To answer Jonathan Piggins’ question in The Guardian, “Is Google’s love affair with content marketing usurping SEO?”, the answer is no. Here’s my rebuttal:

“Google’s love affair with content marketing”
“Google’s preference for content marketing”
That’s like saying “firefighters have a preference for extinguishing fires” – that’s just what they do by definition. The web consists of content, Google searches the web, ergo Google has a preference for content. Nothing new. It’s just that paid links don’t help as much anymore which previously could get a site to rank without having quality content. Paid links though is just one tactic of SEO that has withered (good riddance). The whole of SEO is still alive and well.

“whether the objectivity of algorithms can account for the subjectivity of quality”
Of course not, that’s why SEO will always be around as long as search engines are around. See my post Will SEO End Someday?

“It looks like Google has tired of its old friend SEO and is instead cosying-up to the new kid on the block, content marketing.”
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Good content marketing consists of good SEO. He does admit to this later when he says: “This means that brands need to underpin their content with SEO strategies like strong internal navigation.”

“So we are now in a position where content from brands could usurp smaller, niche content from bloggers? Type ‘small business funding’ into Google…”
Anyone can “usurp smaller, niche content from bloggers” with quality content and good content marketing (which, again, entails SEO), not just brands simply by virtue of being a brand. If a big brand like Barclay’s puts out content on this topic, they’ll rank because of all the other signals that say barclays.com is a powerful domain, like links and a well-optimized site that the content sits on. Not just because they have quality content.

The post Content Marketing Can’t Sidestep SEO appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

Triberr is down

Bloggers who use Triberr, a tool that helps them share each others blog posts on Twitter, found their sites redirected to a parked domain this morning.

Triberr.com is now a parked domain

The domain triberr.com had expired and any site that was using Triberr’s JavaScript code on its pages was automatically redirected. The offending code:

window.top.location = "http://triberr.com/?fp=IyokQCga...(very long string)";

The owner of Triberr, Dan Cristo of New Jersey, has yet to make a public statement or renew the domain.

UPDATE: Dan Cristo has responded.

@dougunplugged Hey Doug. Check out the @triberr twitter account. Lots of public statements there on it. Also diyblogger.net/domain-expirat…

— Dan Cristo (@dancristo) February 22, 2013

The post Triberr.com Domain Expires, Takes Down Sites Using It appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

At the end of January 2013 Google unveiled its new Google Images interface redesign. Hongyi Li, Associate Product Manager at Google, explained, “Instead of sending you over to a whole new page to preview an image, you’ll see a preview of the image in your search results.”

The new Google Images interface.

Many webmasters were disappointed with the change citing a significant decrease in traffic from Google Images since the design update. When a searcher clicks to view an image, not only does Google display a larger image within the interface but there is no loading of the page that the image is hosted on as there was before with a sidebar.

To increase the odds that a searcher will click through to your site from Google Images, watermark all your uploaded images to encourage them to do so.

Demotivational Posters watermarks their images shown on Google Images

DemotivationalPosters.net only watermarks images that get crawled by Google Imagebot. Here are the server header details:


1. REQUESTING: http://cdn.motinetwork.net/demotivationalposters.net/image/demotivational-poster/1002/early-concept-bat-signal-demotivational-poster-1265044541.gif#Report
GET /demotivationalposters.net/image/demotivational-poster/1002/early-concept-bat-signal-demotivational-poster-1265044541.gif HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image/1.0
Host: cdn.motinetwork.net
Connection: Keep-Alive

DESTINATION URI: http://www.motinetwork.net/moticache.php?site=demotivationalposters.net&f=image/demotivational-poster/1002/early-concept-bat-signal-demotivational-poster-1265044541.gif


Google Imagebot indexes the watermarked image and once the searcher clicks to the site they see the regular image.

For those who worry about how this may effect your image rankings, Peter Lindsay, Product Manager for Image Search, said in an interview from 2009, “The presence of a watermark doesn’t itself cause an image to be ranked higher or lower.”

The post How to Increase Your Referral Traffic from the New Google Images appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

You can now buy something by tweeting it.

Hear me discuss the new AmEx Sync on American Public Radio’s Marketplace.

American Express cardholders who sync their card to their Twitter handle can tweet with a special hashtag what they want to buy, tweet again to confirm, and a few days later a package arrives at their door. The consumer obviously wins, but among everyone else how will AmEx Sync pan out?

For American Express to bring to Twitter the first system of payment, albeit not universal, the third largest credit network benefits enormously:

1. Press coverage by major news organizations.
2. Recurring exposure on Twitter to the AmEx brand and the brand of the product on offer. The template of these offer hashtags is the word “Amex” followed by the name of the brand. All these purchase tweets and confirmation tweets are seen in users’ followers’ feeds and if enough people tweet to buy a single offer, the hashtags may even show up as a trending hashtag which would bring even more exposure.
   
3. By offering an incentive for American Express cardholders to sync their Twitter handle to their card by offering them a $25 credit for $15, they build up a base of people who are now able to make impulse purchases.
4. AmEx’ proof of concept that pay-to-tweet works will surely bring competition from other payment processors. It’s a surprise nobody has done this sooner.

For marketers, the benefits of working with AmEx to offer a product for sale on Twitter are compelling:

1. Exclusivity as not many companies have done this.
2. Ability to sidestep paying Twitter for advertising while still getting huge exposure in people’s feeds and possibly as a trending hashtag.
3. Less creativity involved to create something that has the potential to go viral.
4. Tighter loop when it comes to sales. Previously making a sale from Twitter involved having people click a link within a tweet. They’d get taken to an ecommerce store where they’d have to add an item to their shopping basket and go through checkout, fumbling to find their credit card and spending precious time entering it in which might lose the sale if a visitor decides not to buy. The time between “I want that” and “I bought that” is much shorter with AmEx’ pay-to-tweet.

Twitter loses the most:

1. On the bright side, AmEx bolting a pay-to-tweet system on top of it makes the network more valuable and reinforces network effects. Twitter has no real microblog competition except in China where Twitter is blocked anyway.
2. Twitter shares in the press exposure.
3. However, Twitter doesn’t get a cut of the revenue generated by AmEx Sync. Will Twitter impose a tax or build its own pay-to-tweet platform for others to play on?
4. Instead of marketers paying Twitter advertising fees to have their wares seen, they can go to American Express which is a substitute  and in fact more trendy.

The post AmEx Sync, Marketers, and Twitter: Who Wins and Loses with Pay-by-Tweet? appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

Why are there no brands from China that leverage digital channels to the fullest and do so globally? Moreso than the Internet in China being insular (e.g., Weibo instead of Twitter and Baidu instead of Google) and censored (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, and others are blocked), digital marketing agencies (and in-house departments) lack talent.

Digital marketing is becoming more granular and specialist-driven. The number of channels and tactics have grown and most agencies don’t have the expertise to cover all the angles. Chinese companies tend to hire agencies that have the cultural know-how and soft skills of local business etiquette, but which often results in mediocre performance. “CMOs in Asia are not used to convincing the group CEO to take risks in marketing spend,” observed Mark Phibbs, senior director marketing Asia-Pacific at Adobe Systems in a survey of senior marketers in Asia-Pacific. There is simply not enough good work being done by such agencies to evolving, best-in-class standards and their models are simply too slow, inefficient, inflexible and error prone to maintain the current pace of business. Some hide their inefficiencies behind the largesse of their outsourcing contracts, others stay in business thanks to “guanxi”, each masquerades as up to date with the speed of innovation coming out of hot spots like Silicon Valley and New York City, but this status quo does not lead China forward in innovation.

Most vexing, China is doing nothing to increase the already low supply of digital talent. Unlike Japan, whose biggest advertising agency, Dentsu, recently bought London-based Aegis to penetrate new markets and gain much-needed expertise in digital marketing, China has no homegrown agency that’s as big or cash-rich as Dentsu to go on an acquisition spree nor does China even offer digital marketing courses in its universities that would provide a homegrown solution to achieving digital marketing dominance.

The only means of dealing with this difficult situation, in addition to putting in place the prerequisite institutions and infrastructure for tomorrow, is to ensure that top talent want to live and work in China today. Foreign talent not only fills high-skill gaps in the labor market but foreigners bring knowledge and expertise gained from experience in their home countries which spill over to the locals, making them strive for higher standards, and making China as a whole more competitive.

Until then, as Lee Kuan Yew, Minister Mentor of Singapore, a country very welcoming to foreign talent, once observed to Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye, “China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the US can draw on the world’s seven billion, and can recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”

The post China’s Digital Talent Deficit appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

The results that search engines return can be classified in two ways: organic results, which are the links (now interspersed with news, maps, images, knowledge graph answers, etc.) that the search engine algorithm determined to be the most relevant to a query, and paid results, which occupy the space along the perimeter of the organic results shaded in a different color that are auctioned to advertisers.

SEO is the process of improving a website’s traffic from the organic results while PPC advertising is the process of improving a website’s traffic from the paid results. PPC can also refer to banner advertising on other websites as well, but SEM is not a synonym for PPC despite being a commonly held belief (blame Yahoo).

There is also an often-misunderstood distinction that SEO is “free”. Unlike PPC advertising, which requires continued spending to keep your ads appearing, SEO requires no direct payment (neither one time nor recurring) to search engines. SEO is, however, massively hard to duplicate for latecomers, expensive to execute (just buying links or tricking the algorithm violates search engine guidelines), and requires tremendous creativity paired with technical skill and a time-bounded network effect.

The post What are the differences between SEO, SEM and PPC? appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

The post 7 Reasons to Remove Extensions From Your URLs appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

If buyers cannot distinguish between high and low quality SEO offerings before purchase, it raises the possibility that only low quality SEO services will be sold to them. Furthermore, the presence of high quality SEO firms in the market raises the price received by sellers of low quality SEO. Similarly, the presence of low quality SEO firms lowers the price that sellers of high quality SEO firms receive. In effect, sellers of high quality SEO services are implicitly subsidizing sellers of low quality SEO services.

The 2001 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, George Akerloff, called this “a market for lemons” due to the persistent presence of lemons (cars found to be defective only after they are bought) in the market of used car sales.

There is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise, since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller.

Low quality SEO can mean not just ineffective but in some cases damaging for a website. It’s one thing if a SEO firm makes use of the long-ineffective tactic of adding meta keywords, but quite another if it spamdexes or engages in paid link schemes. Black hat SEO tactics, tricking the algorithm from its intended purpose, like the latter will in the long term damage a website’s standing. Low quality SEO has a short shelf life.

High quality SEO, on the other hand, can be an unfair competitive advantage and involves those strategies and tactics that are effective at increasing the visibility of a site in search results while conforming to the search engines’ guidelines. Even as algorithms become smarter and faster, the computational problem they’re chasing after remains the same: quality. For websites that get (or want) traffic from search engines, quality tends to come with a higher price tag.

With each algorithm update, however, some SEOs continue with the old (now ineffective) tactics and charge the same, as indicated by the lower red price line in the diagram below.

Compounded over multiple algorithm updates, this approach is unsustainable as the SEO tactics would gradually become ineffective or go against search engine quality guidelines.

Companies that engage such SEO firms may find pretty good, pretty consistent returns — until a single disaster comes along and wipes the strategy out. It’s always a matter of time before the strategy suddenly and viciously stops working.

Google lowered the ranking of JC Penney in response to tactics employed by an SEO firm on its behalf.

Overstock.com used a link scheme that got it penalized by Google.

Google removed BMW’s German site from its index after the site included “doorway pages”.

The big problem is that until there’s a crisis, the returns from engaging these SEO firms look better than anything else out there. And that means they attract lots of money from clients looking for consistent returns with their SEO budget. Unfortunately, they attract more and more money until they blow up.

Buyer beware.

The post What Time Traveling SEO Specialists Could Tell You appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

Here’s an example of each quadrant:

HIGH COST, LOW EFFECTIVENESS: Traditional marketing that spills over to the web

The Fiat 500 Arbath SuperBowl commercial, which spiked branded search queries for the new car brand, but trailed off soon after.

LOW COST, LOW EFFECTIVENESS: Web spam

Milanoo posting spun content on garbage blogs.

LOW COST, HIGH EFFECTIVENESS: Viral, one hit wonder

Docracy’s Be my (legally binding) valentine, which was a simple one-page tongue-in-cheek document put on their site right before Valentines Day that got picked up and linked to by a lot of other blogs. Another great example would be OKCupid’s The Death Test, which was a quiz that went viral.

HIGH COST, HIGH EFFECTIVENESS: Content strategy, media production

These would be companies that use expensive enterprise SEO platforms like Conductor (client list) or BrightEdge (client list), for example.

The post SEO Effectiveness Quadrant appeared first on Doug Unplugged.

I’m in Dalian, China until August 29th (and coming back later) working on Weibo Agent, a lead generation SaaS tool for Chinese social media, that got funding from Chinaccelerator.

UPDATE
We successfully rocked the room at Demo Day in Beijing on Oct 30th, 2012. Here is our press release:

Weibo Agent, the lead generation SaaS tool for Chinese social media, today unveiled the latest enhancements to its service at Chinaccelerator’s Demo Day 2012. Born inside Shanghai’s Lean Startup Weekend and having just graduated Chinaccelerator, the first seed-funded mentorship-driven incubator in China, Weibo Agent helps B2B companies build, track, and manage their potential customer base on Chinese social media, starting with Sina Weibo.

“Especially in China, social media is really changing the way business is done,” co-founder Michael Michelini said. “Weibo profiles are becoming like Chinese IDs.” The biggest challenge with using social media, however, especially in China, is cutting through all the noise to identify qualified prospects. After an initial requirements gathering, Weibo Agent fills users’ sales pipeline with qualified leads. Once found, Weibo Agent helps keep track of and manage these relationships. Users of the tool convert more leads with less work.

The startup is seeking US$200,000 in funding and plans to use the money to integrate additional data sources from other Chinese social media platforms, building its own API, and integration with SalesForce and other CRMs. To learn more about Weibo Agent, please visit http://www.weiboagent.com or contact Michael Michelini at mike at weiboagent.com, phone 15816859376, or, of course, weibo @michelini.

The post Working on Weibo Agent appeared first on Doug Unplugged.