June 2007

Friday Tea Time is back from a short hiatus. Too much travel can make it hard to do these posts. Anyway, here is a rundown of the things that caught my attention this week:

* Bill wrote a small piece explaining Google’s approach at Blog-Based Annotations for Web Sites. I would think this would be a sweet tool (from a link building angle of course, I wouldn’t dare sabotage my competition by setting up multiple blogs and constantly writing negative articles).

* Brian is once again giving free advice, this time to the new owners of seniors.com. I disagree with him this time. I think the opportunities in the old people market will only increase, and while high school seniors are also a potential gold mine, they are more web savvy and less likely to click on your “student loan” ads. I’m thinking two sections. One for old fogies and one for the young whipper snappers.

* Some great posts on launching a blog: one from copyblogger with the Blog Launch Blueprint and two from ProBlogger with Blog Launch Goals and Insert Linkbait Title Here (but it’s an exellent case study). This seems to be a popular subject every week with generally the same advice being pounded into our heads. I missed the boat in a couple of areas…I’m going to do a time reverse and try to catch up!

* Ask A Ninja? What? How about “ask why Ask is trying to become Fark”.

* Danny wants us to have Google free Friday throughout July. I’m in. I think I’ll take every Friday off of work next month.

* Jake at 10e20 has a nice report card on the 2008 presidential propaganda race. Do these “future world leaders” even have computers?

* Blackhat category! Desert Scraping from Blue Hat SEO. I used this method for a while. I think I called it automated domain hijacking but it worked, and still does to some extent. Be prepared to flip domains and hosts and everything else a lot.

* Whitehat from a blackhat. QuadsZilla points out how some hot chicks can make money with some viral video. Or with their boobs. Either way, the political arena is fodder for those good at creating viral content. And just so I can link to some almost porn, here is her personal page.

* Andrew Goodman just told Jerry yang how to fix Yahoo. Let’s see if he pays attention.

* Interesting post from the YOUmoz section on user behavior impacting rankings. He makes some excellent observations.

* Intraweb Gold: Another Cat on Drugs.

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for more of my thoughts and analysis of SMX Advanced as soon as I can push them out!

Before I get started on this post, I want to say this isn’t a rant against ReviewMe, I really like their service and I think they’re the best one of the paid review services. I just started using them from the advertiser side and everything is good so far.

That said, I thought this was interesting. I recently tried to sign up this blog just to check out what it was like on the blogger side of things. I figured I would probably get declined for too little traffic or popularity (to all my loyal readers, we’re trying!! Thanks for reading my drivel though). I did get the “your declined because you suck” notice but one of the reasons given struck me as odd:

- The website is a suspected fake.

I know ReviewMe has an algorithm that determines quality and they say in ther email it makes mistakes, but I’m curious as to what is on this website that is triggering it as a “suspected fake”. Everything is unique, I did use a generic wordpress template but it’s been modified quite a bit so I don’t think it’s that. I sent them an email a few minutes ago, we’ll see if they respond.

One final farewell to my good friend Nate. He’s lost his marbles and gone and bought a bar and is moving back to Iowa. So if you’re ever driving through central Iowa near Des Moines, look for a little town called Stuart and be sure to stop in at Ruby’s Pub. Tell Nate TheMadHat sent you and get a free Blind Unicorn.

(Nate is the one on the right. George Clinton is the one on the left)

On an industry note…sort of, he will be blogging about his experience buying and running a bar. I did a very brief search for related blogs and didn’t find many so it will be entertaining to follow. His first post will probably be “Stop Giving Aaron Free Beer”. My post right after that will be “Stop Giving Nate Free SEO Advice”.

Anyway, good luck Nate!

Disclaimer: These posts are not meant to be a recap of the sessions like the ones over at Search Engine Journal, but more of a MadHat interpretation of some of the things discussed and the things I found interesting and most important. End of disclaimer.

This session was one of my favorite sessions of the conference. I thought Rand did a wonderful presentation (even if it was 45 slides, they were 45 good ones). The speakers in this session consisted of Rand, Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works (never heard of them until right then), Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl, and the little kid Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising.

* Rand started off this session by going over some differences between Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing and ways to succeed in both. It was an easy to understand presentation and also was more advanced than his normal “what is SMM“ speech at SES. Anyway, here is what you should pay attention to:

Social Media Marketing
- Profiles on social media sites
- Building many friends and relationships through various networks
- You can build solid inbound links through profiles on many social networks
- Social networks are very good arenas for reputation management
- Social media is also an excellent place to control your branding

Viral Marketing
- Linkbait, Linkbait, Linkbait

Rand followed up with an explanation and breakdown of different properties you can actively promote each type of marketing and explained the nuances of each. Here again is the breakdown (and these sites are in order of importance):

Social Media Marketing
1. You Tube (I’m a little confused on this one…I always thought this was more of a viral arena. Rand, if you’re listening it would be cool if you could explain that again for us)
2. Wikipedia
3. Yahoo Answers
4. Yelp
5. LinkedIn
6. Flickr (Extra Bonus: Comments are not no followed!!!)
7. Craigslist
8. Facebook
9. Amazon ?? Reviews ??
10. MySpace
11. Technorati (Extra Bonus: Nofollows are again missing on the ?? main picks ??)
12. Judy’s Book
13. Newsvine
14. Twitter (Rand was harsh about them…said they were worthless)
15. City Search
16. WikiHow
17. Squidoo

Viral Marketing
1. Digg
2. Reddit
3. StumbleUpon
4. De.lico.us
5. Netscape
6. Techcrunch
7. Newsvine (Newsvine made both lists)
8. Boing Boing
9. Fark
10. Engaget
11. Techmeme
12. Lifehacker
13. Yahoo Picks (If you can make it. Very tough)

Great presentation Rand, you are in my top 3 list of favorite speakers this week. Disclaimer: This was NOT a monetary review of SEOmoz…they’re just hot shit.

* Old man Niel Patel was up next and went over ways to succeed on social media marketing. These are in no particular order and again the stuff in the parentheses are my thoughts.

1. Add tons of friends (In my experience most people will add you as a friend as long as you’re asking for an add in a relevant network. I never add friends when it would make absolutely no sense. For example, the other day someone added me to their friend list and wanted a connection that was a yoga instructor, didn’t have a blog, and had no interests in SEO or anything else I was interested in. This was most likely a spammer and it was on MyBlogLog, but you get the point.)

2. Participate. (This one is the most difficult for me personally. It’s time consuming and you really need someone working on this full time with all the networks out there).

3. Become a top user. (Kind of goes along with #2).

4. Use their features against them. (This is my favorite. Must be the spammer in me. He didn’t go into much detail on what features to use against which network…but imagine you have 2000 MySpace profiles…that’s another post in itself).

5. Create a social brand. (Larger corporations need to pay attention here. This is one that can do you a lot of good or do you a lot of harm if done incorrectly. There are some companies that do this well, and I wish I could think of some off the top of my head, but that part of my head isn’t working as I write this today).

* Todd from Stuntdubl briefly touched on some reputation management things like naymz and tagalag, and mentioned testing social media sites for value. Everything in this life revolves around testing and then testing some more. I wish more people would recognize that. He mentioned once you determine the value of some of these sites, start building inbound links to them, thereby controlling the results for your identity and/or brand.

* Cindy Krum had some good examples of using social media to control your brand (Starbucks of course). She gave examples of using widgets and web apps inside of social media networks to strengthen brand and build loyal users.

This was the first organic track of the day, moderated by Danny with speakers from the four major engines. Vanessa Fox from Google, Amit Kumar from Yahoo, Peter Linsley from Ask (you should maybe do a few more posts Peter), and Eytan Seidman from Micro$oft Live Search.

* Microsoft was up first and here are the highlights: Duplicate content fragments the weight of anchor text and page rank and is difficult to algorithmically detect…as if we didn’t realize that from all the MSN issues. He goes on to explain how we should handle some of the issues, a couple which make sense and one that didn’t make any at all. He said if you’re doing a redirects from duplicate content to the original content you should be using a client-side redirect. Say what? Later during the Q&A he retracted and said he was including all types of redirects as long as it was returning a 301 and not some kind of silly javascript flip. I hope nobody left before Q&A or they could be getting prepared to screw up all kinds of things. He also discussed redirecting HTTPS pages to HTTP pages when security was not necessary. This is something I had not even thought about so it will be on my list of things to do when I return. It seems to me they should be able to easily decipher that but apparently not. One thing he emphatically said more than once was that there is no site wide penalty for duplicate content, it’s only on a page by page basis and not really a penalty at all. He says they try to avoid showing pages with “substantially identical” content. Nice. Please define “substantially identical” for me.

* Ask was up next, and it was mostly a reiteration of the Microsoft presentation. Again it was repeated that duplicate content was not a penalty. What is it with this “not a penalty” thing? It’s a damn penalty if your pages don’t rank because your retarded algorithm can’t figure out which one is more important. One new thing he mentioned was that Ask only looks at indexable content for duplication and not other areas like templates and navigational areas. They’re basically using page segmentation and duplicate content analysis together.

* Here comes Yahoo. Same drivel. This time the term was “approximate duplication”. Please define. It’s very difficult to make a site with 50 thousand pages not have some type of “approximate duplication” or “substantially identical” content. One of you engineers give me a range or something. (on another note, all of the “engineers” had trouble working PowerPoint. Except the Microsoft guy).

* Next up was Vanessa Fox. And no, unfortunately she wasn’t nude. Her presentation I kind of glazed over. She had duplicate pictures of Alyson Hannigan from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and no, again unfortunately she wasn’t nude either). It seemed to be a basic explanation of duplicate content that I thought could have been much more advanced. Google gets an F for info, and an A for mentioning Buffy.

* In Q&A time there weren’t too many questions that were interesting. I had my hand up to ask one but never got the chance. My question was that if they were using page segmentation to analyze for duplicate content would they devalue certain sections of content on a page with “substantially identical” content areas. I also wanted them to define or give us some kind of a range that they considered “substantially identical”, but I knew they wouldn’t answer that one. There where a few interesting ideas thrown around about certain variables that would automatically tell the bots a certain page was a duplicate or some reporting features inside the webmaster consoles to show what they considered duplicate. I seriously doubt they will ever have tools like that however, they would be easily gamed.

That was it for that session. I thought it could have been a little more advanced than it was. Up next: How to spam social media networks. Stay tuned.