The Internet Said What About Me?
Articles and famous profiles, sure, but this is personal. PersonRatings.com is a website where visitors can anonymously review and rate other people. Unlike the famed and apishly simple HotOrNot, it’s highly personal with names and reputations on the line as the crowd rates a target’s intelligence, sexiness, classiness, and sense of humor, among other attributes.
Self-proclaimed Yelp for people, PersonRatings is intended to be an online reputation resource working against self-promoting Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Users can upload photos of the subject of review, write a bio, pay to run a background check, or set up an alert whenever a new comment is made about the person.
Jimbo Wales,
Kevin Rose
Call it Gossip 2.0, a streamlining of the horrors of JuicyCampus, though it seems the service is intended to attract hiring managers looking to get a good feel for job candidates. But just imagine if your jilted ex-wife and her bitchy friends got on there. Likely their opinion is different than your mother’s or your best friend’s.
This seems to be its chief flaw. It’s easily gameable, and as with many sites of the slipping away Web 2.0 era, it relies on people. Worse, it relies on people’s ability to be objective and fair. A grudge, a personal dispute, a desire for revenge or playing a prank can easily skew the rating. The same goes for the fanatic element.
For example, Jimbo Wales, who created Wikipedia, doesn’t currently have any friends at PersonRatings. He’s considered not very smart or sexy or funny or friendly, kind, classy or trustworthy. Kevin Rose, creator of Digg.com, on the other hand, is all those things and more, but not quite as wonderful as Adolf Hitler, who apparently lives in Georgia these days.
You can thank some anonymous commentators at Ars Technica writer Jacqui Cheng’s profile for some interesting fiction. But then again she did sort of ask for vandalism in her piece about the site.
Jacqui Cheng
Technically, PersonRatings.com should be covered by the Communications Decency Act regarding computer services and user-generated content; so when the so-called wisdom of crowds gives over to digital character assassination, the site’s (probably) legally in the clear.
That doesn’t usually stop lawsuits, though, and if the site itself escapes defamation liability, some commentator somewhere some time in the future will likely stare down a subpoena.
Shocker: Facebookers Not Happy With Redesign
Here’s your scenario: You’re the CEO of an immensely popular social network with 175 million registered users, or just shy of the population of Brazil. Your users are passionate and tend to protest over the slightest changes. Just recently they got really mad about a terms of service change—so mad it was on the evening news and you had to change them back.
Despite those numbers, despite rabid user loyalty, you’re losing money, so much money you got delisted from Forbes’ Masters of the Universe Billionaires list. At the same time another social network, much smaller than yours with less functionality and more questionable future, is gaining a lot of buzz and membership.
What do you do?
Do you:
A. Don’t fix something that’s not broken. And by not broken, it means that meteoric growth over the past year led your site to trounce MySpace and every sensitive person on the site is relatively happy in their social networking habitat.
B. Ignore that a growing number of people seem to like an incomprehensible platform much like a feature you already offer. Remember that you have 175 million and growing members, and that Twitter does not, and show that you have plenty of confidence in your product. After all Google didn’t just become a portal because some people didn’t get the spare interface.
C. A and B, and focus on Job 1, which is figure out a way to monetize so that you can rejoin the Masters of the Universe at Davos next year.
D. None of the above. Instead, hold a press conference. Announce you’re making the website more democratic if that’s what everybody wants and call for a vote. While everybody’s busy voting on that, change everything.
If you picked D, congratulations, you’re thinking like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
At the end of last month, Zuckerberg laid down what resembled the Magna Carta for Facebook, noting that future changes would be made via a more democratic process in “virtual town halls.” Voting on that set of new principles and user rights and responsibilities would be in effect until March 29, and only required 52 million votes to ensure they took effect. Over that month, said Zuckerberg, Facebook would be making “hundreds of changes.”
Presumably before anybody could stop him. Maybe we’re seeing the grooming of a future politician.
On March 13, Facebook radically redesigned the site to make it more Twitter-esque and less traditionally Facebook-y.
How did the Facebook masses respond? Hard to gauge really.
Yesterday, an update on the Facebook blog about the new Town Hall voting on the new governance plan was met with a barrage of comments about how much they hated new Facebook and wanted the old one back. But comment threads get ugly sometimes, right? You can’t let a minority of protestors beat you back. Just how many protestors are there, anyway?
The number against the changes are even harder to gauge because there are too many separate factions of new Facebook haters. A couple of groups appear to have around 400,000 members, one has 2.7 million, another around 50,000, and several others just have hundreds. We’ll round up and call it a cool 4 million, well shy of the 30 percent of Facebook needed to vote down changes under the new governance that has yet to take effect.
Groups rallying to keep or save the new Facebook exist as well. One of them even has 76 members.
Chris William at the HuffingtonPost does a pretty good job of summing up what appear to be the most unpopular changes. They include:
–No more automatically updating “live feed” with updates on everything. One critic called the live feed a “TV alternative.”
–Data is fully integrated into the new status updates. Users used to be able to separate out by category: wall posts, status updates, links, photos, etc.
–The feed no longer tells you when friends add new friends. This was a popular way of expanding one’s own friends list.
–Now users get updated with every photo posted in a separate post. 30 new pictures posted. 30 new posts in the feed.
–Gone is the ability to just see less of an individual’s posts. Now it’s all posts or no posts from a person.
The complaints go on for a while at different sources. The least that can be said is there are a lot of people out there wondering why unbroken Facebook needed to be fixed, and why anyone with a user base so change-averse to begin with would think hundreds of changes over a short period of time—no testing, no asking—would go over well.
>>> Do you like the new Facebook?
… Add you comments below…
Tons of Tips for Ranking in 5 Other Google Engines
It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.
Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.
1. Ranking in YouTube
As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.
A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:
- An accurate and descriptive title
- Make sure your description is just that - descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.
- Descriptive keyword tags
- Avoid keyword stuffing
It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:
- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags
- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.
- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.
- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.
- Encourage participation by enabling everything.
- use meta data
- use captions and subtitles
- use watermarks
- use Google Maps integration
There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.
More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.
2. Ranking in Google Image Search
Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":
- Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.
The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:
More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.
3. Ranking in Google News
Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:
- Only indexes articles three days old or less
- Only indexes it once
- Read Google News Help for Publishers
- Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it
- Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)
- Host "most popular" and "breaking news" sections on your site
- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description
Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.
More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.
4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search
While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.
For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”, “Music, Nicholasville KY”, and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:
- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less
- Local Groupings
There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:
- have pages, mentioning your area of service
- your phone number
- your physical address
- directions on how to reach your office
- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)
- have links pointing to you from local websites and directories
- have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)
- have ccTLD (country-specific domain - google.ca, for instance)
Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.
More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.
5. Ranking in Google Blog Search
Back in ‘07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:
- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank
Some negatives he mentioned:
- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site
ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.
More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.
Wrap Up
It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.
The Blogger SEO Burden
There is no question that blogging can help improve your search engine optimization efforts. Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts talked about some of the reasons why in the following video, but he also said he favors some platforms over others for SEO purposes. Namely, he recommends WordPress or b2evolution as opposed to Google-owned Blogger.
While Spencer may be right about Blogger not being as good for SEO purposes, it raises the question: Why would a blog platform owned by Google itself carry a greater burden for getting good rankings on the very search engine that everyone strives to rank well in? I contacted Spencer to get his thoughts on just that.
"I don’t think it is intentional on Google’s part," says Spencer. "The developers of Blogger designed it for simplicity and usability (the "KISS" principle). They ‘didn’t know what they didn’t know’ — and that unfortunately included SEO."
"Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO," Spencer continued. "They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. In fact, several search engines hired us at various times to advise them on SEO, i.e. to help them get their own sites to rank better in Google! The engineers don’t have the deep SEO experience that allows them to make SEO-informed decisions around functionality (like support for tag clouds), site architecture & internal linking structure (e.g. the way they handle pagination), design and layout, etc."
Spencer touched upon on a few of these things that Blogger lacks for SEO purposes in the above video. He also followed up with me:
BTW, this one takes the cake… the tag pages on Blogger (actually referred to as "labels" by Blogger) are disallowed by the robots.txt file! They are within the search directory, which is disallowed:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Doh!
Spencer also notes in the video, that "it’s really hard to get off of it once you’re on it," and there are many, many people using Blogger. Even if the platform isn’t great for SEO purposes, there are still some things that you can do to help somewhat. People have offered SEO tips for Blogger in the past.
This article is about two and a half years old, but Wayne Hurlbert offers some in it. SEO Kolkata also had some suggestions about a year ago.
A Beginners Guide To Link Building
Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines.
There, now that we’ve got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let’s move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners guide this won’t be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you’re trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the “why” of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.
Why Are Links Important?
To put it simply: a link is a vote. Every link pointing to your site from another website tells the search engines that the other site finds your resource valuable and thus, the engines read this as a vote for your site. So it must be about getting tons of links and you’re done right? Wrong. This is incorrect as …
Not All Votes Are Created Equal
Unlike your own vote in an election, some votes are worth more than others and some votes are worth SIGNIFICANTLY more than yours (unless of course you’re a content writer for the Google.com domain in which case you obviously have the top vote). The basic factors that affect a link’s value to your website are:
The site strength – the strength of the site that is pointing to yours is a significant (and historically abused) factor in the valuation of links. In the absence of other easily-visible criteria let’s look at PageRank as a key valuation of a site’s strength. If a site with a PageRank 8 links to your site, this vote is worth significantly more than a link from a PageRank 3 site. This is because a PageRank 8 site is, in Google’s eyes, a more important site than the PageRank 3 site.
Relevance – the relevance of a site linking to you is, if anything, more important than a site’s strength. If you run a bed a breakfast in Utah a link from a PageRank 3 bed and breakfast will be worth more than a link from a PageRank 5 web design site. This area is a bit grey in that it relies on the engine’s ability to determine what is relevant and what is not however we’ve seen evidence that this area is strong at this stage in the game and is only becoming more important over time.
Anchor text – the actual text used to link to your site is extremely important. I’ve seen extremely strong sites get beaten out by weak ones simply due to the poor use of anchor test. If you’re building links to your site be sure to include your keywords in the text that links back and, if possible, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for. At the same time, you can’t make all your anchor text exactly the same – how can that possibly look natural?
Position – the position of a link on a page and the number of other links on that page impacts the value of a link. A link in the footer of a page is given less weight than a link near the top, a link in the content of a page is given more weight than a link in a list of links and a link on a page with 50 other links is given less weight than a link on a page with only a few other links. If we think about it – this makes sense. All of these things indicate whether the site with the outbound links actually intends for one of their visitors to click the link or not. From an engine’s perspective – the more it appears that a site wants a link to be clicked on, the higher the weight that link (or vote) is given.
Admittedly there are a number of other factors but this is a beginners guide. Following the considerations above will insure that as you make each link decision – you’re odds of making the right choices will be significantly higher than if you ignore them. Ignoring them may not get you penalized or banned but it will make your task far more time consuming as you secure less valuable links and thus need to build far more than following he right methods.
So far we’ve covered briefly the why of link building, now let’s get into the real-life, here’s-how-to-do-it side of things. Below I’m going to cover three of my favorite link building tactics. These are tactics that apply to virtually every scenario. The number of ways to build links is only limited by your imagination however and this should not be viewed as a comprehensive list. This is, after all, a beginners guide and I’m trying to list the tactics that apply to virtually every scenario.
Side Note: Reciprocal Link Building
I’m not going to count this as one of my favorite and so it won’t count as one of the three noted above and I’ll only touch on it briefly. There have been a number of assertions that reciprocal link building is dead. This is simply not the case. I have seen and competed against sites that were very successful with reciprocal links as their primary link source.
The problem with reciprocal links isn’t so much in their value which does seem to be a bit lower than non-reciprocal links however often more easily attained. No, my problem with reciprocal links is in the management. Unethical webmasters’ removing links after you’ve put the link up to them, sites expiring and not being renewed, sites getting penalties of their own due to their bad tactics are all inconveniences the reciprocal link manager must deal with.
As an SEO company, a huge issue we faced was leaving our clients with this task after a campaign was over if they decided not to go on a maintenance package. Non-reciprocal links may be a bit harder to attain in some cases however that issue is much easier to overcome than the sum of all these issues.
And now on to the top three …
Articles
If you’re paying attention as you read this you’ll probably have guessed that I’m a fan of article writing as a link building method. If you look to the “about the author” section you’ll notice a link to the Beanstalk site (and if you don’t, well … let me know as somebody’s stealing it without permission). While I genuinely enjoy writing and sharing my experiences with others – the purpose of getting the article distributed is primarily as a link building tactic, secondarily as a great source of qualified traffic and thirdly for my own enjoyment.
You are an expert in your field. Who knows more about your business than you? So share. Writing an article may not be easy but it is rewarding. If you can’t think of a topic, think of what you get asked. If you’re asked common questions repeatedly then chances are, it’s a good topic for an article. I often get asked about link building, and you’re reading the result.
Once the article is completed you need to get it syndicated. Using an article submission service is a simple way to get your article out to a large number of publishers quickly. On top of this you’d do well to seek out specific sites in your field using one or all of the major search engines to find highly relevant sites that accept articles and submit to them.
And oh, don’t forget an “about the author” section. 
Directory Submissions
Directory submissions are likely the most painful of the link building tactics you’ll employ. Why? Because it’s tedious and time-consuming work.
To be done right directory submissions must be done manually, the titles and descriptions must be tailored to the specifications of the directory in question and often, you’ll have to decide if a review fee is worth it.
While there are a good many directories that accept free submissions there are also a large number that’s require a review fee. The fee can range from a few dollars to a few hundred. If you see that a directory has a low PageRank, is general in it’s nature (i.e. it isn’t about your specific field) then it likely isn’t worth more than a couple dollars if that. If the site is strong, and strongly related to your site then it’s obviously worth more.
There is no hard-and-fast set of rules for how much a listing is worth. I’d recommend to start your hunt for directories (don’t forget the topic and/or region specific ones), submit to all the free ones and make a list of all the ones that require a fee. After you’ve gotten a solid number in you “needs to be paid list” you can get a general idea as to what’s out there and what you can get and for how much. This will enable you to make solid choices knowing what all your options are.
Forum Posting
I just know I’m going to get a couple comments and/or emails for listing this as a link building tactic but if it’s done right there’s nothing wrong with it. Forum and blog posting got a bad reputation as a link building tactic when it came under huge abuse by unethical webmasters spamming forums with useless garbage just for a link. They even went so far (and still do) as sending out spiders to automatically submit posts. To this end, I have to agree that it’s a bad tactic however …
If you’re seeking out forums related to your site, reading the threads and responding with solid advice or with questions and not just firing off some sales-pitch then you’re doing what you’re supposed to be. Another perk to this is that, like articles, if you do this right you’re gong to see traffic as well and what more can you ask from a link building tactic than traffic as well as links.
Conclusion
Above we’ve covered the basics of link building. As I’ve noted repeatedly, once you’re done reading this and applying some of what you’ve read you’d do well to read other articles, forums and blogs. This isn’t a complete breakdown of everything link-related (that would be a full book) but it will keep you out of trouble and save you countless hours of wasted time getting poor links that haven’t held value since 2003.
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