In recent years it has become increasingly more difficult to hide information (including data, pages, new domains, and entire websites) on the internet. In some cases, the discovery’s results can range from being mildly embarrassing to to completely giving away a business plan. In this post I’ll talk about some of those holes and how to protect yourself.

Domain Registration

When you register a new domain, especially one of the popular high level TLD’s such as .com, .net, or .org it gets recorded in numerous places. One of the most visible is AboutUS.org (see my page). For many non branded URL’s, the AboutUS.org domain usually ranks in the top 10 and presents an opportunity to engage in some reputation management. Since you can edit your listings on AboutUs.org you can also engage in some low level link building. Unless you have edited it, AboutUs.org will scrape one of your pages by default. You can always go back and edit the resulting entry and add in links. All of the links from AboutUs.org are nofollowed (it’s that SEO Blackhole thing); however, when the AboutUs.org page gets scraped, the nofollow tag doesn’t always get applied. These aren’t going to high powered links but they will add up over time.

Additionally, whenever you register a new domain, that registration info is captured by services like DomainTools.com. One of the services domain tools offers is the ability to see archived “who is” info. If the domain has changed ownership and if the registration info was updated, that information will be available for a price. Another piece of information offered by domain tools is the ability to search for identical/similar registration info. You can search by the person’s name or company name and (again for a fee) get a list of other domains listed with similar registration info. You can try to block and obfuscate that data with private registrations, but I’ve seen some evidence that having public whois data can help rankings … so you have to decide which is more valuable.

Scraped Information

I’ve mentioned numerous times that in most cases it’s not worth wasting your time chasing down people who are scraping your content. In fact in most cases you are better off just inserting links to yourself and letting the scraping continue. If you are selling information and someone is copying you or if you are being outranked, then it’s worth fighting; otherwise it’s like herding cats. In some cases this scraping is legit and will turn up in odd places. For example in my post telling people to not be linking to public testing, I was doing a little testing myself (c’mon you have to appreciate the humor of testing in a post about testing). I inserted this phrase in the meta description:

constagagulation is fun constagagulation is nice constagagulation for everyone, constagagulation is fun constagagulation is nice constagagulation for everyone

Google ignored the meta description and didn’t index it. Topsy.com, however, came by, scraped the page, and added the meta descption, which Google then indexed. What’s the lesson here? Any information that’s publicly accessible on the internet has the potential to be copied, duplicated, and reproduced. Don’t count on spiders/bots being polite and respecting disallow directives in your robots.txt file. I know more than one person who looks for blocked directories as a place to start looking for secret information. If you want to keep information from being copied, you need to put it behind a password.

Social Media and Social Engineering

In my opinion one of the unintended outcomes of social media has been the connection of  social data points. Sites now try to actively link as much information about you as possible, using your public profile to flesh out your social graph. Using common things like webmaster central verification files, google analytics ID’s, and adsense publisher ID’s, it’s becoming increasingly easier for even a novice to determine what sites you own or are connected to in some way. To avoid this, there are two choices: 1. build everything in isolation and hope that no one notices the times you do mistakenly cross the streams; or 2. mix the information with mis-information so that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate truth from fiction. We no longer live in a world where “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” In the world today,  “what happens in Vegas ends up on Twitter and Facebook”. Once it’s set free in the wild ‘net, you can’t pull it back, so choose your friends wisely and hope they are smart enough to know when not to cross the line.

It’s not about hiding from the truth. It’s about deciding what you want to advertise.
photo credit: left-hand

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Why It’s Harder to Hide Things on The Internet

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Now that Pubcon is over I’m going to let you in on a tool that helps me keep track of, organize, find, and use the information I get from conferences, trade shows, and seminars:  Evernote.

The company describes Evernote as an external brain. Your external brain. It remembers things so you don’t have to. Evernote is a clipping service with a browser based client, web interface, desktop application, and smart phone interface (it works on the iphone, blackberry, and others). Evernote is also cloud based, so information that’s added from your smartphone is sync’d to your desktop automagically. But enough promotional chatter. Let’s get down to some real world usage.

Once you’ve got an evernote account set up, you’re going to create a notebook for the conference. Think of it as a big bucket for holding all the Pubcon stuff. By default your notebooks are private, but you can share them with select people or the entire internet, which is what I’ve done with my Pubcon 2009 Notebook. Go ahead–take a look.

To make your notebook useful, you’ve got to put stuff in it like the conference schedule. While you could just as easily bookmark the page,  Evernote’s advantage lies in its technique. It actually stores the data from the page so that, when the 2010 schedule goes up and erases what’s there now, you’ll have a permanent record of 2009. The next thing I added was live blogging session posts from Outspoken Media, 10e20, Top Rank Online Marketing, and Search Marketing Sage. Normally I would have added Search Engine Roundtable too, but they are using a new app that doesn’t render the text on the page. Evernote can’t read it.

Now that I’ve got all that content in my notebook, I can start doing searches. I heard the session about the Las Vegas Hotels using twitter was pretty interesting, so let’s do a search for [las vegas hotels twitter].   I get three live blogging recaps I can use for reference.

After the conference, you’ll get a CD with all the presentations; however, unless you remember where the information is or what its name is, sometimes it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. If you uploaded all the presentations to evernote, though, the content is fully searchable. Now there are some legal restrictions and some people don’t let their presentations go public, so for this notebook I only uploaded mine (since I’m pretty sure I can’t sue myself). However, if you keep your notebook private, you don’t have anything to worry about. Let’s say you remember something in a presentation about banned sites. Executing a quick search on [banned sites] brings up the presentation and the live blogging recaps.

You may be thinking, “Well this is all pretty neat, but can’t I do the same thing with a Google custom search engine?” You could if you only wanted to search text, but what about images? Evernote has some extra functionality. An example: maybe you’re really bad with names and faces. While evernote isn’t savvy enough to have facial recognition, if you are clever and take people’s pictures in front of their speaker cards, evernote can read the text. Can’t remember what Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide looks like? A quick search for [Jennifer Laycock] will bring up the picture you took. If you click through you’ll see it actually reads the text from her name card and highlights it in yellow.

As long as you take the picture fairly straight on and not at an oblique angle, it works pretty well. Here’s another example. A search for [image indexing] returns a picture of  Bruce Clay in front of a slide with the words “image indexing” on it.

Maybe that’s still not awesome enough for you. Have you ever lost a business card? If you use Evernote to take a picture of the card, you’ll have a picture of it and be able to get back in touch with that really smart person. Are you bad about losing your receipts? If so, you can use evernote to take a picture of the receipt so you can find it when your bookkeeper needs it. If your smart phone has GPS, it will also record the location for you. You can also scan the receipt and import that way, but you lose the nifty mapping functionality.

There are lots of other ways that you can use Evernote but, as a conference reference guide, it’s a pretty powerful tool. Evernote comes at two levels: free and paid. The paid product is $45 per year, which gives you a huge increase in upload file size, more file types, and a few other things too. Full details are available on the premium membership page.

Disclosure: This wasn’t a paid or sponsored post. This post contains no affiliate links. I wish there was an affiliate program because I would absolutely join it. My membership wasn’t comped or discounted. I paid the full price for a premium membership. If the nice folks at Evernote like this post and want to send me some swag or a t-shirt (x-large) it would make me almost as happy as batch of warm chocolate chip cookies

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Michael Dorausch of Planet C1 Chiropractic for allowing me to include his photos.

photo credit: TheLizardQueen

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How to Use Evernote to Create the Ultimate Post Conference Reference Guide

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Despite what you may have read, Google secretly has a love affair with thin affiliates. Like a techie and Gizmodo, Google can’t get enough of affiliate marketers who build sites with no value add. If Google has its own internal Twitter, Eric Schmidt would tweet, “I heart affs who rely on search to power their business model.” Why?

Google loves thin affiliate sites because they:

1) Are lazy.

2) Lack brands that would cause people to be loyal to them.

3) Give Google their AdWords data.

4) [Sometimes] do Google’s testing for Google. [NB: A high converting lander doesn't lift you above the status of thin affiliate.]

5) Repeat what’s in a datafeed verbatim, making it easier to pinpoint key data in the absence of a Google base feed. For those of you in this boat, read Rae on how to handle affiliate datafeeds properly.

All of this enables Google to launch affiliate sites like its mortgage comparison tool, which sells traffic on a cost-per-lead basis. Aaron Wall has also pointed out that Google’s getting into retail affiliate marketing, which will increase as universal results become more widespread.

Google loves thin affiliates because they’re no competition. They’re disposable.

I told you guys over a year ago that Google aims to be the world’s biggest affiliate. Thin affiliates are a lovely source of competitive intelligence.

What’s the takeaway for internet marketers?

Google is progressively taking all the value in search traffic for itself. If this trend continues in the long term, search will gradually become a lower-and-lower ROI marketing channel as competitors bid the traffic/leads etc into the stratosphere.

And that’s not just for affiliates! Google is taking on Amazon too, though that battle should won’t be as easy as picking on thin affiliates. What’s the difference?

Amazon has:

• A huge brand. Even if Amazon blocked Googlebot in its robots.txt, people would still visit Amazon to shop online.

• A first-mover advantage in ebook readers with the Kindle.

• Other marketing channels, including its affiliate program, public relations etc.

While it’s trite by now, Internet marketers – both affiliates and merchants – would do well to imitate Amazon. Developing a brand, a first-mover advantage, and non-search marketing channels are going to be increasingly important for online businesses to minimize their risk.

Sadly, this suggests that we’ll see a swing back from permission marketing to interruption marketing. Not tomorrow or even in 2010, but very slowly over the next few years. Wonder what Seth Godin would think of that?
photo credit: Photomish Dan

(While comments are closed here, you can tweet feedback to me via @GabGoldenberg. You can also check out my blog’s affiliate marketing posts.)

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Why Google HQ Loves Thin Affiliates

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In the past week there’s been a lot talk about the Wall Street Journal threatening to pull its content from Google and why it’s a good idea or sheer lunacy.
Let’s be clear. I think this entire thing is saber rattling on both sides and that Murdoch really just wants a “piece of the action.” I don’t think he wants the Wall Street Journal to be out of the index any more than Google is being flippant about whether they are in the index or not. However, if you are going to play hardball and draw a line in the sand, you have to be willing to hold your ground–or at least convince everyone you are–for it to work.

To be honest, regular consumers aren’t going to notice the absence of  the WSJ as long as the general news is covered by the New York Times, Chicago Tribune or LA Times. However, when journalists like Kara Swisher or Walt Mossberg (who write for All Things D, a subsidiary of WSJ) write or break news and it’s not in Google, that’s kind of a big deal. Sure, the stories will start appearing in other papers in a few hours, but they will cite/mention and maybe even link to other articles that aren’t in the index. Imagine doing a search for [Kara Swisher Keyword] and it not working. That is a textbook definition of  a bad user experience.

The  big question is whether the Bing index will have exclusive access to the WSJ content. If  Bing does get exclusive access, it’s going to set a precedent. If Bing can lock in some of the major news sites, Google will be backed into the corner and probably forced into a “pay to play” status with some of the newspaper sites. While it’s unlikely, if Bing was able to get a lot of the big newspapers to sign exclusively, Google’s index would take a measurable drop in quality, which could completely screw Google. The steps Google has taken to offer free online versions of Microsoft’s cash cow Office software bundle don’t seem that far out of line with its overall search strategy, does it?

Taking the “what if” scenario a little further: what if Bing started offering cash incentives to the bigger blogs like Techcrunch, Engadget, and Gawker for exclusive access to their content. Think of it as an alternative to the black box manipulation and smart pricing voodoo that publishers experience when using adsense. Further, if Bing managed to to take 10% of the top news/informational websites into its exclusive index and Google lost the ability to crawl those websites, would a link-based algorthym for ranking websites still work or would it fall apart like a house of cards?

At the end of the day I’d say there’s less than a 10% chance that WSJ will end up a Bing exclusive because this is a business/money decision that’s full of public posturing for negotiation purposes … but still I find it hard not to root for the guy who like Horatius Cocles had the nerve to stand up to an overwhelming opposing force.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How Bing and the Wall Street Journal Could Screw Google

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Now that twitter lists have taken off and are being utilized, and in some cases are replacing RSS readers, I’m going to try to take advantage by experimenting with a new account @graywolfseo.Some of the common complaints I get are that I am chatty, meander about, post too many cooking, disney, or other non SEO related tweets. If that describes your feelings  then go ahead and follow @graywolfseo. The plan is to use it to post things from this blog and other interesting marketing, search engine, or social media links without being conversational. Lot’s of people think social media without the conversations is a social media fail, but I disagree, I think you can make it work.

So which account should you follow @graywolf or @graywolfseo? It’s up to you, follow both and if you find one annoying unsubscribe from it, my feelings won’t be hurt … much . There will be some cross posting but I will keep it to a minimum, there will be more links there that aren’t in the main account. Give it a week and let me know what you think.
photo credit: Katie@!

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New Twitter Account @graywolfseo

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Now that twitter lists have been rolled out just about everyone, I’m going to actually agree with Robert Scoble and say twitter lists are teh awesome.

To be clear I haven’t gone as far as stopping to use my feed reader … but in the next few weeks I will be looking to move what I can out of google reader and into twitter lists. It’s not that RSS is bad, but RSS is too complicated for anyone but geeks to use, in fact I share Guy Kawasaki’s belief that if you can take the tech out of RSS and blogging it’s going to be better for everyone (shocking I agreed with Scoble and Guy Kawasaki in the same post, someone check for pods in the basement). It’s a matter of how simple it is to integrate into your life and workflow, twitter is a simple steak knife, an RSS reader is a complicated swiss army knife.

RSS is integrated into most blogging and a lot of publishing systems, it will still have uses, and will never die out. However if you are looking for social engagement not having a twitter account is probably a liability, especially when there are so many tools that make it easy to integrate the two.

That said twitter lists aren’t manna from heaven, and they aren’t without their problems, for example let’s look at the clueless Todd Ziegler. Todd showed his academic ivory tower mentality, with his post last week “using twitter lists to judge influence“, sorry Todd do not pass go, do not collect $200. Don’t feel bad you aren’t the only one who doesn’t grasp real world economics. Anytime there is something of value, and there is way to use it gain money, power, influence or sex from it, a black market economy will spring up around it. First people will create silly lists, then others will experiment to see if they rank in Google. Once that’s done, people will start trading favors to be on lists, systems will spring up making adding yourself to lists more efficient and scalable, and ultimately people will start selling placement on lists. Put it this way, once you are on 5,000 lists people will think you are important, and start adding you to other lists. It doesn’t matter that the first 4,950 of those lists where fake spam lists, once you have the 5,000 you are a self referencing authority and you are grandfathered in by your legacy status.

The really clever people will realize that twitter lists are also a powerful reputation management tool, used for good or evil. Because twitter is a pagerank blackhole, all you need to do is work the system to get enough high powered internal links, and you’re good to go. The problem is of course most people aren’t ready for this kind of power, it’s like giving a flame thrower to a 13 year old, no good will come of it. With great power comes great responsibility, and marketers have history of no self restraint and have elevated self-destruction to an art form. To put a fine point on it most of you don’t know when to STFU, destroying your own online communities in short lived blaze of glory, in an effort to gain a link or a bit of exposure.
photo credit: G. Rivas Valderrama

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Twitter Lists are Teh Awesome

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

Clasione Directory – Quality directory for listing your business

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Thanks to this Months Sponsors – October 2009

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In the past few months all of the search engines, but especially Google have released or started supporting new ways of fixing site architecture issues. However IMHO these are band-aid solutions for bad site architecture, and not something you should rely on … at all.

In 2009 some of the big advances we’ve had the major search engines announce support for are things like the “rel=canonical” tag which allows you to tell a search engine this content at this URL may exist in more than one place, but you should credit it to one URL. Another new item is the ability to tell the search engines to ignore certain URL parameters. So if you’re using tracking parameters, session ID’s or other items you can now tell the search engines to ignore them entirely. There are many people who are happy to have these new tools, as it allows them to fix “issues” they have had for years. However I think these tools are crutches for lazy and incompetent programmers and developers, and should be avoided like the plague … and I’ll tell you why …

In the dawn of the public internet there where dozens of search engines that webmasters and publishers had to deal with, combine this with a lack of standards and the online publishing community had a lot of growing pains. When the dot-com bubble burst and the market consolidated we where really left with four big search engines. As Google pursued it’s relentless market domination, under the guise of a garage start-up bathed in the light of primary colored lava lamps, they stole the thunder of everyone else (coincidentally of course) and, established themselves as the ruling organization and defacto standards setting body, the rest of the world be dammed.

This is bad, as sloppy publishers and slip shod developers, now use google’s band-aid solutions, instead of developing websites and applications that don’t introduce problems that don’t need to exist in the first place. Case and point look at this URL from Forbes Magazine:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html?feed=rss_news

Notice the [feed=rss_news] part at the end, that enables Forbes to track where visitors came from, in this case RSS, most likely a feed reader. But now there’s the problem of that same content existing at two URL’s, remove the feed parameter and it still works:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/20/live-well-cities-lifestyle-real-estate-hermes-paris-london-new-york.html

Not to worry we can use the “rel=canonical” to point to the URL without the parameter, we can also use webmaster tools to tell it to ignore the “feed” parameter and we’re good to go right … wrong junior that’s two band-aids you needed to use instead of solving the problem properly. What you should have done is issue a 301 redirect at the server level to the correct URL, and not rely on the client or bot to figure things out. Need that parameter for tracking drop it in a cookie.

Why does this matter … as publishers we want to foster and build an environment that’s friendly for more than one search engine. Here’s an experiment, go try and append a meaningless imaginary parameter or two to a URL and submit it to a social site like Digg or Stumbleupon and see what happens. The simple fact is they aren’t sophisticated enough to parse it out as tracking parameter. Lots of other social sites are trying to gain access to your content as well, and by using substandard architecture you aren’t helping yourself. Your story will get votes in two places, decreasing its ability to go “go hot” or “popular” as its votes are spread over two URL’s.

While social search may be in it’s infancy, and may never overtake traditional search, the easier you make your content to crawl and understand for everyone and not just google, the better off you’ll be in the long run. Get out of the habit of relying on the crawling and indexing band-aids of search engines for your survival, learn to write clean code that makes you self reliant for your long term lively hood and success.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Bad Architecture and Band-Aid Solutions

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Last week Danny Sullivan twittered he was looking for a creative commons image to use. Christine Churchill poked a little fun at me wondering how I was able to get that so quickly. The trick is using search shortcuts, and I’m going to show you how to do it.

For my first example I’m going to set up a creative commons search for commercially licensed images on flickr (aka images you allowed to use on websites you make a profit on as long as you attribute them properly). Go the advanced search page on flickr, put in your query term and check the boxes creative commons, and commercial reuse.

Execute the search, and you’re result should look something like this:

Make sure it says for commercial use so you stay legal. By default flickr returns based on “relevant”, however I find the “interesting” setting gives better results so click that. Now look at the URl it should look something like this:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=magic+kingdom&l=comm&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&adv=1&s=int

We could disect all of the parameters, but really all we need to identify is the “q=magic+kingdom” part. Highlight the URL and copy it to your clipboard using CTRL+C. Next click on the little wrench icon in your chrome toolbar, and choose options. Look for the area labeled “default search” and click manage.

next click the “add” button another dialog box will open

You need to enter a unique name (in this case flickr) into the box. If you enter the name of a search engine that already exists the green checkbox will turn into an orange exclamation point. Next enter the keyword, this is what you have to type in the address bar/omnibox to execute the search. It needs to be unique and the shorter you make it the easier it will be to type. Next you need to paste the search URL into the URL box. Once you do that you need to go back and remove the “q=magic+kingdom” and replace it with “q=%s”. By placing the %s we are telling the browser to replace %s with whatever term we type in. Click OK, and close out all the dialog boxes. Lets give it a test. Use CTRL+T to open a new tab, by default your cursor is now in the address/omni box. Type in the keyword shortcut (in this case “flickr” followed by the search term). Use a different term than the one you started with to make sure it working, but it should look something like this:

Hit the enter/return key and it should execute the search on flickr for the term “ford mustang” showing only creative commons images approved for commercial reuse, sorted by interestingness.

You can do this with any site the key is getting the right URL for the search, and replacing it with %s. Some sites will require special handling for multi-word terms, such as wikipedia. Here’s the URL for an image search in wikipedia for “ford mustang”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ford_Mustang

The problem is you don’t have the ability to tell chrome to replace the space with an underscore. However with a bit of URL experimentation and hacking this URL will work:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=ford mustang&go=Go

So repeat the steps above for flickr (naming it something different of course) replace the “ford mustang” with %s and you’re good to go. You aren’t limited to image searches you can do the same thing on any search engine as long as you can reverse engineer the URL querystring. There you have do quick and esy searches across almost any site.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Add Search Shortcuts to Google Chrome.

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This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in the past few months so I thought I’d spend some time explaing what it is, what to watch out for, and how it could be problematic for you.

Lets start at the beginning with sponsored themes. A sponsored theme is where you have a designer create a wordpress theme for you and give it away to others to use for free with the provision they leave the link intact in the footer. This tactic grew and got abused, with themes eventually getting porn, pills, and casino links in them. Both Google and wordpress have spoken out against the practice but there are still thousands of sponsored themes with commercially motivated SEO footer links in them.

Now let’s jump over to reputation mangement for a minute … Google did a post last week talking about reputation management, and some of the tips they gave where publish good information about yourself, and link to it. I agree one of the key aspects of any reputation mangement campaign is finding positive or neutral information you created or that exists on third party sites and linking to it … but what if you are third party is there any danger to you … possibly.

Let’s imagine someone is involved in a reputation management campaign, and they want to point some links at a neutral SERP listing on a third party site, and the method they use for link acquisition is links in the footer of a sponsored theme. If the theme is popular it’s quite possible thousands of links could be generated in a very short period of time, in a lot of cases from very questionable sites. Google says it doesn’t have a problem with low quality links, in fact there official statement is:

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

Notice the “almost” part, now google won’t tell us bursty link acquisition from a high volume of low quality sites from bad neighborhoods, fits the definition of “almost”, but I say getting a butt load of of site wide links from an eastern block warez or porn blog network is going to really distort your inbound link profile and is almost certainly within a 1 block radius of “almost”. To take this out of the theoretical, what if a sponsored theme with site wide footer links gets put on a dozen auto-gen scraper blogs, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for a site to have 30,000 or more new links pointed at them in a 3 month period, and what if  they had less then 500 links to start with, do you think that could affect their link profile and subsequently their rankings …

Knowing about and understanding that tactics like this are important and one of the key reasons you should be monitoring your backlinks. If you see something like this and it gets to the point where it’s approaching a few thousand links it might be time to talk to a search engineer …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Using Sponsored Blog Themes For Reputation Management

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