I know I'm a bit late for Mother's Day. I love my mother every day though. Do you? In case you love your mother reshare this!

Now, who will say "no" and refrain from resharing? Many people will feel compelled to do so. Today I will show you a few little social engineering tricks that pretty much everybody and their mom is using out there on social media.

In SEO we had the ever-present dark side of black hat SEO but what many overlook is the downright manipulation of people within social media.

Indeed social media by itself is a kind of manipulation where corporations earn money by making you create content for them for free and monetize your relationships. That's  a longer article though.

This time I just want to explain the few simple methods people use to make you share their updates or vote them up artificially. I'll use Google+ to show that but it's even more common on more popular sites like Facebook or Tumblr.

Reshare This if You Love ...

Social Media is about identity. Whether you have to disclose your name and address like on Facebook or are able to create a virtual identity like on Tumblr it's about who you are most of time. You are what say and what you share.

Online you are always alone and just connected to people who are elsewhere on the globe. That's why you see everybody staring at their mobile these days while fewer people talk to or even look at each other in real life. You create a connection by saying and sharing things others like. In case they don't you end up ignored or being a troll.

Things we all can relate to are easier to share. That's why cute images of cats and other pets rule the Web.

Everybody can relate to that. Facebook is also full of baby photos but that's not as simple anymore. People who can't have kids for example my be pout off. Others may not want to look at strangers' kids.

Click "+1" to Vote

Usually a social media vote equals appreciation. That's the case for sure with the "+1! by Google or the !like! by Facebook. What about the people who do not like something though? Don't forget those undecided, unable or unwilling to choose whether they like something or not. How to make them vote? Well give them the fitting options.

Of course you need something that is not really important but almost everybody by now will have an opinion on it.

The more opinionated the better. For example you could make them choose between three common operating system options by asking "what is the best OS?"

1. Linux
2. Mac
3. Windows

Social sites will of course count all these votes as genuine engagement, it even is to some extent, you din't pay anyone to vote!

Click "like" to Win!

You have seen plenty of those sweepsateks on Facebook. Click "like" to win an iPhone or something. Google+ doesn't allow contests ion their TOS so I can't show you an actual example here but you know what I mean.

Even scammers have used this "click to win" technique by setting up fake Facebook pages.

They would post something like click "like" to get a 100$ coupons and 50k people would do it without even looking closely at the page they did it on! In some cases those who clicked downloaded some malware.

Of course the likelihood to click and really win is minuscule. It's far too easy to click so that far too many people will do it and the few items that get given away will be given to a tiny fraction of those who clicked if at all.

At the same time all the people clicked the "+! or "like" as if the y truly appreciate it. Now that's a big win for the manipulative person or company. We're still in the early stages of social media so that kind of inflated popularity doesn't get really discounted.

Real Social Media Manipulation

There are of course more advanced techniques of manipulating social media audiences at large. For example

the US military has a whole social media division and uses fake accounts

dedicated to spread news and rumours about America's enemies. That's why you read so many awful stories about Iran despite our ally Saudi Arabia being much worse. Such manipulative efforts are far harder to spot though.

Also people are so used to view the bad news about Iran that they tend to vilify the country by themselves. Remember that Iran for example is a democracy while in Saudi Arabia an absolutist king is reigning with an iron fist.

Just recently Saudi Arabia's army has destroyed the democracy movement in the neighbouring Bahrain. Instead the main news for a year has been the civil war in Syria where rebels" supported by the US and the EU are fighting the Syrian government, an Iranian ally.

This post is not about politics though. Neither Syria nor Iran are perfect, I know that, but isn't it strange how much worse offenders who are "our rogues" get away with murder while our enemies end up in the spotlight all the time?

Meanwhile I guess you still love your mother, so please reshare this! The Google+ button is below or just select any image or text part and click to win more hearts and minds!

This is a sad story with a happy ending about the way Microsoft has made the Web ugly and what to do about it. You have to act now though or you lose readers and customers. In a more descriptive way it deals with body text readability in the age of default font smoothing.

The typography of many sites is literally broken without their respective owners' knowledge it seems. You can't ignore the fact anymore that your copy is fuzzy and difficult to read. You simply turn away visitors from your site!

Have you heard the term anti-aliasing? Most people probably haven't unless they are graphic designers. Do you know what ClearType is? Both are dealing with font smoothing. What you need that for you might ask? I'm not sure myself.

Ideally font smoothing makes text appear more readable and good looking on screens. In reality it doesn't unless you make sure it does.

Web-safe Fonts

It all started with Times New Roman. Early websites used that font known from newspapers. It didn't look good nor was it very readable on the Web but at least you could print it out in the early days of the Internet. Later on more so called Web-safe fonts like Helvetica and Arial appeared and finally a really good crispy font for body text took center-stage: Verdana. Web-safe meant available, readable and looking the same on all platforms. Then things got worse again.

Starting with Windows  XP Microsoft introduced a proprietary technology called ClearType to smooth fonts.

Windows ClearType

Windows not only ships with ClearType pre-installed since XP, it's also activated by default since Vista. So whether you like it or not, most people use ClearType on Windows to smooth fonts. I use Windows too but I don't like smooth aka fuzzy body text fonts that strain my eyes and look ugly. That's why I switch ClearType off on my machine.

So in recent years I was able to ignore the fact that my body text looks pretty and readable to me while to most other people it doesn't.

Web-safe fonts looking blurry

I was testing a site lately on different browsers and platforms and was again alerted to the difference font smoothing or lack of it makes. Maybe I'm one of the people who can't distinguish colors as good as the Clear Type technology requires to be of use. On the other hand even highly accepted fonts such as Helvetica/Arial look blurry and clumsy when font smoothing is on. Just compare these two, first the crispy version without ClearType, this is what I see and then the default ClearType font smoothing version, this is what most of my readers see:

Is the second one really better readable as Microsoft claims? I doubt it. In case it's just me, look at the font, it looks blurry and ugly. Even in case you don't care you will notice on a sub-conscious level and dislike the overall user experience. The smoothed Arial barely resembles the elegance of the classic Helvetica font it is based on.

Microsoft has introduced a special set of proprietary fonts that look OK with ClearType, most notable Calibri, but these fonts are mostly Windows only:

So users on other platforms may see other fonts instead. Apple and Linux systems are reportedly better at font smoothing than Windows but you also want to make your site look more or less the same on all platforms, don't you?

Font smoothing not activated

It doesn't even have to be a corporate identity. The sheer readability of body text improves or deteriorates a lot depending on whether you have taken font smoothing into account or not. Many fonts that are perfect in small sizes without font smoothing are causing problems once font smoothing is switched on. On the other hand your perfectly smooth font can look really broken on systems not using font smoothing. Not every font works both ways with font smoothing turned on and off:

The example above is ironically taken from the Usability Post article on font smoothing. With ClearType off there is no font smoothing left and the font is looking really weird, notice the bizarre additions to the "e" for example.

Some people turn off ClearType on Windows of their own accord, others simply do not have it activated it as they use Windows XP on netbooks for example.

Anyway, neither keeping on using your standard fonts like Verdana or Helvetica/Arial nor using some new smooth by design fonts like Calibri is the perfect solution. For each one of them there are cases or rather users who won't be able to view them properly.

Webfonts for body text

Of course there is third kind of solution I want to suggest today: webfonts. Webfonts are a by now popular way of modern font replacement for high quality typography. Webfonts are often basically rented fonts you access on a third party server.

You can display body text using Webfonts not just headlines unlike the early font replacement techniques.

There are even a lot of free Webfonts from a few services you can use. Sadly it's not as easy as you might expect. The choice of the right font and font size is crucial to ensure readability.

• Some fonts will look OK with old school font smoothing but not with ClearType.
• Some font sizes are too small to be still readable using webfonts.
• Many fonts are too fancy to be of use for body text.

So you have to chose the body text font wisely and test it even on Windows on several browsers and with ClearType on and off.

I have tested lots of free webfonts on my own microsite over at onreact.com - Finally I chose Muli for both h2 subheadlines and body text. It works best with simple anti-aliasing and still OK with subpixel rendering. That's what ClearType does too. Different browsers on Windows will treat smoothed fonts differently. Firefox simply anti-aliases them (first screen shot), Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer use subpixel rendering (second screen-shot from Chrome):

As you see the readability here is not perfect yet. At least it looks the same with ClearType on and off now. Please note how the same font size is a lot different on both browsers though. On FF the readability is better. On Chrome etc. the font looks more like the original design of it but is harder to read.

Vinny La Barbera's blog uses Questrial as a webfont. It looks both good and is readable. It works for headline and body text. Still, on Chrome the display is not perfect here either.

Another similar free webfont that I have seen working pretty well in the wild is Quicksand. All three are not perfect though. In some common sizes and colors the readability suffers.

I consider using some high quality paid Webfonts instead. I have collected lots of them for testing purposes and have still to choose one. I may follow up on this topic in the future.

Webfonts, even free ones are not only available from Google Webfonts. You can get them from Adobe as well or Fonts.com where you can get high quality professional fonts for 10$ a month and many other vendors. A professional font like ITC Avant Garde Gothic in its Web optimized version works well both from a readability perspective and to please the eye.

What about you? Do you care about readable body text or do you just focus on getting your visitors and assume that once they are on your site they will stay there and read your text no matter how it looks?

* Creative Commons image by matt knoth.

BuzzFeed reports that

"Traffic from Google to digital publishers dropped 30% over the past eight months."

based on traffic statistics from over 200 major media properties, among them

1. BuzzFeed
2. Time
3. Huffington Post
4. Rolling Stone
5. Sports Illustrated

Overall social media traffic to publishers, even Facebook traffic by itself amounts to more than Google search traffic for quite a while by now, 3 months in a row.

Danny Sullivan stopped right in claiming that it's all so called "not provided" traffic that doesn't get shown. That's not true though. That's only a small fraction. Where did all the search traffic go then? I'll explain. Here are the reasons:

Google Knowledge Graph

The so called Google Knowledge Graph is designed to keep searchers on Google, give them all the information they need onsite or send them over to similar search pages. Searchers do not need to click actual search results anymore. For example Google scrapes content from Wikipedia and display it right in the results.

Google Image Search content theft

Google Image Search has been updated recently. The new versions steals your images and hotlinks them on Google-page. There is no way to redirect the searcher to the image source anymore with frame-breakers or similar means. Advanced hotlink protection can help to recover some clicks partly but can't stop Google from this large scale content theft.

Paid only search "results" above the fold

For many search queries, especially those that make money Google doesn't display real search results right away anymore. Instead you'll only use ads and hidden ads  that is "paid inclusion" Google services. You have to scroll to see some actual organic search results. Most people click what's on top instead and often do not even notice or care whether it's an ad or not.

Social media dwell time grows, search dwindles

For a few years in a row the so called dwell time on social media sites has grown while the one search sites e.g. Google dwindles. Dwell time is the actual time you stay onsite and use it. Users spend hours on Facebook per week while the search only for minutes. That's why Google tries desperately to push Google+ as an alternative.

People go to sites directly

When I search for [seo] I see almost the same low quality search results for a few years in a row. I see Wikipedia, Google's own "anti-SEO" FAQ , some information for beginners and a few spammy sites. When I search for something new on SEO I use other sources. I use Topsy and other tools, I check what my social media friends share.  So using search is only for first time users in many cases. Once you know where you want to go, you can go directly. I will check out SEOmoz or Search Engine Land without the help of Google.

A small amount gets wrongly attributed

Google hides more than half of so called referral data from publishers. That is the will see that some came from search to their site but not what they searched for. They have to buy ads on Google to see that data. That called "privacy" in Google's Newspeak. The Safari browser on some mobile devices, that is newer Apple products will hide that traffic altogether and won't tell you that it's search traffic at all.

Answers instead of search results

So what's the overall trend here? Google tries to become a destination itself. The gate-keeper is closing the gate more often so that fewer searchers can go though. Modern search is about answers not search results. For others it's just a toll-booth.

It's no wonder that Google traffic dwindles. Their short term goal is to keep users on Google and grab as much third party content as possible.

When it comes to mobile interfaces or images the process is already very painful to publishers. Social media also replaces search for many people. You rather trust your friends than a buggy Google algorithm.

So where did all the search traffic go? Most of it didn't go anywhere, it stayed on Google. The rest moved to social media.

* Image courtesy of BuzzFeed.

You have to admit: it didn't work out! Your quest to replace the stigma of SEO was futile until now!

• You wanted to practice internet marketing to no avail, you still just did keyword research, onsite optimization and link building.
• Then you tried to become an inbound marketer but were sending out all these cold outreach messages to unsuspecting bloggers.
• Lastly you jumped on the content marketing bandwagon by publishing more and better content than the keyword-stuffed gibberish you did earlier just to get hated by real content marketers who have done that for a decade.

You are still an SEO.

Everybody still considers SEO a dirty word though so you may have decided to quit SEO as a belated April Fools joke.

There is one problem remaining though. How to call yourself now? All the marketing terms are already used by real marketers with university degrees in marketing and 30 years of experience. Words everybody understands like findability do not sell incredibly expensive SEO services as they don't sound enough like magic. So what now? You need a new acronym. Also you need an acronym that is positive and doesn't have the bad rep of SEO.

I have repurposed a few common acronyms with a positive or ironic vibe that could readily replace SEO, here are the best ones:

1. LOL (love of links)
2. ROFL (relationship optimization for links)
3. UFO (user findability optimization)
4. SEX (search engine experimentation)
5. COMA (content marketing)
6. people oriented optimization - POO
7. OMG as in Online MarketinG

I understand that it will be difficult to rank for those as they get used by average people for different meanings but who cares? After all we're SEOs! We will optimize our sites and get tons of links and ultimately outrank all the other sites.

I just wonder which of these ideas is really the best one. Which one do you prefer? Personally I tend to focus on people oriented optimization as that's what SEO 2.0 is about in its core. I guess some people think that acronym stinks though!

* Creative Commons image by Alex Cockroach.

Simplicity is the ultimate (form of) sophistication - Leonardo da Vinci

When it comes to design or self improvement - two topics I follow in my free time - simplicity is widely accepted as the path to success. When it comes to blogs, social media or search many people still tend to overlook it.

Just think of the biggest successes in all three areas:

1. When Google introduced the clean and simple search box homepage instead of the cluttered portals of the 20th century they had an amazing success. Of course many aspects fuelled it, the better results, the young sympathetic team, the playful corporate culture etc. Nonetheless the simplicity in web design or UX as we call it today played a major role.
2. On social media one of the most successful sites, Twitter has been made what it is today by its super simple approach to publishing. The limit of characters and lack of features was exactly why everybody started using it.
3. You may call it a social network but I consider it a blog platform: Tumblr made blogging simple again and took over myriads of users from WordPress and Blogger. Additionally they got high numbers of users from Facebook and other social sites. These people were not even into blogging.

OK, I hear you saying "yes, but these are huge corporations, I'm just an average business person". How does simplicity work on blogs, social media & search to make real life business owners without millions in venture capital succeed? I could offer you examples of people that have succeed by simplifying. One is enough though.

Zen Habits is probably the best example of success through simplicity.

The author has a hugely popular blog with a "million+" readers. Every article of his gets re/tweeted hundreds of times at least:

While he treats SEO with disdain and isn't optimizing for any major keyphrases like

• [self help]
• [personal development]
• [life hacks]

he nonetheless ranks on top for most of his current articles, e.g, he wrote one on calmness two months ago and is #4 on Google for the term outranked only by Wikipedia and two dictionaries:

I read a lot of other self improvement blogs by authors who are even more sympathetic but none of them has a similarly big audience.

So what do the other self improvement bloggers wrong?

• They have shiny interfaces with lots of colors and images.
• They push their latest ebooks on their blogs.
• They have very long and sensationalist post headlines.
• They have lots of guest posters from other blogs.
• They display lots of social media buttons everywhere.

Now you wonder: are these things really wrong? Aren't everybody and their aunt suggesting them? Haven't I suggested myself to do some of these? Well, apparently adding more and more, be it features or items or authors or whatever isn't always the best solution.

The people of our age are bombarded non-stop with messages, things and offers.

Do not force even more down their throats. Try it with less.

1. fewer features
2. less clutter
3. shorter headlines

without that many "long tail" keywords. I have even banned Google here on my blog to be able to return to a less Google-begging writing style.  I don't have visible social media buttons. I don't ask you to buy my ebook. That's why my readers are returning. Some of them are with me for 6 years now.

* "What is simplicity" poster by Paweł Kadysz.

Are links unnatural or even dangerous like some SEO experts repeat after Google? The Web is built upon so called hypertext. Why is it hyper? It's not because of all the hypes we witness on the Internet. The hyper-aspect stems from hyperlinks.

Before the Internet you could only publish and read in a linear way. As a reader you would start at page 1 and read on. Of course you could read the end of the book right at the start. I did in school when we had to tell the teacher how a book we had to read ended. You could even read page 50, then page 1 and then again page 100.

In the print era most people would start at the beginning and finish reading at the end.

Newspaper readers would read just the few articles they liked, skip the ads and look up the weather report right away. Some people would even read more than one newspaper or book at a time, read this one a bit and then the other one.

When hypertext arrived, that is text containing links to other texts linear reading became a thing of the past.

On the WWW you can open up a wormwhole-like hyper-channel from inside a text and land on another text in real time despite it being an a different server at the other end of the world. The really revolutionary thing about the Internet is not the "series of tubes" it consists of according to a popular anecdote. It's not that you can view cute cat images or receive tons of spam in your inbox.

The most important aspect of the Web is the hyperlink.

In reality the Web is just part of the Internet, I use the phrases interchangeably here for the sake of simplification. For example email is not part of the Web, it uses the Internet though. The Web is defined by hypertext. Without hypertext aka links there is no Web. There is just a collection of documents that aren't connected.

The nature of the Web is free and egalitarian. In theory everybody can publish and link to others. Of course the early Web was still a bit difficult to publish on. I tried in 1997 for the first time. It was easy in a way (I handcoded my first webpage in Windows Notepad). I was a student in college sitting on a dead slow clumsy computer. I could publish to the whole world with just a few keystrokes. That was an amazing feeling. I was really about equality and opportunity. My university allowed me and other students to publish for free on their webspace.

A few years later Google appeared and decided that equality is inherently a bad thing for their business model.

So they created PageRank. It's name stems from Larry Page (not the Web "page" like you might think). So Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided that some sites and links are more equal than others. While the technology behind each link is the same one link is more valuable than the other. They created a meritocracy based on the number and authority of links. A link from the NYT would count more than one from my free DIY college page.

While Google became the dominant search engine for analyzing hypertext instead of simply counting words like the older search engines many people noticed that links are a currency by themselves.

Then the big link trade began and it still takes place. Now that links are not created equal anymore you can also trade or buy them. Some link are worth more than others. Some links would be sold from thousands of dollars even.

Still links are pretty egalitarian to this day. Anybody can still link to anybody else. Links can be automated and there is even some level of anonymity when you link to someone or someone links to you. There is no name or image attached to a link. In the early days of the Internet most governments and conservative pundits were scaring people that the Web is mostly about guides on how to build bombs, child molesters and Nazi propaganda.

There were many attempts to make links illegal. For example in Germany you assume responsibility the minute you link out to a site, you can even get sued when somewhere on that site you link to illegal material appears. So people are scared of linking out. Many use bizarre disclaimers that are meant to protect them in case they link to something of questionable legal status but those won't help in most cases. You'll have to fight in court despite of them.

Google now tries a similar strategy:  for years the common Google speak was to call links they don't like "dodgy links". In recent years they dubbed those link "unnatural". The next step is already on the way: it seems links are now dangerous. Of course not all links, just some links, those over-optimized ones, the ones just built for SEO reasons. Guess what average people will remember after reading such an articles? Exactly: "dangerous links". They want be able to really remember which links exactly are dangerous. They will get even more cautious when linking out or even allowing incoming links.

For years many newspapers sites have been ridiculed by Web-savvy webmaster for forbidding linking to their sites in their TOS.

Already most people get link removal request from all sorts of webmasters and their Indian outsourcing SEO service providers. Now that links can be dangerous this situation will worsen. Don't fret though! Google has already the solution. They are building their own secure proprietary Web for us. It's called Google+, Google+1 Google authorship etc. They might come up with a new name. What they want is what their competition from Microsoft, Apple and Facebook already has: a closed walled garden type of ecosystem they control and wherein they can trap users.

Google already tries to force you on YouTube to use your real name. Each time I want to comment they ask the same question again. I can't say no, then they ask again without giving me a clear choice of saying no. Only reloading the page will help. On Google+ most people use real names or nicknames you can easily identify which aren't anonymous.

Links, aka hyperlinks aka hypertext are dangerous? Why? It's because no single company can control them.

That's why Google wants to replace them with proprietary metrics and connections. The first step in doing so is convincing people that free and neutral link are dangerous for them. Once they stop using them the "better" Google alternative will solve the problem. The strategy is so apparent I wonder why nobody is talking about it. Prepare for the forced Google+ activity and "AuthorRank" dystopia. Google will protect us from dangerous links by creating their own Web.

* Creative Commons image by Andrew Barclay.

This post is not about killing cute animals. In search a Panda and a Penguin are different types of Google updates or rather penalties. In case you own a website or two I will help you deal with those later on the post.

When I first started collecting material about SEO 2.0 and what it might be about I had no real idea on my mind yet. It was just a set of techniques I recognized as the new SEO vs the old one.

Over the years it became more and more clear that SEO 2.0 is about people.

Now isn't that what Google told us all long you might ask? Didn't they always preach to optimize for searchers not search engines? Yes, they did, but that's not SEO 2.0 yet. That's what Google wants from us, give Google all your great content for free to monetize etc. People out there do not want to read dozens of essay-like articles on SEO each day.

People want quick fixes. People don't want to read the history of the Panda and Penguin updates in 10 chapters

they want to get right down to the nitty-gritty and get straightforward actionable advice. People out there want get the 5 step plan to for your Google Panda and Penguin issues. You just need to compare the numbers of what gets shared from your blog with what your subscribers read. Your returning visitors really care about your writings and really read your advice. People who share may not. I often share stuff that I don't use myself because I know that it rocks and that other people can make use of it.

Your real audience, the actual people who will follow your advice are often NOT the people who share your content on the Web.

These people are far too busy studying your advice and attempting to follow it. Some of them may comment when they stumble while trying. The sharing happens elsewhere. That's not the main topic today. Today I will devise the 5 step plan to deal with a Panda and Penguin penalty.

I've seen and worked on sites hit by both Panda and Penguin penalties and I even mean sites hit by both updates, first Panda and then also Penguin. So let's start with the simple 5 step plan to kill Pandas and then take a look at the Penguin plan below.

BTW: the plan itself is simple the things you have to do are not, they are pretty tedious and require both time and effort. Ideally you also have someone with the expertise to implement that plan.

Killing Pandas

Step 1:

Review every single piece of content on your site. In case you don't know what content is or don't have it at all provide content. Nowadays you have to. Delete completely outdated articles. Enrich shallow articles (add resources, images, expert opinions, outgoing links, a stance). Fix and update the remaining articles, check outbound links, whether what you've written still applies.

Step 2:

Provide new quality content from industry experts or at least gifted writers. I have written numerous postings on what quality, killer or flagship content is, so please peruse my blog and use the search box.

Step 3:

Check your site for duplicate content both onsite and off. Are other sites ranking with your content? Just search for your headlines to find out. In case they do, fight the copycats with take down requests and make sure your content gets recognized as the original source by using XML sitemaps, authorship markup, sharing content right after publication while postponing the publication of your RSS feed for half an hour so that scrapers don't get it first.

Are you indexed with the same content more than once on Google? Check by using the "site: " search on Google. Make sure that there is just one URL per content piece. Clean your URLs. Something like site.com/content.php and site.com/content.php?ref=x can already lead to duplicate content issues.

Step 4:

Change your business model from providing cheap keyword-rich fodder for search engines to providing valuable insights and resources for people. I know it's difficult. I had to ban Google search on this blog right here to learn it again.

Step 5:

Be human. When writing use metaphors and real language not just keyword gibberish. Practice social networking with real people, don't just exchange links. Link out (low quality sites do not link out to others). I could go on, but my blog is full of such techniques so just read my other articles on improving your site so that people love it.

Killing Penguins

Step 1:

Check every single link that leads to your site. Does it have artificial anchor text like [best seo company india]? Do you have site-wide links from domains that link to you thousands of times because of this? Do people link to you in their footers? Do sites link to you as partners or sponsors without using a nofollow "link condom"? Do you have bought one of those miraculous "SEO services" promising 10k comment links for 19$? Do low quality, ugly, empty, outdated sites link to you? Remove, fix, disavow all the links that look strange.

Step 2:

Brand yourself and your links. Make sure that people know your name, brand name and the names of your products. Make them use those names. Just look up how people link to Amazon (hint: amazon amazon.com, www.amazon.com are the most common anchor texts).

Step 3:

Provide incentives for people to link to you of their own accord. Blog regularly. Create flagship content people would like to share. Make something happen and write about it or let others spread the word. This might be charity or a give away or a real life event.

Step 4:

Reach out to people. Provide customer service on social media. Answer questions on social media sites. Be helpful. No man is an island. Connect with like-minded individuals and businesses, they are not your competitors. They are your colleagues. Share their content. Compliment them on their achievements. Ask them for their opinions. Publish articles about your colleagues, by them or featuring them. Make sure you get recognized in your area, niche or industry.

Step 5:

Become an avid community member. Join a forum, a niche social news site, a trade association. Meet your peers in real life. Use your real name and brand wherever you can. Make yourself an ambassador for your business. In case you don't know how, learn from Lee Odden.

As you see some of the techniques are more or less the same to fight both Pandas and Penguins. Also done right they will make you popular among people. Ideally the people will flock to your site directly instead of by proxy of using the search box in Google. Than you have succeeded. Make sure not to kill people along the way though.

Some people will brag how big experts they are, they will make others in their industry look stupid, they will bash things and other people, they will create attention bombs to become well known over night.

You don't want to gain notoriety, you want to collect true fans and brand evangelists. You don't need huge traffic, you need real dedicated people to visit you. Implement quick fixes but don't go after quick wins. SEO 2.0 is a marathon not a sprint.

* Creative Commons image by Martin Fish.

Last week the number one topic on the Internet was not the new pope it seems, it was the demise of Google Reader. Mostly geeks know what Reader was about and used it so average people probably won't notice. Still

Google Reader was a service millions of people used and even relied on. For them it was something of a shock.

While most former Google Reader users were frantically looking for alternatives and finding mostly other volatile online services, even the likes of Digg (itself an almost dead venture) appeared on the scene to get some of the attention wave the topic resulted in.

Some pundits suggested that Feedburner is most probably the next on the list as Google neglects it for years by now. Some voices among SEO professionals are even more cautious. For example editor in chief of Search Engine People, the #1 Canadian SEO blog suggests not to get too fond of Gmail for example.

Why did Google kill Reader? There is a lot of speculation. The official reason is that the interest in RSS and Google Reader is dwindling. This is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy as Google has been abandoning the open RSS standard step by step over the years

Instead Google is focusing on its closed "walled garden" type of network - Google+.

Most of the sharing features from Google Reader have been moved over to Google+ a few months earlier effectively making it far less useful. Even the man-power needed to maintain Reader was not there anymore. The engineers have been relocated to the Google+ team as well.

So the "declining" interest in Google Reader was part of a larger plan or strategy.

Google Reader was never making any money anyway. Google is an advertising company as economists say. They make money by placing ads in front or around search results, on third party websites, on their won services like Google shopping search (where you have to pay to get included). For many lucrative industries like e-commerce or travel Google already dominates its own search results by replacing them almost completely in the visible area with ads and so called paid inclusion (hidden ads).

Search is declining these days as well, or maybe it's juts stagnating or not growing. People spend ore time on social media instead.

The market is saturated and Google can't earn much more by using conventional ads. Google attempts to open up new revenue sources where it can. They try to grab new markets. They are into software, hardware, mobile, social - you name it. They establish monopoles wherever they can. Once they dominate a market they can start charging money for usage a people have no alternatives anymore.

• With each new search algorithm update millions of sites that previously did everything right in Google's eyes get downgraded or downright penalized. They disappear into obscurity.
• In industries where Google enters the market the competition is doomed anyway.
• Even publishers all over the world have to fight Google because it robs them of revenue by making people go to to Google news instead.

It's about time to cut out the middleman before he cuts you.

Your site might get penalized for no apparent reason any day. Google might take over your whole market by adding the same product you sell for free until all competition is bankrupt. Google might even discontinue search as we know it and offer paid results instead. Many people who click their ads right now don't even know these are ads and not real unpaid search results.

Or Google might decide to let you pay for their services. Either they will charge webmasters to get included in their index or they will ask users to pay them to use search. Of course thy will call it something else, like a registration fee for Google Webmaster tools for example. Or they will offer you an ad free Google search version when you pay.

Google is a not a library. It's a giant corporation out there to make money.

It's not a question whether they will discontinue other services. The question is when will Google "sunset" search and move on to greener pastures? Will you be prepared or shocked? I'm already training for the time after Google.

More resources on the Google Reader death and its ramifications:

1. Closing Google Reader Sucks For Me, But Is Dangerous For Google
2. Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees: we'll all be worse off
3. Former Google Reader product manager confirms our suspicions: Its demise is all about Google+ - The Next Web
4. Why is Google killing Google Reader?
5. Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense
6. Google Reader joins graveyard of dead Google products - Slate Magazine
7. Building online assets that Google can't take away - 3 Door Digital
8. Dreams, discernment, and Google Reader | massless
9. How Google Reader's Overhaul Betrayed and Irked Its Most Passionate Users – ReadWrite

* Creative Commons image by Thomas Hawk

As I am probably not the only one to look for an RSS reader I decided to share my list of those I think are the best ones.

Most people until 2013 used Google Reader for RSS (and Atom) feeds but then Google decided to shut it down.

I listed it here originally in my list of the best free cross-platform RSS readers (also referred to as feedreaders by many) along with alternatives. Cross platform means they work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

• 3 of the best RSS readers are open source software, two of them are based on the Java programming language, that's why they work on all operating systems.
• 1 of them is a Firefox extension (add ons) and works on all systems as Firefox itself is cross platform
• 2 of them are web based feed readers. It means they work in your browser like any website.
• 1 is a mail client that can also be used for feeds.

So here is the list, the standalone desktop programs first:

1. RSSOwl - Probably the most popular free open source RSS reader, nice clean interface, supports dozens of languages
2. BlogBridge - Simple, browser-like interface, also open source and quite popular newsreader
3. BottomFeeder - It's a complex open source RSS reader for the power user
4. Sage - Sage is by now an established Firefox Add on for RSS. It's been very simple and easy to use
5. Feedly - Feedly, a newer RSS Firefox extension offers a magazine like display of your feeds thus adapts to your natural reading habits. Originally it required Google Reader, not anymore!
   
6. Google Reader - AJAX enhanced and most popular web based RSS reader, using the typical Google colors and fonts. Allows easy sharing of items
7. Netvibes - Netvibes is more a web based starting page than a stand alone RSS reader but you can use it like one, you can share items too
8. Thunderbird - The popular mail client by the Mozilla Foundation, the makers of Firefox, can also be used as an RSS reader. Reading news like this saves time but can also be distracting.

Are newsreaders, feed readers, Atom and RSS readers the same? Yes and no, I prefer the term RSS reader even though they also support Atom feeds (just another RSS-like format) because there is an RSS Reader software called Feedreader. I do not want you to mix them up.

I did not include Feedreader here as it only works on Windows and Linux while the online version is only rudimentary.

"Newsreader" might refer to the so called Usenet, a part of the Internet that came before the Web and still is used by some people. Usenet newsgroup readers are not the same as RSS newsreaders.

Originally published: September 27th, 2007. Last updated: March 14th, 2013.

* Creative Commons image by Lorrie McClanahan.

Google recently released an "interactive infographic" titled "how search works". I ignored it until Barry Schwartz convinced me to take a second look. The infographic starts with the number of "30 trillion individual pages" Google has in its index.

Later on in the infographic another number is mentioned: 0.22% of all domains in the Google index have been subject to a manual penalty.

Remember that Google also employs algorithmic aka automated penalties which are much more common. Anyway, I was intrigued by this "small" number. You know there are a lot of proverbs that say you can prove anything by making up or tweaking a statistic.

At first I was a bit overwhelmed. I tried to count how much 0.22% of 30 trillion is. I asked other people and even they were unable to really help me.

Finally today I asked Google search itself and the answer was 66,000,000,000 or 66 billion.

There is a problem with that number though. We know how many "individual pages" Google indexes but not how many "domains" they penalize manually. Assuming that a domain can have dozens, thousands or even millions of pages (think WordPress.com) we can't be sure how to divide that number.

As far as I know Google does not disclose how many domains they index. Let's assume for simplicity's sake that they index "only" one trillion domains (the assumption would be that a domain has a median number of 30 pages).

Now let's assume that one trillion is 1000 billion and one billion is 1000 million. Then let's just take 0.22% out of that. It's still 22 billion sites that have been manually "marked a spam" by real people, so called Google quality raters.

I have to admit that I am so shocked and awed by these numbers that this post is still probably wildly inaccurate. So I hope Google will come forth and clarify how many billions of sites or domains have been penalized. Yeah, I know that a domain can house more than one site. That's why these "individual pages" vs "domains" numbers are pretty useless and difficult to compare. How many sites have been actually affected by manual penalties or "manual action" in the Google jargon?

Are there billions of sites manually penalized by Google? How many more have been subject to algorithmic penalties and updates?

Are you one of the billions of people affected? Tell your story in the comments. I have been myself the victim of several penalties either on my own site or on client sites despite being known as one of the most ethical SEO specialists around.