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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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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Late last week as we where all recovering from balloon boy, another minor kefuffle percolated to the top involving a mother and her child being separated during a TSA checkpoint screening. This story provides some interesting insight from a reputation management and social media perspective, so I’d like to delve a little deeper.So last week a post went viral titled “TSA Agents Took My Son” it was an emotion filled post that culminated with this gut wrenching moment:

The male TSA agent repeated, “I’m going to have to pick him up to inspect him.”
I handed him my son.
I handed him my son and he walked away with my child.
My eyes welled up with tears, I stood up from my chair and I asked the female TSA agent, “Where is he going? Where is he taking my child? Why is he leaving?”
Jackson, while being whisked away looked at the male TSA agent awkwardly and repeated “no no no no.”
I started crying.
The female TSA agent did not answer me.
Panic set in. My hands began to shake. My body was sweating. My breath was short and my heart was racing.
They had taken my child and not told me.
Jackson was out of my eye sight.
I could not see my son.

Anyone who is a parent has a tremendous amount of empathy for this woman and her situation, and anyone with even the slightest level of humanity can say that’s not an ideal set of circumstances. Years of the discovery channel and animal planet have taught us coming between a mother and her cub is never going to have happy ending.

Here’s where the story takes a turn and gets interesting, the TSA used their blog as tool to become involved in the situation. They even went to extraordinary measures, and edited together the video’s from different closed circuit surveillance camera’s of this woman’s entire interaction with the TSA.

I’ve watched the video twice and I don’t see a TSA agent taking her son out of her sight, in fact I don’t really see her son leaving her side. He may have been in the stroller and was farther away than she had a comfort level for, but no he didn’t really leave her side.

What are the take aways here:

• If the TSA didn’t have a blog or other social media outlet, participating in the conversation would have been much more difficult.
• Choosing to remain mute, in a time of crisis isn’t always a good idea, as you can’t provide balance to the story, and lose by default
• Have a small team of key players, who can get involved, react, and solve problems like this when they involve
• React as soon as possible when you have all the facts, and try to do it within 24 hours, even on holiday weekends unless you want a motrin mom moment on Monday morning
• If you can’t get traction on the organic side be prepared to go with PPC, thats why its important to have an adwords account already active and in place
• Be as truthful and transparent as possible it almost always works to your advantage, especially in the long run

It doesn’t matter how conservative you are, and how much of a negative reputation you have, if you deal with the general public or a large portion of your customer base is participating in social media, you need to be there as well.

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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.

No The TSA Really Didn’t Take Your Baby

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If you’ve been involved in SEO for a while chances are you’ve heard the term google whacking. For those of you that haven’t basically it was coming up with a search term for a real word that had exactly one result. Due to the way Google does things now it’s nearly impossible, and hardly any fun to try and find one anymore. However with bing it’s entirely possible, and in some cases it looks intentional.Here’s an example go to Bing and do a search for [perez hilton] screen shot of my results below for reference.

Being a well known, popular, and controversial celebrity blogger, he really should have more results, for example check out google [perez hilton] and yahoo [perez hilton]. So have you seen any other intentional one listing only results in bing, if so drop them in the comments below …

off topic comments will deleted on sight, without prejudice or mercy
photo credit: bandita

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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.

Google Whacking on Bing

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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.

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Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information.

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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.

Thanks to this Months Sponsors – September 2009

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I was browsing around Wikipedia and couldn’t help but laugh at the stupidity of some of Wikipedia’s editors, or wonder how Google can love thieves like these…

Wikipedia editors can’t spell, yet they want us to make a better ‘choise’ of words.

So let me get this straight. The content was garbage, but you still thought it was good to plagiarize it? That’s like watching Bruno and thinking he’s a role model! And of course, while you’re plagiarizing, you may as well link around to the rest of the crap content you stole and repurposed on the Wiki.
If you like this post, set up your Wordpress blog’s Internal Link Building plugin to autolink to this post with the anchor text Wikipedia . That way, whenever you mention Wikipedia, it’ll link here and help remind the world of Wikipedia.org’s high quality standards.
photo credit: Kelly Sue

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Wikipedia: The Guide To Complete Idiots

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