Last Thursday (April 2), Google unveiled new shortcuts in their SERPS, displaying a single line of four links that take search engine users deeper into a site, bypassing the page shown in the results. These new shortcut links are being called “One-Line Sitelinks”, or alternatively “Mini Sitelinks”.

(I prefer One-Line Sitelinks, as I think it’s more descriptive. While traditional Sitelinks often contain 8 links displayed across 4 lines, I’ve seen a number of sites that have only 3-7 links listed, so those could theoretically be called as “mini Sitelinks” as well.)

Among the most obvious differences between these so called One-Line Sitelinks and the regular Sitelinks we’re already used to:

• Display of this abbreviated version of Sitelinks is not limited to “branded” searches
• One-Line Sitelinks are not just reserved for the #1 result and can appear in results at the bottom of the SERPs
• One-Line Sitelinks are appearing on more than one result at a time
• A single domain can have more than one set of Sitelinks per page

Mini Sitelinks Chosen Similarly to Regular Sitelinks

Below is a screenshot of One-line Sitelinks (aka “mini sitelinks”) in the #1 position, followed by an indented position, and then again in the #3 position:

The above example hints at an algorithm for pulling One-Line mini sitelinks that matches the full-fledged Sitelinks usually displayed for “brand matches”, except One-Line Sitelinks pull only four links — and as far as I can see, not fewer than four.

In the case of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) (the first result in the screenshot above), the One-Line Sitelinks match the first four links displayed in the regular 8-link version of the full-size Sitelinks. These four links are not necessarily the main navigation items, and the titles come from a combination of anchor text and page titles.

In the case of KidsHealth.org (result #3 in the screenshot above), the main page is an unfriendly Flash page with three main buttons: Parents, Kids, Teens. “How the Body Works” is one of over a dozen submenu items within the “Kids” subdirectory. These four links, in this same order, are the first four Sitelinks in the full-size version of this site’s Sitelinks when you do a query on [Kids Health]. It’s not entirely clear at first glance where exactly the Sitelinks names are pulling from, since they are not an exact match for on-page anchor text, page titles or alt attributes. Most likely it is using a combination of those factors, but then stripping out “stop words.”

For my previous observations on how Google is determining which Sitelinks to display and what text it uses to describe them, please see: What Info is Google Using to Display Sitelinks?

Sitelinks Near Bottom of Page

One-line Sitelinks are not just reserved for the top of the results. The screenshot below shows One-Line Sitelinks as low as the #7 position:

It really makes you wonder why the results displayed in positions #1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are good enough to outrank KidsHealth.org, but not good enough to get a line of Sitelinks.

How Many Sites Will Show Sitelinks On a Single SERP?

I’ve seen up to 3 results displaying these inline sitelinks for a single results page. In this example for a search on [find a job], results #1, #2, and #3 all show the set of four links below the snippet:

Given that Google is displaying these links on multiple results on a single page and on results near the bottom of the page, there’s no reason to think that it couldn’t theoretically include One-Line Sitelinks with every result.

Sitelinks are Query Dependent

Here you can see that One-Line Sitelinks are not site-specific. InsureKidsNow.org gets the new One-Line Sitelinks in the #1 spot when you search [children health coverage]:

… but gets the four-link, two-line version on the search query [children health insurance], where it also occupies the #1 spot:

In both cases, the site is in the #1 position for the query and in both cases the Sitelinks listed are the same (they match the four links displayed for a “brand query”: [Insure Kids Now] — In this case, the site does not have a full 8-pack of links, even when searching on the site’s exact name).

Interestingly, when you further refine your search to include any of the keywords mentioned in the Sitelinks, the Sitelinks disappear. (E.g., a search on [children health insurance state's programs] does not pull up any results with One-Line Sitelinks, even though that keyword was part of the InsureKidsNow.gov result previously.)

Having 1-Line Sitelinks appear underneath your results for one search query, does not guarantee that you’ll see 1-Line Sitelinks for your site on other search queries, but it’s logical that similar search queries would improve the odds.

Check out this example where Google is perhaps trying to calculate just how close to a “brand” fit, the site might be.

1. A search for [health care] brings up the full set of eight Sitelinks plus an internal search box:

2. A slightly longer-tail search phrase ([kids health insurance]) brings up traditional Sitelinks, but this time with only four links instead of all eight, and no site search box:

3. The long-tail search phrase [kids health insurance program] brings up One-Line Sitelinks (in the #2 position):

Mixing Regular Sitelinks with One-Line Sitelinks

So now we’ve seen queries that bring back traditional Sitelinks and queries that bring back the new abbreviated Sitelinks. But will Google show both traditional and abbreviated Sitelinks together? Yep.

Here you can see that Google is mixing regular Sitelinks and One-Line Sitelinks in the same results:

(The fact that the first result has only 5 links, rather than the usual 8 is not related to One-Line Sitelinks. That particular results hasn’t displayed a full set of 8 Sitelinks in many months. How or why Google is deciding to display “regular Sitelinks” with fewer than 8 links is probably worthy of a separate blog post. It’s also worth noting, while we’re on the subject of Sitelinks for All-About-Content.com, that for a while the first link was actually called “Washington DC SEO”, thanks to a few choice inbound links with that anchor text. It then reverted back to using the predominant anchor text to the page from within the site’s template.)

One-Line Sitelinks Not Just for Domains

In fact, not only is Google mixing regular Sitelinks with One-Line Sitelinks, but in rare cases it’s doing so for the same domain:

It’s surprising to see a single domain get two sets of Sitelinks here, as you’d expect there to be overlap (thus wasting valuable SERP real estate), but in the above screenshot, only one link is repeated, and that’s because the Sitelinks for the second result are specific to the subdirectory.

In this next example, you can see One-Line Sitelinks for a subdomain in the #2 position:

As you can see, much like the examples I posted previously of Sitelinks showing up on subdomains and subdirectories, these new One-Line Sitelinks are not reserved just for “homepages” or domains; One-Line Sitelinks show up at the folder and subdomain-level as well.

Parting Observations

Based on what I’ve observed so far, it’s hard to predict where these One-Line Sitelinks will show up, but the same rules seem to apply as getting regular Sitelinks: a site needs to have some amount of authority for the query (although clearly not as much as before) and also have strong internal navigation/site architecture that Google can use to determine which links get displayed; Sitelinks links frequently are those high-level pages most prominent in the navigation.

But then there’s always the exception that proves the rule (h/t to Terry for this example):

One thing’s for sure, Google is always testing these SERP enhancements, so don’t be surprised if you see fluctuations and tweaks in the coming weeks. If you want to improve your chances of getting additional links into your SERP listing, work on building strong internal navigation with optimized internal anchor text, and get high-quality inbound links to your internal pages with anchor text that matches your target keywords. Since Google is tracking those links, I’m probably not going out on a limb by saying that it doesn’t hurt to drive traffic to those internal pages either

Related Posts:

• Yahoo Enhanced Results Allows Embeds Directly Into SERPs
• Sitelinks on Subdomains and Subdirectories
• Internal Search Box Displayed in Google Sitelinks
• What Info is Google Using to Display Sitelinks?

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Google’s One-Line Sitelinks Explained

Basically, by adding a small bit of markup around an embedded object in your web page, you enable Yahoo “to extract the necessary structured data to display it as an enhanced result”. The enhanced result is first displayed as a thumbnail next to your search result; if your embed object is a video, then when a searcher “click[s] on the thumbnail image, an expanded video drops down so they can watch the video clip directly on the search results page.

This works for videos and will soon work for games and other documents … apparently it also works with something called Facebook Share markup.

If it’s been a while since you’ve used Yahoo for search, you may be surprised that Yahoo has been rolling out enhanced results for all sorts of things. In other words, this isn’t just for tricked out multimedia content like Hulu videos (the example used on the above Yahoo Search blog). Simple things like images and internal anchor links could be displayed as enhanced results. Although Yahoo is handpicking which sites get this special treatment for now, the blog does encourage publishers to use the mark up so Yahoo can crawl it as soon as possible.

Check out this Wikipedia listing displayed as an enhanced result. Not nearly as sexy as being able to watch a video right from the SERPs, but tell me this isn’t going to be more compelling to searchers than a plain vanilla listing:

The shortcut links directly below the title correspond to internal anchors on the Wikipedia page. (We saw Google testing similar internal anchor links directly within the SERPs a while back as well.)

Take a look at the Yahoo results for a search on my name:

Clicking on these Facebook shortcut links just sends me to a login page. Terrible usability, but I still bet that enhanced listing will get more clicks than the surrounding results.

Obviously there are a questions: How many sites will eventually get to have enhanced listings? Will too much of this make the Yahoo SERPs look cluttered? Will embedding multimedia content in the SERPs cause users not to visit the hosting page, thus impacting page views?

While Google’s stranglehold on market share is not likely to be upset by Yahoo’s latest SERP enhancements, I do find it exciting to see this kind of product improvement by the second biggest search engine — features aimed at helping users, not simply getting more user data or serving up more ads in more places.

(On a side note, as more evidence that the whole cult of “nofollow” has reached ridiculous proportions, those shortcut links are nofollowed. Why? Links in SERPs aren’t going to be passing PageRank (or the Yahoo equivalent) and they aren’t any more or less vetted editorial content than the rest of the links on the page - if you’re disavowing those links, why not nofollow every single result?)

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Yahoo Enhanced Results Allows Embeds Directly Into SERPs

But a consistent percentage of traffic seems to be asking the very basic questions: How do I know if my photo got into Flickr Explore? … and, How can I tell which of my photos are in Flickr’s Top 500 list?

If you’re trying to find out if you made Flickr Explore, the easiest way is to go to Flickr Scout, a tool created by Big Huge Labs.

Enter your username and click “Apply” to see which of your photos (if any) made the cut.

The default view shows you which of your photos is currently part of Explore. Click the link “Include dropped” (underneath the line of drop down options) to see ALL your photos that have ever been deemed worthy of Interestingness in the past.

And there you have it, the easy way to find if your photos got into Flickr Explore.

Then What?

Once you’ve identified which of your photos made it into the Top 500 of any particular day, you can tag them with ExploreDDMONYR, where DD is the day, MON is the 3-letter month abbreviation and YR is the two-digit year the photo was uploaded (example: Explore16jul07) and Interestingness###, where ### is the position your photo achieved (example: Interestingness86).

You can also add your photo to the plethora of Explore photo pools (e.g., Interestingness - Top 500, Explore Top 20, etc.)

And don’t forget to check your stats (you have access to stats if you have a Flickr Pro account) to see if which photos are drawing eyeballs and where traffic is coming from.

So what does getting into Explore/Interestingness mean? Hmm… nothing really. You might be able to monetize your Top 500 photos status somehow, but if you figure out how to do that effectively, please let me know because in my experience the attention you get on Flickr is fickle. The amount of effort required to get into Explore is really only worth it if you enjoy being active in the community, not if you’re trying to leverage Explore for some other agenda — which is exactly as it should be. Achieving Interestingness is really just about idle bragging rights and nothing more.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Back to Basics: Finding Flickr Explore Photos

When I search “melanie phung” and clicked through to my blog, I got a bunch of “Melanie B ringtones” [AdSense] ads on my site. When I get to my site via SEO-related terms I’m presented with search ads. The content on the site, in both cases, is obviously identical (and not at all related to ringtones or “Melanie B”).

I wrote that in October of 2007. At some point after I wrote that draft, I stopped seeing radically different ad units depending on the referring keyword so I completely forgot about it, but it really bugged me at the time — I didn’t want my site content associated with ringtone ads. (Eventually I just took AdSense off my blog because even the ads that were relevant to my content didn’t seem to reflect well on the site)

In theory, you wouldn’t appear in the results for search terms that aren’t aligned with your content — in which case, AdSense could match ads to either your content or the referring search query and it would be six of one/half dozen of the other — but we know that isn’t true in reality; often users find our pages using search terms that have nothing to do with our content.”Contextual ads” that place advertisements based on broad match keyword search terms rather than landing page copy can easily miss the mark and create message mismatches that could have advertisers annoyed and uncomfortable.

And that’s nothing compared to what could happen with this new behavioral targeting Google AdSense is rolling out. Donna just made some compelling observations about how Google’s behavioral targeting could be a nightmare for publishers and users alike over on SEO Chicks.

I always thought the beauty of AdSense is that it matches ads to content. Messing with that formula seems like a losing proposition - for users, publishers and advertisers alike.

What do you think? Would you, as a Web user, click on AdSense ads targeted at you, even if they aren’t relevant to what you’re currently doing? As a publisher, how do you feel about ads on your site that aren’t related to your content? Should advertisers on Google’s Content Network worry this will hurt their campaign performance?

Updated March 12: Also read Aaron Wall’s critique of grave privacy issues, and Bob Massa’s impassioned comment in response.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Are Behavioral/Interest-Based Ads More Relevant?

The other option is to seek out and embrace new challenges.

And with that by way of intro, I have some news to share: I’ve left New Media Strategies, the national leader in digital PR and word of mouth marketing for Fortune 500 companies, to go much smaller and deeper.

Starting at the end of the month, I’ll be joining the team at RedEngine Digital, an integrated marketing firm that specializes in online marketing for nationally acclaimed non-profits, associations and businesses. Offerings include SEO, paid search, A/B testing, online fundraising, membership acquisitions, and email marketing — all with an eye on running highly profitable campaigns.

As RedEngine’s new Director of SEO and Online Marketing, my responsibilities will include search engine optimization (naturally), strategic marketing and social media… and the RED website. I’ll be able to have direct, quantifiable impact against specific goals; there’s something exhilarating about being held accountable by hard numbers. Even better, clients include non-profits that advocate for issues and causes I can get passionate about.

What does this mean for this blog? Expect nothing to change. I’ll probably maintain the same erratic publishing schedule, with posts varying in quality from lame to surprisingly not terrible, on subjects ranging from the blog itself to banal observations about the state of the industry. Keep in mind that the really juicy stuff doesn’t get published here. I still won’t blog about my clients, “amazing SEO secrets”, or industry news already being covered ad nauseum on other SEO sites, although I might start blogging more about issue-related or cause marketing.

For more frequent updates, your best bet is to follow me on Twitter, where I do drop a few nuggets of knowledge (usually from other people). And if you’re interested in what RedEngine Digital can do to turbo charge your marketing efforts, get in touch and let’s chat.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Revving Up with RedEngine Digital

The truth is, some subdomains ARE completely separate sites — just look at sites hosted on blogging platforms. Google understands that, and in the examples below is even showing Sitelinks on subdomains.

I have yet to see subfolders on a site get their own Sitelinks.

For more info on Google sitelinks, check out my older post on what factors influence Sitelinks and how anchor text is chosen, as well as Eric Lander’s excellent Sitelinks research.

Anyone have examples of Sitelinks for subdirectories? Or know something specific about how Google may treat blog hosts differently?

UPDATE: Okay, that’s what happens when I blog from the hip. Just got tipped off on examples of each. Big thanks to @rishil and @streko for these examples.  Screenshots up momentarily.

Sitelinks for a subdomain (on a site that’s not an obvious authority site, e.g. video.google.com):

Sitelinks for subdirectories:

and

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Sitelinks on Subdomains and Subdirectories

What happened was that, as one commenter aptly put it, 3M “crapped in the sandbox they were trying to play in.” And as a result, their bad faith dealings surrounding the launch of their social media marketing campaign got a ton of negative buzz.

At one point, the general product search terms [3M post it note] and [3M post it notes] even brought up sites blasting 3M for what they had done.

The various articles focused on differing aspects of what 3M’s Marketing Department did wrong — everything from contacting the photog and shredding any semblance of plausible deniability, to acting like a Big Dumb Company and steamrolling right over “the little guy” when he could have easily been their biggest cheerleader. It’s clear that the story had legs.

Although I think the incident made well the point that big corporations can’t just run rough shod over social media and content producers (and, seriously, don’t screw over my friends, k? thxbai), my post on 3M’s viral marketing failure did not go as hot as I secretly hoped it would.

Most of the marketers who heard this story agreed it was a great example of how not to do viral marketing, even commenting that they’d love to use it as a case study in social media marketing presentations. It’s precisely the sort of David-vs-Goliath story that tends to capture the imaginations of social media users. So while the story got some attention, why did my post not go truly “viral”?

What I Could Have Done Differently
aka Things to Consider If You’re Trying to Get Your Story to Go Hot

• Promote the Story More Aggressively — It was clear to me that this was a story that was made for social media. First, it was about social media. Social media loves to eat itself. Second, it was a story of a corporation ripping off the little guy — also a story the Internet loves. So I wrote the post to be “social-media friendly” and got a Digg power user to submit it to Digg. And I got someone to submit it to StumbleUpon for me. Then I reached out to several of the large sites that featured Scott’s original photos, as well as sites like Consumerist and AdRants (which like stories of big companies acting like jerks and failed marketing campaigns, respectively). I also tweeted the Digg link a couple of times, but not more than a half a dozen times.
  .The obvious advice would have been to be more aggressive in pimping my blog post, but social media is tricky and if you push too hard people tend to resent that. The obvious answer might backfire. And when I say “backfire” I don’t just mean that people would have buried the story on Digg or unfollowed me on Twitter for being too self-promotional; my worry was that my friend Scott (the photographer whom 3M ripped off) would receive the brunt of the backlash. Every time I saw someone criticize Scott for being anything less than flattered that 3M even approached him at all, I cringed a little. It was a delicate balancing act to push the story while also being mindful of his reputation

• Pitch the Story to Different Audiences – In the end, it wasn’t the SEO crowd (active Sphinn users, my Twitter friends, etc.) who took this story and ran with it: it was more traditional (for lack of a better word) online marketers and the professional photography bloggers who took a genuine interest in this story and reached out to their audiences. Rather than focusing just on the social media scene, I could have reached out to more, and perhaps more traditional, marketing blogs, as well as gone after blogs catering to professional photographers rather than hobbyists. In hindsight, I should have. Unfortunately I didn’t really know the players who could have helped spread the story to their followers and didn’t put enough effort into connecting with them.Great blogger outreach isn’t just about sending a well-composed pitch to a blogger; it’s also about doing research to find the right targets.

• Continue Pushing the Story for a Longer Period of Time — After my initial Digg push(es), I stopped promoting the story, figuring that it was time for the story to go viral organically. After all, I figured, the point of “viral” is that it’s not a single person creating the growth and spread of information; it’s about seeding the story and getting other people to spread it. There are diminishing returns to pushing the same story to the same audience, but this wasn’t (only) about getting my post to hit Digg FP.Digg isn’t the be-all end-all of going viral. While two weeks felt like a decent amount of time to push the story — at which point I was feeling like the date stamp on the blog post was getting stale by blogosphere standards — the fact is that I didn’t even come close to reaching all the people who would have been eager to here about it.

• Post the Story on a “Bigger” Blog – The “Dell Hell” fiasco would merely have been a “Dell M’eh” if it hadn’t originated on Jeff Jarvis’ blog, but that doesn’t mean you need to be an A-list blogger to do a lot of damage to a company’s reputation. However, the bigger the site, the bigger the audience and the bigger the potential damage. Considering that I don’t have a large Twitter following or even a well-read blog, I was taking a risk by posting it on this site and hoping the post was compelling enough on its own.I could have approached a bigger blog and asked to do a guest post. From there it would have reached a wider audience, and surely would have been submitted to whatever voting sites that audience liked, and then voted up according both to the merits of the story and the popularity of the site’s owner.The problem again is that my best connections were in the SEO/social media blogger world, which may not have helped me with the broader audience (it certainly would have torpedoed the story on Digg). But much more to the point, this was as much about getting my blog noticed (and certainly I was hoping for some links) as it was about pimping Scott’s story out to the biggest blog I could find. Now while I’m sure some might criticize me for the admission I just made (the shock, the horror, a blogger who writes something for recognition and links, oh my!) let’s be realistic, of course I was hoping to get something out of it (something in addition to speaking up for Scott and venting my outrage, both as a marketer and as a content producer): I wanted some kick-ass content on my blog.

• Bait 3M Into Responding -- It’s debatable whether 3M helped themselves when they refused to join the conversation, apologize or even acknowledge their growing reputation management issue . However, my suspicion is that if 3M had responded to any of the negative buzz around its brand, regardless of whether it cooled the outraged, initially at least it would have helped draw a lot of attention to my original post. Could I have done some things to put pressure on 3M’s marketing department (and in particular the eMarketing Supervisor who wrote the incriminating email) to respond? Certainly. But it was not my intention to embarrass a specific person (although googling her name shows that others were not as kind and included her full name in their own write-ups).Certainly if a story that you’re pushing to go hot contains some sort of controversy or involves other people, you can fan the flames by getting people to respond to the fight you’re picking. But it’s hard to do that and stay classy. I was not trying to gain popularity at any cost — in this particular case, getting into an internet brawl wasn’t going to serve my ultimate purpose.

• Keep It Simple: One Story and One Story Only – Here’s where my mistake became immediately obvious just as soon as feedback started rolling in: I complicated the story unnecessarily by bringing up the issue of intellectual property rights. I love IPR debates but it distracted from the “tone deaf social marketing” angle, which should have been the only angle. Not only did it possibly dilute the power of the story, but it served as an annoying red herring that drew a lot of non-supportive comments on sites like Digg and Flickr (e.g., people focused too much on whether or not a copyright violation occurred and not on how stupid 3M’s actions were, regardless of the legality of what they did).If there’s one lesson that will stick with me about how to create a compelling narrative, it’s this one: focus on the one story you’re trying to sell, and don’t introduce distractions.

In hindsight, there are things I could have done better to draw attention to the story and my post. I did have some things going in my favor in terms of potential for going viral though: 1) It was an interesting story, not a marketing campaign. While I did have an “agenda”, it wasn’t about profit and there was a real hook. Those types of things tend to have the easiest time going hot. And 2) It was original. I had the inside skinny: Scott hadn’t talked to too many people about his experience and I was the only blogger he’d shared it with. Since I wasn’t up against any one else who might “break” the story before me, it meant I could take the time I needed to craft my post the way I wanted, including whatever elements I felt would make the post as compelling as possible.

So there you have it. While my original post never went into “the social media marketing lessons to be drawn from the 3M viral fiasco” (David Meerman Scott’s post does a nice job of that, if you’re interested), I’ve finally gotten around to putting down some notes on lessons learned from helping turn a simple failure into a fiasco in the first place.

Lastly, I want to give a big thanks to all the sites that wrote-up and gave their input on the story of 3M’s viral marketing screw-up. Couldn’t have done it without you!

In particular:

• The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) blog
• The Consumerist (which went Hot on Digg: digg link)
• BL Ochman’s What’s Next Blog
• WebInkNow by David Meerman Scott
• Autoblog
• Murketing
• AdRants
• A Photo Editor
• Popular Photography blog
• and the many other photography, automotive and social media marketing blogs, as well as various forums/chat groups.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

3M’s Post-It Note Viral Marketing Attempt - Redux

He ends with:

The FTC is a consumer advocate,not Google’s private police force.

Don’t let Google scare you into thinking their rules are “the law”. By law, you don’t need to disclose your affiliate links. You don’t need to put nofollow on your links either… by law. As John’s post explains, links are not bad for consumers and don’t need to be sanitized. The stuff you do to your links you do for Google, not for the FTC. If they imply otherwise, that’s pure Google FUD.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Quote of the Week: Links Are Not Bad

Forrester graph via the Groundswell blog.

According to the survey, people trust email from people they know and consumer ratings - not a surprise. The third most trusted source is search engine results (mwuahahaha… just kidding), with half or Forrester’s respondents putting a high level of trust in the likes of Google. Somewhat ironically, only a third of people trust Wikipedia as an information source even though Wikipedia.org tends to be at the top of Google’s search results practically by default.

What I find flabbergasting once you go down the list is that more people trust things like Facebook’s Friend Feed than do online content sites like the New York Times’ website! I mean come on.

I get that people are leery of corporate blogs (only 16% said they trusted company blogs as information resources), but more people place trust in message boards (which are open to manipulation and spammers) and personal blogs (ditto) than company blogs, which at least have a brand to protect and generally tend to be fully transparent by virtue of being part of the company’s own site.

This confirms my suspicion that the average consumer of information is both paranoid and naive, at the same time, about what information sources are trust worthy. I mean sure, most corporate blogs aren’t very good, tend to lack personality or worthwhile content, but does the fact that they tend to rehash press releases make these blogs inherently untrustworthy sources of information? Less worthy than, say, a message board?

Rohit Bhargava, the authors of Groundswell and a few others have some thoughts on how corporate bloggers can win consumer trust. (But maybe someone else can address how the NYTimes.com can improve its trust factor.)

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

What Information Sources Consumers Trust

“How do I ride a bicycle?”

That’s what I hear when people ask me how to make money on the web or to rank in Google. The best way to learn is to get on the bike and start peddling. You’ll fall at first, but eventually you should get it. I can describe the basics and warn of some pitfalls, but in the end you gotta just try it to learn how.

Don’t get me wrong — you can read, read, read everything there is about the subject, talk to the experts, take courses, read reviews of products that are supposed to help, watch videos of people diagramming the mechanics … but until you’re actually doing it, it’s all just theoretical. You don’t ride a bicycle by talking (or blogging) about it.

This post originated at: All About Content - SEO Blog. All articles are the copyright of Melanie Phung. If you've found this post reprinted in full on another site, it's probably a scraper. Visit www.all-about-content.com and subscribe to the original feed, won't ya?

Quote of the Week: Like Riding a Bicycle