I'm the CEO of Linkbuildr Marketing and the brains behind our branding and blog content. I specialize in effective marketing strategies for hotels, luxury brands and real estate. If your brand is in need of a boost then don't hesitate to contact me for a free proposal. Follow me on
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Twitter: @Linkbuildr on Twitter. You can also come ask me a question on our Facebook Page.
I just wanted to get the word out we’re sending Ryan from our team to go soak in the experience at one of the top search and social conferences currently running. He was quite pleased to hear that this one was in Austin TX, and won’t be in Vegas where he was last…apparently he had a hard time focusing there! The Austin Pubcon looks to be an amazing time with a huge line up of amazing speakers. He’ll be there to network and share expertise, for free, so make sure to look out for the goofy Canadian amongst the crowd.
We’ll make sure to keep you updated of his where abouts through Twitter, Youtube and Foursquare where he’ll be checking in constantly like he always does. Follow us on Foursquare to keep tabs, or just to see how much he eats out. You’d be surprised how often that guy can manage to not cook a meal. But besides Ryan being there, the list of speakers is stellar and here’s just a taste of the talent at the Austin event:
– Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures – view bio
– Aaron Shear from Shopping.com – view bio
– Andy Beal from Trackur.com – view bio
– Chris Tolles from Topix – view bio
– David Wallace from Search Rank – view bio
– Gillian Muessig from SEOmoz – view bio
This is a little speech Matty Cutts gave at SMX West this year. I really liked what he had to say and think it’ll be a real information nugget to you too!
This is a little speech Matty Cutts gave at SMX West this year. I really liked what he had to say and think it’ll be a real information nugget to you too!
As I went off yesterday about Google going after content scrapers and low quality websites, I also should have gone into this topic a little more. Our site gets scraped by a few sites and while it is getting better, I’m still finding posts I wrote a week or two ago getting outranked by the scraper site. This pisses me off to no end, and I don’t need any more stress in my life that’s for sure.
Matt Cutts has stated, below on video for good measure, that in most cases it won’t hurt your site. He also stated, that it can help out a little if the scraper site links to your site. This is all fine and dandy, the problem I have is all the scrapers I’m dealing with are not linking back, they’re stripping my links and they’re even hot linking my our images. I’ll go into how to attempt to put a stop to that below without having to hire some h4x0r to DDoS the living stink out of their server….not that I would ever recommend that lol.
On our end, from my constant checking, I’ve noticed a few things that I thought would have helped beat out the scraper sites. Google has mentioned that Facebook Likes and Retweets help rank your content, but even after 50+ likes on a content piece, and about a dozen ReTweets I didn’t notice much. I still need to measure what threshold levels are in place for that style of marketing to take effect. I’ve even submitted the best of the content to Digg, Reddit’s SEO section and a few other bookmarking sites we have built up properly.
So about two weeks ago we started using Google’s two new meta tags for content producers which is supposed to tell Google it started here first. If you’re using WordPress, I’ll spare you the time reading my post and you can just go ahead and install WP Original Source and never think about it again. I will say that we’re seeing a huge improvement with our content ranking very well, and our main scraper isn’t even registering in the SERPs anymore.
Some other advice I can give out here is get a few internal links pointing to your content when you can. I’ll even try and see what older, indexed content we have that is on the same topic and find a way to add a link in. Make sure you’re also using a related posts plugin if you’re a blog, just like the one you’ll see below this post. Every little bit helps, but if that’s still not working you can always file a DMCA complaint with Google and their Webhost. Sadly, when I tried this nothing at all ever happened, but I wish you better luck.
Last but not least, this is another good reason to grow your social profiles properly and of course, bigger and better! Having more and more people Retweet and Like your content is only going to help in the long run, even if we didn’t see any movement with it at the moment. This can also lead to Twitter apps picking up your content, and as I’ve mentioned before, most of them follow their links and we see almost lightning quick indexing because of it. I’ll also take this opportunity to BEG you all to Follow us on Twitter because we’re awesome.
There has been a lot of talk about Matt Cutts recent remarks regarding the amount of content farms and low-quality (spun and other) content that dominates the SERPs. We saw in the Mayday update how Ecommerce sites with manufacturer content descriptions started taking a dive. This was also seen throughout the real estate industry because of IDX and MLS listing system spread across tens of thousands of Realtor sites.
There definitely is a reason why SEO’s keep talking about content being king, so be ready for that adage to be more real than ever. By the sounds of Matt’s post, I’m suspecting another major algorithm update in the very near future…are you ready? I’m hoping these coming changes play well into our new series of blog posts entitled “Google vs Bing“. I was recently searching for a serious dental product and got quickly frustrated with Google’s results…I was getting hit after hit of the same ripped content ranking nearly for 8 out of the 10 spots. This is what prompted the new series of posts, and I look forward to checking that search term again later for a blog post update.
One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads
This statement I find tricky because sites like Mahalo for example has not stopped growing. That site has taken our content, taken my personal sites content and it is so thin on good material it makes me wonder. I know that site is making Google millions a month, as well other useless sites…so the question I still have in my brain is, would they put a stop to that? If I were a major shareholder I certainly wouldn’t want to see any of that happen…sadly I’m not a share holder.
While it’s not fair to pick on Mahalo as they’ve been attacked enough, I imagine Matt is more after sites like Fixya.com. I had a problem with my BenQ projector and that site dominated the SERPs for just about every result I looked at. This site rarely, if ever had an answer to the problem. It also had one line of text and the rest of the site was saturated with Google Ads and internal links…I couldn’t make out what was going on. By the looks of it, they just input long tail questions taken from other sites, and perhaps tools like Word Tracker. You can see what I mean here;
So basically if you spam a bunch of H1’s and not have any real content then you’ll rank anyway. The Fixya Alexa ranking certainly shows that Google thinks this is currently great. I imagine they’re making Google a mint so we’ll see if the lose some of their traffic due to ultra low quality pages. They have about 50 million indexed pages, and I imagine half are the kind of junk I showed you above. There are already enough Q/A sites as well so it makes me wonder how many of these sites are going to be able to grow like this.
I’ve seen other content farm sites in their infancy, making me frustrated about doing a site in a legit manor. Never the less, I can give you a perfect example of a site that show up huge in the rankings but eventually got the boot. DayMix.com is a site that was basically pulled RSS feeds and it saw some serious growth for a period of a few months. This was the first time I had looked at their Alexa graph in a while and it does look like Google figured them out and put the kibosh on that.
I really like what Matt has to say in the very recent video. We here at Linkbuildr always push for this type of content to our clients, especially in this day and age of getting social media followers. You’re not going to grow that area of your business well just tweeting about product prices and weights. Facebook fans are not going to stick around if you’re just posting pictures of your products…well, unless you’re selling bikinis or lingerie I take that back!
In closing, I highly highly recommend following this Webmaster World thread on the subject, don’t fully listen to me of course and keep a watch on the SERPs. If you’re a little worried about the quality if your content then I’d start looking for a writer, contacting us or getting out Notepad and get to work. I’m excited for a cleaner search result page, and it only backs up the people following the rules as well not expecting to dominate in a month. Good content, relationships and brand images take time to build up so make sure you do it right!
I’ve been wanting to showcase some excellent Facebook Page marketing examples by large brands and this opportunity came to light whole browsing today. The Olive Garden is currently running a Facebook contest that blew me away, mainly because of the sheer brilliance of how they’re doing it. This example should be looked over hard by companies struggling to grow their Facebook Page, especially ones with a large marketing budget.
I have been nagging and annoying the hell out of our clients to get more socially involved. A lot of them don’t see it as a marketing method worth going after hard…and this drives me nuts. I’m very well aware of the coming change in search trends, and more and more people are sticking on Facebook. This means organic search traffic is not going to be the only player in town, and it certainly might even become the market companies focus on the most.
The Olive Garden has recently hit a milestone of 1,000,000 Facebook fans which is down right amazing for any company. We only have one here in the west coast of Canada, so it’s mostly Americans they’ve tapped into although they got my like! To celebrate the achievement, they have decided to run a contest that is going to send them quickly on their way to another few hundred thousand more followers.
If you’re a social media manager for a big brand, I’d take note of how many followers they grow by the end of the month. The Olive Garden hopefully will respond to my email request to interview their marketing team about Facebook and Twitter marketing. I also see they’re doing a great effort with Foursquare which is just fantastic. I wish them the best of luck, but by the looks of it they won’t be needing any of it!
For those of your who enjoyed taking a gander at the hilarious post we wrote in November titled “Can I Get 5000 Links Please“, I bring you an even better one. The freelancer sites are littered with the craziest link building offers one can find. No legit company in the world would be out trying to snag deals like this, but instead these are affiliate marketers going after spam links. This one in particular caught my attention on Twitter and made me almost choke on my coffee here.
The request is for 20,000 links in about 10 days time….riiiiiight. They also state they all have to be dofollow and white hat techniques only. Oh an the best part, they only want to pay a max of $250 USD. While the offer is getting bids from the usual outsourcing companies, there’s no way this guy is going to have his project met in a white hat method. I cannot stress this enough to some of the big brands out there that come to us wanting something like this.
I feel sorry for Matt Cutts and his team having to combat the tens of thousands of websites out there trying to link spam like this, so I’ll be sure to buy him a beer the next time I see him. Keep in mind when it comes to getting a lot of links, do it over time, do it right and don’t spam. We are firm believers of quality over quantity, so build strong relationships on line and the good links will follow over time…not 10 days. The freelancer link builders are only going to get your company caught up in an anchor text filter, or even worse, complete de-listing from Google.
In this day and age it is becoming increasingly more difficult to go viral. This is especially true for companies to overcome the feel of spam which means creativity is your only weapon. Comedy is usually the best weapon, and creating the content isn’t the easiest of tasks. Old Spice obviously hit the nail on the head with their commercials and ran with it just long enough to keep the brand in the minds of millions. They’ll most likely never be able to duplicate that amount of buzz again, but take a look at just how much traffic they got blasted with;
For most of the companies out there trying to get a piece of the pie, they’ll most likely not have the option to just launch viral right from their website. Getting that extra push will require the help of the social web, and while getting hot on Digg just isn’t as easy these days, there are other places to turn your attention to. Keep in mind you cannot just jump on these sites and expect to go viral, it could happen but most likely not. Building your social fan base is key, and for this we recommend building up a couple months of fans and social participation on these sites.
Buzz Feed is not only a great site to read on a daily basis, it is also a great place to go viral. I’m an active user here just for the purposes of entertainment, but if you got some hilarious or strange link bait, you stand a great chance of getting attention. Keep in mind on a site like this there are thousands of other content pieces in the queue, so you’re link bait is going to need to be grade A awesome. Have your social media manager build up a strong account here beforehand and put forth a positive image of your brand. From the viral content we’ve launched here, you’ll see a lot of Facebook shares and ReTweets from the users, as well the thousands of sites that aggregate the content.
Reddit is my favorite website, I’m personally a 4 year user and couldn’t live without it! Reddit is not a site you can game very easily, nor do I recommend trying to at all. Their user base is above and beyond the childish Digg user, and they can smell a spam scam from a mile away. The only advice I can give you is to have awesome content and wait for a Reddit user to submit it on their own merit. If you’re team has a good account, make sure you stick to the sub-reddits which will greatly increase your popularity. If you can get content to go hot here, you’re in for a large amount of traffic!
All you right wingers out there might be scoffing at this recommendation, but the left just does entertainment news so much better. This is mainly a news site, but it does have a very popular entertainment section where you’ll find write-ups on the latest viral content going around. This site is also user powered which means you can sign up, write your own posts and participate socially throughout the site. If your link bait is hot hot hot, then you’re chances to getting it to go viral from this site is very good. This is a place you’re going to want to build an account up for as well, don’t bother just signing up for the sole purpose of submitting one piece of content. Social media is about building relationships, so keep that in mind before you try and become a one post wonder.
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This is the section where I plead, beg and ask for our readers to suggest other sites that they are fond of. There are dozens of great sites to launch your link bait from so lets here em! If your company is struggling with its own viral marketing efforts then this is where I’ll offer our link baiting services.
Find out the results of a year of high volume content marketing on guests blogs taught us money still talks. Read the results!
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Negative SEO Attack?
Check out the anatomy of a "negative SEO" attack on our own site in our latest post. There's too much worry about these attacks happening, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Come read what I think and just what to do if anything like this happens to your brand.
