wouldn’t force their products upon us with their Universal Search, they would let us look for what we want on our own instead of telling us what we want.

There is another rumour floating around out there regarding this latest dance, it has to do with how Google actually has to resort to hand editing the PR of sites that they suspect of engaging in the link economy. If this rumour is true then it should go a long way to discredit their so called “better search engine”. Strange how this better search engine can easily be manipulated through linking and the only way to fix it is by hand editing the results to weed out the paid linking dance crashers.

I don’t know about you guys but to me it seems that the Emperor is having a garage sale and we are all buying his “Used” New Clothes.

Social Book Marking – The newest form of MLM harassment.

It wasn’t all that long ago that people started to question why old friends and acquaintances were looking them up.

You’d be sitting at home doing something solitary like reading the paper or doing the crossword when you’d get a phone call. Answering you are surprised to hear that it is that old buddy from the 9th or 10th grade calling to “Catch Up”. A few minutes go by and after you have run the gamut of pleasantries and platitudes you politely ask “So what do you do for work now?”

“So glad you asked” is the response. “I recently got involved with (insert whichever fits, Melaleuca, Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, PrePaid Legal, Reliv and far too many others to list), and man do you ever need to take a look at this.” Some seductive numbers are offered in an effort to win an invitation to your house so they can show you how much money you can make. “Great, how does Tuesday sound?”

Tuesday arrives and everything looks wonderful until they tell you that all you have to do to make some serious cash is to sign up hundreds of people under you and before you know it, you too are making some serious greenbacks. This always brings the question… “Where am I going to find all of these people to sign up under me?” “No problem, just ask all of your friends and the people at the office and before you know it, the people you sign up are signing up people too and they are all under you making you money”.

Sounds easy right? Wrong. People are resistant to old friends showing up out of the blue with get rich quick schemes. In fact if you want to be removed from your social network of friends join an MLM scheme and see if the invitations don’t stop coming soon after your first few attempts to con your buddies into signing up under you.

How the hell is this like Social book marking you are probably asking? Well it isn’t in terms of buying anything but it is similar in how these vast networks of old friends and acquaintances looking you up and then constantly asking you to Digg this and add that to Delicious or write on my Super Wall. The good ones will actually provide their own page profile to Digg before asking but others expect you to do this for them as well.

I don’t know about you but it is getting so bad that I don’t even like to look at email and instant messages from people from my past any more. Hell, I am even starting to question messages from current contacts.

Another thing, what if I don’t like the content you asked me to social bookmark, what is the etiquette on that, if I say no will it somehow ruin the friendship if there was one to begin with? Or how about this, are the people within your social book marking circle book marking equally or are they building up a vast social book marking deficit that they will never make good on?

I don’t know about you but I for one can’t wait until Google completely removes the value of social bookmark links. Really what value can these social bookmarks have as I don’t even know anyone who uses them to find content on the web. If people aren’t actually using these social bookmark sites why do we have them? Is it because some socially inept programmer types think social bookmark sites are cool because they afford them a social circle even if it is only a virtual one?

Bottom line for me is this… If you are contacting me after all these years because you found my profile on Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn and you thought you would ask me to social bookmark your content, stay in the woodwork, I am really not all that interested in making a positive public declaration regarding your spam content.

Just like the MLM pressure salespeople of old, I am not interested in your schemes to make you rich, more popular or socially acceptable. Similarly to multi level marketing, it doesn’t take much exposure to the social bookmark scheme to grow weary of the one sided nature of the old friend contacting you with the request to Digg my story.

Nevada gets its own Domain

It has been a while since I blogged so I thought I would write about the new domain .nv.com. That’s right you read right .nv.com. Does this mean that all of the states are going to be getting their own domains now or is Nevada getting their own in hope that they might funnel all gambling sites to that top level domain?

Lets for the moment suppose that the funneling of gambling sites is the reason behind the new TLD. What other state funneling processes would be put in place would wi.com (Wisconsin) be used to funnel all American cheese sites into that TLD? Would all American automobile sites get funneled in to mi.com (Michigan)? I highly doubt it but there must be a reason behind the new domain.

A quick visit to the nv.com registry site tells us that they have been allowing organizations and companies from Nevada and Netherland Limited Liability Companies (Naamloze Vennootschap - "NV") since late August 2007. They also go on to say that as of September 19th, 2007 they will allow everybody else to purchase domains.

I did a quick check to see what domains were available still and managed to secure a few good ones for myself seeing as I represent several Nevada based gaming concerns. I managed to secure 10 myself; sports-betting.nv.com, pokerroom.nv.com, horseracing.nv.com, marketing.nv.com, texasholdempoker.nv.com, searchengineoptimization.nv.com, onlinepoker.nv.com, onlinebetting.nv.com, mma.nv.com and handicapping.nv.com. Not too shabby if you ask me.

Naturally I tried to get the biggies like sportsbook, casino, poker and the like but naturally these were already taken. I did a little check with their Whois tool to see who the lucky registrants were but it appears that they are cloaking ownership or they have taken those names in reserve for future sale, perhaps through auction.

Regardless of what happened to these great gambling domain names there are still plenty of great domains available. I would fully expect that as of September 19th, 200712:00PM CST (-5GMT) there will be rush to secure domains that hasn’t been seen for a while. I could be wrong but I doubt it. If you should go and try to secure some domains keep this in mind; these domains cost $50 US per year and you must order for 2 years minimum. Good luck everybody and let me know which domains you secured and perhaps do a little link trading.

Social Media Marketing – What is it & who needs it

By now there are a few sites that you should have heard of, Craigslist, Digg, YouTube and MySpace – these are just a few of the social media sites and there are quite a few more. Social media sites are sites that people can go to congregate to share pictures, ideas, videos and more. I know it sounds like just about every other site out there but there is a difference and that difference is in the level of interaction. You see social marketing sites encourage involvement and promote a sense of community

Social media can be used for more things than sharing your holiday pictures or goofy videos. Social media sites can be used to find new employees or perhaps a new love interest or even find an old one. Social media can be used to bring in a whole new level of collaboration when joining in with a similarly minded community.

Perhaps one of the best things that social media sites can be used for is reputation management. Let’s say that some person has printed some negative comments about your company and those pages rank highly in the search engines, this is clearly not a good thing for your business. Creating social media accounts can certainly help in some cases.

You see due to the high level of traffic and linking to these social media sites, some of these sites can rank quite highly within the search engines. Given the power of these networks you should be able to create your company pages that will soon out rank those negative comment pages, forcing them to fall in the SERPS and hopefully, right off of page 1. Of course you would need to set up several profiles to push those negative comments off of page 1.

Here are a few of the more popular ones.

Amazon
Craigslist
Facebook
Flickr
Judy's Book
LinkedIn
MySpace
Newsvine
Technorati
Yahoo Answers
Yelp
YouTube

Google Web Alerts – Is anybody maintaining this product?

I don’t know how many of you out there use Google Alerts or how many of you actually try to get your stuff published using this system. If you are like me you may use this system to stay up to date on the topics that matter most to you.

As a content producer I have tried several times to get my reporters stories included within the Google Alert system only to be rejected time and again. I know that for their system it is all about how the information is delivered and the number of writers can also make a difference. Knowing this hasn’t made it any easier to get included.

With that said I can’t help but wonder if it is so hard to get included into the Google Alert system, why do I keep getting alerts that redirect to pages that have nothing to do with the original alerted story? How about a little quality control on the sites that are currently in the system and kick the offenders out to make room for new, quality feeds?

Link Requests – A waste of time or just a waste of my time?

Own a website? Expect link trading email offers – it is a given. A lot of time and energy is devoted to this simple task; I just wish that the efforts put forward for these types of email requests demonstrated some rationale thought and offered a value added solution. Unfortunately this is rarely the case as more often than not; the requests come in as a selfish deal skewed towards the requester.

I am the project manager for one of our sites http://www.wisehandpoker.com/. This is a content rich site that deals with poker and is rapidly gaining an authoritative nature due to all the content we provide to major sites, publications and organizations.

Take this request I received this morning as it is pretty common. (Example edited to remove references to where the email came from and to what site they were trying to promote.)

Currently we are carrying out a 3 – Way link exchange program.
This gives us
both a better footage in Google ranking. I’ll link to you from one of my site,
and then you link from your site to my another site.

If you are
interested in exchanging links with us, please upload the following information
on your website

It goes on to say…

Please notify me when you upload our link and mail me all your link
details.

Hoping for a successful deal

Now as far as requests go it isn’t too bad with the following exceptions.

• They expect me to place a link to their site and notify them on the location prior to informing me of the URL of where they will place my link.

I took a look at the site they want me to link to and it is just another one of those poker portal sites that offers nothing to the viewers except for a way for the viewers to help make the site owner some money through affiliate links. What would be the value to our readers?

Good only knows what kind of lame ass link directory they would be placing my link on?

If you are going to spend time looking for quality sites to link with don’t you think it would be a wise idea to offer the other site a high quality link in exchange? Barring that, don’t you think you should at least disclose where you were planning to place the reciprocating link?

What we have to keep in mind here is that when linking to another site that link is considered to be a recommendation to your readers to visit that other site. As such don’t you think that you should make sure that the site you are linking to is of a value?

I know that the strategy here is to get me to put a link to their site and then hope that I forget about it so that you get a nice 1 way link. This may work for some sites because the site owners don’t know any better but I mean come on… if the site you are trying to secure a link from is miles better than yours and it offers something of real value, should you be trying these bullshit tactics?

Come on people; practice a little linking responsibility in an effort to make the Internet a more useful place for everybody. Don’t pollute the web with your pitiful attempts to make money by promoting your garbage sites with third rate linking schemes. If you want to use a 3 way link system, offer the other site in your triumvirate something of value and fully disclose everything up front.

I can’t really say that the request I got this morning was totally useless as it did offer me the opportunity to blog about something today.