Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
ProBlogger Challenge: Create a Pinterest Persona
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Our big annual March Madness tourney for SEOs and online marketers around the world is open again! It’s time for SEO Madness 2013! As always, we’re using Yahoo’s tourney pick-em game to run our SEO Madness group, so you’ll need a Yahoo account to play. If you’re ready to go, the group details are below: Link to sign-up: http://y.ahoo.it/2Vk0TYsX Password: clickhere The games on Tuesday don’t count, so you have …Read More
This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
SEO Madness 2013 is On! Sign Up Now
Web Designers, Agencies, & Marketing Firms:
Work with us to deliver the best local search results for your clients and earn commissions.
Expert, accurate, U.S.-based team will claim, verify and enhance your client's business listings and more.
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Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/seo-madness-2013-is-on-sign-up-now/7073/
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Source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/03/the-beal-deal-with-dharmesh-shah-dharmesh.html
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How to Get Authority Sites to Notice You
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/quantumseolabs/~3/Kza072AVwwY/
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How to Write the Perfect Headline
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How to estimate Facebook advertising budget
Related posts:Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seoptimise/~3/fgkV5cdlLvA/how-to-estimate-facebook-budget.html
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Following my article about paywalls, a reader raised a point about ?Tribes?. I?m paraphrasing the ensuing conversation we had, but I think it could be summarised as:
You?re wrong! The way to succeed on the internet is to build a tribe! Give your content away to the tribe! Grow the tribe!
An internet tribe is ?an unofficial community of people who share a common interest, and usually who are loosely affiliated with each other through social media or other internet mechanisms?.
The use of the term dates back to 2003. More recently, Seth Godin wrote a book on the topic. As did Patrick Hanlon. A tribe could be characterized as a special interest group, a demographic, or a group of people interested in the same thing - plus internet.
So, is cultivating a tribe by giving everything away for free a better approach than locking information behind a paywall? If we lock some information away behind a paywall, does that mean we can?t build a tribe? BTW: I'm not suggesting Seth or Patrick assert such things, these issues came out of the conversation I had with the reader.
People don't have to build a paywall in order to be successful. Or build a tribe in order to be successful. Either approach could be totally the wrong thing to do.
If anyone found the article on paywalls confusing, then hopefully I can clarify. The article about paywalls was an exploration. We looked at the merits, and pitfalls, involved.
Paywalls, like tribes, will not work for everyone. I suspect most people would agree that there is no ?One True System? when it comes to internet marketing, which is why we write about a wide range of marketing ideas. Each idea is a tool people could use, depending on their goals and circumstances, but certainly not proposed as being one-size-fits all. In any case, having a paywall does not mean one cannot build a tribe. The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
People may also recall The Well, the mother of all internet tribes. This tribe didn't lead to profit for owners Salon. It was eventually sold it to it's own users for a song. Salon, the parent company, has never been profitable. They have also tried various paywall models and free content models, although I think some of the free content looks very eHow: Driven by Demand Media.
With that in mind, let?s take a look at tribes and how to decide if a certain marketing approach is right for you.
"Cultivating a tribe" is a strategy.
Will everyone win using this strategy?
No.
Like any strategy, it should be justified by the business case. The idea behind tribes is that you form a group of people with similar interests, and then lead that group, and then, given appropriate and effective leadership, people help spread your message far and wide, grow the tribe, and eventually you will make money from them.
There is nothing wrong with this approach, and it works well for some businesses. However, like any marketing strategy, there is overhead involved. There is also an opportunity cost involved. And just like any marketing strategy, the success of the strategy should be measured in terms of return on investment. Is the cost of building, growing and maintaining a tribe lower than the return derived from it?
If not, then it fails.
During the conversation I had with the reader, it was intimated that if someone can?t make money from a tribe, then it?s their own fault. After all, if someone can get a lot of people together by giving away their content, then money naturally follows, right?
The idea that profit is the natural result of building an audience resulted in the dot.com crash of 2000.
Many web companies at that time focused on building an audience first and worried about how it was all going to pay off later. Webvan, Pets.com, boo.com, and many of the rest didn?t suffer from lack of awareness, but from a lack of a sound business case and from a failure to execute.
We?ve had digital tribes, in various forms, since the beginning of the internet. Actually, they predate the internet . One early example of a digital tribe was the BBSs, a dial-in community. These tribes were replaced by internet forums and places, such as The Well.
Many internet forums don?t make a great deal of money. Many are run for fun at break-even, or a loss. Some make a lot of money. Whether they make a loss, a little money or a lot of money depends not on the existence of the tribe that surrounds them, as they all have tribes, but on the underlying business model.
Does the tribe translate into enough business activity in order to be profitable? How much is a large tribe of social-media aficionados interested in ?free stuff? worth? More than a small demographic of Facebook-challenged people interested in high margin services? Creating a tribe to help target the latter group might possibly work, but there are probably better approaches to take.
Does SEOBook.com have a ?tribe?? Should we always be looking to ?grow the tribe??
We don?t tend to characterize our approach in terms of tribes. At SEOBook.com, we do a lot of things to maintain a particular focus. We tend to write long, in-depth pieces on topics we hope people find interesting as opposed to chasing keyword terms. We don?t run an endless series of posts on optimizing meta tags. We don?t cover every tiny bit of search news. We focus almost exclusively on the needs of the intermediate-to-expert search professional. We could do many things to ?grow the tribe?, but that would run counter to our objectives. It would dilute the offering. We could have a "free trial" but the noise it would create in our member forums would lower the value of the forums to existing community members.
We do offer some free tools available to everyone, but when it comes to the paid parts of the site we leave it up to individuals to decide if they think they're a good fit for our community. If a person has issues with the site before becoming a paid member, we doubt they would ever becoming a long-lasting community member, so our customer service to people who have not yet become customers is effectively nil. In short, we don?t want to run the hamster treadmill of managing a huge tribe when it doesn?t support the business case.
Tribes can help spread the word. People tell people something, and they tell people, and the audience grows and grows.
They?re great for political groups, movements, consultants, charities, and any endeavour with a strong social focus. They tend to suit sectors where the people in that sector spend a lot of time ?living digitally?.
As a marketing approach, building tribes is well-suited to the charismatic, relentless self-promoter. A lot of tribes tend to orient around such individuals.
Not everyone can be a leader. Not everyone has got the time to be a relentless self-promoter and the time spent undertaking such activity can present a high opportunity cost if that?s not how your target market rolls. Perhaps a relentless focus on PPC, or SEO, or another channel will pay higher dividends.
There is also an ever-growing noise level in the social media channels, but the attention level remains relatively constant. The medium is forever being squeezed. Is blogging/facebooking/tweeting all day with the aim of building a tribe really a useful thing to be doing? Only metrics can tell us that, so make sure you monitor ?em!
To build a big tribe in any competitive space takes serious work and it takes a long time. Many people will fail using that approach. Not only are some people not cut out to lead, the numbers don?t work if everyone used this method. If everyone who led a tribe also followed hundreds of other people leading their own tribes, then there simply aren?t enough hours in the day to get anything else done.
It will not be an efficient marketing approach for many.
I know of a company that just got bought out for a few million.
Sounds great, right. However, I know they carry a lot of debt and their business model puts them on a downward trajectory. This site has a massive ?tribe?. This site is number one in their niche. People tweet, Facebook, follow them, sing their praises, they engage up, down, left, right and center. They?ve got the internet tribe thing down pat, and their tribe buys their stuff.
One problem.
The business is based on low prices. The tribe is fixated on ?getting a great price?. This business is vulnerable to competitors as that tribes loyalty, that took so long to build, is based on price - which is no loyalty at all. Perhaps they achieved their exit strategy, and did what they needed to do, but growing a massive and active internet tribe didn't prevent them being swallowed by a larger competitor. The larger competitor doesn't really have a tribe, but focuses on traditional channels.
Without getting the fundamentals right, a tribe, or any other marketing strategy, is unlikely to pay off. The danger in listening to gurus is they can be fadish. There is money in evangelizing the bright, shiny new marketing idea that sounds really good.
But beware of placing the cart before the horse. Marketing is a numbers game that comes down to ROI. Does building the tribe make enough money to justify serving the tribe?
Having followers is no bad thing. Just makes sure they?re the right followers, for the right reasons, and acquiring them supports a sound business case :)
Source: http://www.seobook.com/tribes-it-depends
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We’ve been hard at work here at Yoast.com, together with our good friend Arjan Snaterse, to complete the delivery of our next baby: the Local SEO plugin, which is, just like our Video SEO plugin, an extension to the WordPress SEO plugin. The Local SEO makes creating geo sitemaps and KML files a breeze, while…
Local SEO made easy! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/hGXAJczh0GQ/
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Google’s bias for their own services has many people rethinking their SEO strategies. It even begs the question of whether SEO is still worth the effort.
Despite the seemingly disheartening future of SEO, I share the opinion of many who …
Social Media: The Key to Surviving the Evolving SEO World was originally posted on the Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by Gary Cottam.
You can connect with Gary on Google+, on Twitter @garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about Doublespark SEO or Doublespark Web Design.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/phoenixrealm/UynW/~3/NrSG5Sp9JeQ/
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Poor quality link building, also known as black hat SEO, involves numerous forms of spamming and is designed to artificially inflate a website’s search engine rankings. White hate SEO, on the other hand, focuses on …
From the top of Google to a black hole ? the dangers of poor link building was originally posted on the Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by Gary Cottam.
You can connect with Gary on Google+, on Twitter @garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about Doublespark SEO or Doublespark Web Design.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/phoenixrealm/UynW/~3/DrtEp3JoFBQ/
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Internet content is becoming a trickier force to deal with. The number of websites, blogs, and links all over the web make it difficult to sift through and gain accurate information on the subjects you are after. Content generating companies …
Google Panda Update & Penguin MK2 was originally posted on the Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by Gary Cottam.
You can connect with Gary on Google+, on Twitter @garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about Doublespark SEO or Doublespark Web Design.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/phoenixrealm/UynW/~3/MfNfKzTs4iY/
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Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
7 Simple Steps to Writing Great ‘How To’ Content on Your Blog
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/wvvlaj3F6sk/
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Growing search marketshare is hard work. At a recent investor conference Marissa Mayer stated that: "The key pieces are around the underpinnings of the alliance themselves. The point is, we collectively want to grow share, rather than trading share with each other."
Part of the reason Yahoo! & Bing struggle to gain marketshare is Google's default search placement payments to Mozilla and Apple. If the associated browsers have nearly 1/3 the market & Chrome is another 1/3 of the market then it requires Yahoo! or Bing to be vastly better than Google to break the Google habit + default search placement purchases.
Danny reported some interesting comments from Nikesh Arora:
A friend sent me a screenshot where he was surprised how similar the results looked between Bing & Google.
If Bing looks too different it feels out of place, if it looks to similar it doesn't feel memorable. And if Google is optimized for revenue generation then Bing is going to have a fairly similar look & feel to their results if they want to earn enough to bid on partnerships.
Another factor helping Google maintain their dominance in search marketshare is the shift of search query mix to mobile, where Google has a 95.8% marketshare.
Mobile search has a significantly higher CTR than desktop search, due in large part to there being less screen real estate. By the end of this year tablets will likely account for 20% of Google's search ad clicks & drive $5 billion in ad revenues. Add in mobile phones with tablets & mobile search will drive 1/3 of paid search clicks by the end of this year.
With mobile becoming such a huge share of search clicks Google is forcing advertisers into buying all platforms with their ad purchase via their enhanced AdWords campaigns. Google builds off that sort of dominance & Yahoo! is only making about $125 million a year in total revenue from Yahoo!'s mobile traffic.
Yahoo! also buys ads on some smaller ad networks & sends those through to a search result with almost no organic results.
Yahoo! has had a long history of search arbitrage, but they typically did it through a partner network which lowered click value. That was part of what lowered their click prices & made them sign the deal with Microsoft (you couldn't even opt out of Yahoo!'s partner syndication until after they signed the deal with Microsoft).
I recently saw the above ad for Bing which highlighted how they want to work with brands, but Bing still has a number of issues they are dealing with on the monetization front: tighter broad matching, smaller ad ecosystem, regional issues with ad targeting, and no serious effort to develop a contextual ad program open to the long tail of publishers. In spite of those issues, the Yahoo! / Bing ad network was finally starting to build a critical mass & Yahoo! responded by signing a deal to carry Google's contextual AdSense ads.
As Google continues to layer contextual search layers into mobile devices, launch their own physical stores, layer their social network into the search ecosystem, expand their venture investments, inserts themselves at an ISP level, shape the news, control a greater share of ad budget with programmatic bidding, control measurements of success, redefine words, scrape-n-displace publishers with the knowledge graph, de-fund competitors, & hyper-target ads at users, their leverage & market dominance will only grow.
Google is great at growing the search pie.
Yahoo!, not so much. ;)
Source: http://www.seobook.com/growing-search-pie
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Our Top 5 Predictions Regarding SEO in 2013
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
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Can You Rank High in Google Using Just Social Signals?
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
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As we’re now running a plugin shop here on yoast.com, selling our Video SEO plugin, Tag optimizer and soon more, we also have a checkout page. I wanted that checkout page to run on https, for obvious reasons: people fill out their email and, depending on their payment method, their credit card details there. That…
WordPress SSL setup tips & tricks is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/UJSqyG-mFAg/
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Due to heavy lobbying, the FTC's investigation into Google's business practices has ended with few marks or bruises on Google's behalf. If the EU has similar results, you can count on Google growing more anti-competitive in their practices:
Google is flat-out lying. They?ve modified their code to break Google Maps on Windows Phones. It worked before, but with the ?redirect,? it no longer works.
We are only a couple days into the new year, but there have already been numerous absurdities highlighted, in addition to the FTC decision & Google blocking Windows Phones.
Don't ask Larry Page:
Mr. Page, the CEO, about a year ago pushed the idea of requiring Google users to sign on to their Google+ accounts simply to view reviews of businesses, the people say. Google executives persuaded him not to pursue that strategy, fearing it would irritate Google search users, the people say.
...
Links to Google+ also appear in Google search-engine results involving people and brands that have set up a Google+ account.
Other websites can't hardcode their own listings into the search results. But anyone who widely attempted showing things to Googlebot while cloaking them to users would stand a good chance of being penalized for their spam. They would risk both a manual intervention & being hit by Panda based on poor engagement metrics.
Recall that a big portion of the complaint about Google's business practices was their scrape-n-displace modus operandi. As part of the FTC agreement, companies are able to opt out of being scraped into some of Google's vertical offerings, but that still doesn't prevent their content from making its way into the knowledge graph.
Now that Google is no longer free to scrape-n-displace competitors, apparently the parallel Google version of that type of content that should be "free and open to all to improve user experience" (when owned by a 3rd party) is a premium feature locked behind a registration wall (when owned by Google). There is a teaser for the cloaked information in the SERPs, & you are officially invited to sign into Google & join Google+ if you would like to view more.
Information wants to be free.
Unless it is Google's.
Then users want to be tracked and monetized.
A few years back Google gave themselves a pat on the back for ending relationships with "approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods."
How the problem grew to that scale before being addressed went unasked.
Last year Google announced a relevancy signal based on DMCA complaints (while exempting YouTube) & even nuked an AdSense publisher for linking to a torrent of his own ebook. Google sees a stray link, makes a presumption. If they are wrong and you have access to media channels then the issue might get fixed. But if you lack the ability to get coverage, you're toast.
Years ago a study highlighted how Google's AdSense & DoubleClick were the monetization engine for stolen content. Recently some USC researchers came to the same conclusion by looking at Google's list of domains that saw the most DMCA requests against them. Upon hearing of the recent study, Google's shady public relations team stated:
"To the extent [the study] suggests that Google ads are a major source of funds for major pirate sites, we believe it is mistaken," a Google spokesperson said. "Over the past several years, we've taken a leadership role in this fight. The complexity of online advertising has led some to conclude, incorrectly, that the mere presence of any Google code on a site means financial support from Google."
So Google intentionally avails their infrastructure to people they believe are engaged in criminal conduct (based on their own 50,000,000+ "valid" DMCA findings) and yet Google claims to have zero responsibility for those actions because Google may, in some cases, not get a direct taste in the revenues (only benefiting indirectly through increasing the operating costs of running a publishing business that is not partnered with Google).
A smaller company engaged in a similar operation might end up getting charged for the conduct of their partners. However, when Google's ad code is in the page you are wrong to assume any relationship.
The above linked LA Times article also had the following quote in it:
"When our ads were running unbeknownst to us on these pirate sites, we had a serious problem with that," said Gareth Hornberger, senior manager of global digital marketing for Levi's. "We reached out to our global ad agency of record, OMD, and immediately had them remove them.... We made a point, moving forward, that we really need to take steps to avoid having these problems again."
Through Google's reality warping efforts the ad network, the ad agency, the publisher, and the advertiser are all entirely unaccountable for their own efforts & revenue streams. And it is not like Google or the large ad agencies lack the resources to deal with these issues, as there is some serious cash in these types of deals: "WPP, Google's largest customer, increased its spending on Google by 25% in 2012, to about $2 billion."
These multi-billion Dollar budgets are insufficient funds to police the associated activities. Whenever anything is mentioned in the media, mention system complexity & other forms of plausible deniability. When that falls short, outsource the blame onto a contractor, service provider, or rogue partner. Contrasting that behavior, the common peasant webmaster must proactively monitor the rest of the web to ensure he stays in the graces of his Lord Google.
You have to police your user generated content, or you risk your site being scored as spam. With that in mind, many big companies are now filing false DMCA takedown requests. Sites that receive DMCA complaints need to address them or risk being penalized. Businesses that send out bogus DMCA requests have no repercussions (until they are eventually hit with a class action lawsuit).
Remember how a while back Google mentioned their sophisticated duplication detection technology in YouTube?
There are over a million full movies on YouTube, according to YouTube!
The other thing that is outrageous is that if someone takes a video that is already on YouTube & re-uploads it again, Google will sometimes outrank the original video with the spam shag-n-republish.
In the below search result you can see that our video (the one with the Excel spreadsheet open) is listed in the SERPs 3 times.
The version we uploaded has over a quarter million views, but ranks below the spam syndication version with under 100 views.
There are only 3 ways to describe how the above can happen:
I realize I could DMCA them, but why should I have to bear that additional cost when Google allegedly automatically solved this problem years ago?
Unlike sacrosanct ad code, if someone points spam links at your site, you are responsible for cleaning it up. The absurdity of this contrast is only further highlighted by the post Google did about cleaning up spam links, where one of the examples they highlighted publicly as link spam was not a person's spam efforts, but rather a competitor's sabotage efforts that worked so well that they were even publicly cited as being outrageous link spam.
It has been less than 3 months since Google launched their disavow tool, but since it's launch some webmasters are already engaging in pre-negative SEO. That post had an interesting comment on it:
Well Mr Cutts, you have created a monster in Google now im afraid. Your video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I says that with the new disavow tool makes negative SEO a mere nuisance.
Yet in your previous video about the diavow tool you say it can take months for links to be disavowed as google waits to crawl them???
In the meantime, the time lag makes it a little more than a "nuisance" don't you think?
As Google keeps adding more advanced filters to their search engines & folding more usage data into their relevancy algorithms, they are essentially gutting small online businesses. As Google guts them, it was important to offer a counter message of inclusion. A WSJ articles mentioned that Google's "get your business online" initiative was more effective at manipulating governmental officials than their other lobbying efforts. And that opinion was sourced from Google's lobbyists:
Some Washington lobbyists, including those who have done work for Google, said that the Get Your Business Online effort has perhaps had more impact on federal lawmakers than any lobbying done on Capitol Hill.
Each of the additional junk time wasting tasks (eg: monitoring backlinks and proactively filtering them, managing inventory & cashflow while waiting for penalties tied to competitive sabotage to clear, filing DMCAs against Google properties when Google claims to have fixed the issue years ago, merging Google Places listings into Google+, etc.) Google foists onto webmasters who run small operations guarantees that a greater share of them will eventually get tripped up.
Not only will the algorithms be out of their reach, but so will consulting.
That algorithmic approach will also only feed into further "market for lemons" aspects as consultants skip the low margin, small budget, heavy lifting jobs and focus exclusively on servicing the companies which Google is biasing their "relevancy" algorithms to promote in order to taste a larger share of their ad budgets.
While chatting with a friend earlier today he had this to say:
Business is arbitrage. Any exchange not based in fraud is legitimate regardless of volume or medium. The mediums choose to delegitimize smaller players as a way to consolidate power.
Sadly most journalists are willfully ignorant of the above biases & literally nobody is comparing the above sorts of behaviors against each other. Most people inside the SEO industry also avoid the topic, because it is easier (& more profitable) to work with the elephants & attribute their success to your own efforts than it is highlight the holes in the official propaganda.
I mean, just look at all the great work David Naylor did for a smaller client here & Google still gave him the ole "screw you" in spite of doing just about everything possible within his control.
The linkbuilding tactics used by the SEO company on datalabel.co.uk were low quality, but the links were completely removed before a Reconsideration Request was filed. The MD?s commenting and directory submissions were done in good faith as ways to spread the word about his business. Despite a lengthy explanation to Google, a well-documented clean-up process, and eventually disavowing every link to the site, the domain has never recovered and still violates Google?s guidelines.
If you?ve removed or disavowed every link, and even rebuilt the site itself, where do you go from there?
Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-wins
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Source: http://www.getelastic.com/11-ways-to-optimize-thank-you-pages/
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Source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/03/the-beal-deal-with-matt-mcgee.html
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Source: http://www.getelastic.com/3-unconventional-elements-to-test-in-checkout/
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Sharing is caring!
Please share :)
If you find the following a bit hard to read due to font size, a wider version is located here.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/obfuscation-and-misdirection
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Source: http://www.getelastic.com/the-easiest-way-to-increase-conversion-by-20/
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Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
7 Simple Steps to Writing Great ‘How To’ Content on Your Blog
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/wvvlaj3F6sk/
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Google has experimented with a list of algorithm changes.�Over the past couple of years, these changes have of course directly affected the way SEO works. If we talk about more precise terms, we see that keywords, back-links and anchor text are some of the terms that have been very dominant, powerful and effective in the [...]
The post Co-Citation and Co-Occurrence ? The Next Big Thing in SEO appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/6b9ifbPAgyY/
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Social media interaction is in a constant state of evolution. Traditionally, progress has been limited to text-based interactions or static video; however through Google+ Hangouts, users are given the ability to ditch asynchronous social media interactions for real-time communication that delivers the ability to see the audience blink, follow hand and body gestures, eye movements [...]
The post How Google Glass will influence the way we connect on Google+ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/sTWHE38aWTM/
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Blogger Outreach Process ? Organisation is key
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How to Get Authority Sites to Notice You
Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/quantumseolabs/~3/Kza072AVwwY/
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What are the incentives to publish high-value content to the web?
Search engines, like Google, say they want to index quality content, but provide little incentive to create and publish it. The reality is that the publishing environment is risky, relatively poorly paid in most instances, and is constantly being undermined.
There is little point publishing web content if the cost of publishing outweighs any profit that can be derived from it.
Many publishers, who have search engines in mind, work on an assumption that if they provide content to everyone, including Google, for free, then Google should provide traffic in return. It?s not an official deal, of course. It?s unspoken.
Rightly or wrongly, that?s the ?deal? as many webmasters perceive it.
Search engines take your information and, if your information is judged sufficiently worthy that day, as the result of an ever-changing, obscure digital editorial mechanism known only to themselves, they will rank you highly, and you?ll receive traffic in return for your efforts.
That may all change tomorrow, of course.
What might also happen is that they could grab your information, amalgamate it, rank you further down the page, and use your information to keep visitors on their own properties.
Look at the case of Trip Advisor. Trip Advisor, frustrated with Google?s use of its travel and review data, filed a competition complaint against Google in 2012.
The company said: "We hope that the commission takes prompt corrective action to ensure a healthy and competitive online environment that will foster innovation across the internet."
The commission has been investigating more than a dozen complaints against Google from rivals, including Microsoft, since November 2010, looking at claims that it discriminates against other services in its search results and manipulates them to promote its own products.
TripAdvisor's hotel and restaurants review site competes with Google Places, which provides reviews and listings of local businesses."We continue to see them putting Google Places results higher in the search results ? higher on the page than other natural search results," said Adam Medros, TripAdvisor's vice president for product, in February. "What we are constantly vigilant about is that Google treats relevant content fairly."
Similarly, newspapers have taken aim at Google and other search engines for aggregating their content, and deriving value from that aggregation, but the newspapers claim they aren?t making enough to cover the cost of producing that content in the first place:
In 2009 Rupert Murdoch called Google and other search engines ?content kleptomaniacs?. Now cash-strapped newspapers want to put legal pressure on what they see as parasitical news aggregators.?
Of course, it?s not entirely the fault of search engines that newspapers are in decline. Their own aggregation model - bundling news, sport, lifestyle, classifieds topics - into one ?place? has been surpassed.
Search engines often change their stance without warning, or can be cryptic about their intentions, often to the determent of content creators. For example, Google has stated they see ads as helpful, useful and informative:
In his argument, Cutts said, ?We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that?s not a new attitude.?
And again:
we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information
And again:
In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content
However, business models built around the ads as content idea, such as Suite101.com, got hammered. Google could argue these sites went too far, and that they are asserting editorial control, and that may be true, but such cases highlight the flaky and precarious nature of the search ecosystem as far as publishers are concerned. One day, what you're doing is seemingly "good", the next day it is "evil". Punishment is swift and without trial.
Thom Yorke sums it up well:
In the days before we meet, he has been watching a box set of Adam Curtis's BBC series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, about the implications of our digitised future, so the arguments are fresh in his head. "We were so into the net around the time of Kid A," he says. "Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as 'content'. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile phone deal or whatever it was, and they would say all they need is some content. I was like, what is this 'content' which you describe? Just a filling of time and space with stuff, emotion, so you can sell it?"
Having thought they were subverting the corporate music industry with In Rainbows, he now fears they were inadvertently playing into the hands of Apple and Google and the rest. "They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want? I still think it will be undermined in some way. It doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The commodification of human relationships through social networks. Amazing!
There is no question the value of content is being deprecated by big aggregation companies. The overhead of creating well-researched, thoughtful content is the same whether search engines value it or not. And if they do value it, a lot of the value of that content has shifted to the networks, distributors and aggregators and away from the creators.
Facebook?s value is based entirely on the network itself. Almost all of Google?s value is based on scraping and aggregating free content and placing advertising next to it. Little of this value gets distributed back to the creator, unless they take further, deliberate steps to try and capture some back.
In such a precarious environment, what incentive does the publisher have to invest and publish to the ?free? web?
Google lives or dies on the relevancy of the information they provide to visitors. Without a steady supply of ?free? information from third parties, they don?t have a business.
Of course, this information isn?t free to create. So if search engines do not provide you profitable traffic, then why allow search engines to crawl your pages? They cost you money in terms of bandwidth and may extract, and then re-purpose, the value you created to suit their own objectives.
Google has done content-related deals in the past. They did one in France in February whereby Google agreed to help publishers develop their digital units:
Under the deal, Google agreed to set up a fund, worth 60 million euroes, or $80 million, over three years, to help publishers develop their digital units. The two sides also pledged to deepen business ties, using Google?s online tools, in an effort to generate more online revenue for the publishers, who have struggled to counteract dwindling print revenue.
This seems to fit with Google?s algorithmic emphasis on major web properties, seemingly as a means to sift the "noise in the channel". Such positioning favors big, established content providers.
It may have also been a forced move as Google would have wanted to avoid a protracted battle with European regulators. Whatever the case, Google doesn?t do content deals with small publishers and it could be said they are increasingly marginalizing them due to algorithm shifts that appear to favor larger web publishers over small players.
Google?s infamous catch-phrase is ?Don?t Be Evil?. In the documentary Inside Google", Eric Schmidt initially thought the phrase was a joke. Soon after, he realized they took it seriously.
The problem with such a phrase is that it implies Google is a benevolent moral actor that cares about......what? You - the webmaster?
Sure.
?Don?t Be Evil? is typically used by Google in reference to users, not webmasters. In practice, it?s not even a question of morality, it?s a question of who to favor. Someone is going to lose, and if you?re a small webmaster with little clout, it?s likely to be you.
For example, Google appear to be kicking a lot of people out of Adsense, and as many webmasters are reporting, Google often act as judge, jury and executioner, without recourse. That?s a very strange way of treating business ?partners?, unless partnership has some new definition of which I'm unaware.
It's getting pretty poor when their own previously supportive ex-employees switch to damning their behavior:
But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they're focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad. Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
Some may call such behavior a long way from ?good? on the ?good? vs ?evil? spectrum.
Bottom line: if your business model involves creating valuable content, you?re going to need a strategy to protect it and claw value back from aggregators and networks in order for a content model to be sustainable.
Some argue that if you don?t like Google, then block them using robots.txt. This is one option, but there?s no doubt Google still provides some value - it?s just a matter of deciding where to draw the line on how much value to give away.
What Google offers is potential visitor attention. We need to acquire and hold enough visitor attention before we switch the visitors to desired action. An obvious way to do this, of course, is to provide free, attention grabbing content that offers some value, then lock the high value content away behind a paywall. Be careful about page length. As HubPages CEO Paul Edmonds points out:
Longer, richer pages are more expensive to create, but our data shows that as the quality of a page increases, its effective revenue decreases. There will have to be a pretty significant shift in traffic to higher quality pages to make them financially viable to create"
You should also consider giving the search engines summaries or the first section of an article, but block them from the rest.
Even if you decide to block search engines from indexing your content they still might pay others to re-purpose it:
I know a little bit about this because in January I was invited to a meeting at the A.P.?s headquarters with about two dozen other publishers, most of them from the print world, to discuss the formation of the consortium. TechCrunch has not joined at this time. Ironically, neither has the A.P., which has apparently decided to go its own way and fight the encroachments of the Web more aggressively (although, to my knowledge, it still uses Attributor?s technology). But at that meeting, which was organized by Attributor, a couple slides were shown that really brought home the point to everyone in the room. One showed a series of bar graphs estimating how much ad revenues splogs were making simply from the feeds of everyone in the room. (Note that this was just for sites taking extensive copies of articles, not simply quoting). The numbers ranged from $13 million (assuming a $.25 effective CPM) to $51 million (assuming a $1.00 eCPM)
You still end up facing the cost of policing "content re-purposing" - just one of the many costs publishers face when publishing on the web, and just one more area where the network is sucking out value.
Use multiple channels so you?re not reliant on one traffic provider. You might segment your approach by providing some value to one channel, and some value to another, but not all of it to both. This is not to say models entirely reliant on Google won?t work, but if you do rely on a constant supply of new visitors via Google, and if you don?t have the luxury of having sufficient brand reputation, then consider running multiple sites that use different optimization strategies so that the inevitable algorithm changes won?t take you out entirely. It?s a mistake to think Google cares deeply about your business.
Treat every new visitor as gold. Look for ways to lock visitors in so you aren?t reliant on Google in future for a constant stream of new traffic. Encourage bookmarking, email sign-ups, memberships, rewards - whatever it takes to keep them. Encourage people to talk about you across other media, such as social media. Look for ways to turn visitors into broadcasters.
Adopt a business model that leverages off your content. Many consultants write business books. They make some money from the books, but the books mainly serve as advertisements for their services or speaking engagements. Similarly, would you be better creating a book and publishing it on Amazon than publishing too much content to the web?
Business models focused on getting Google traffic and then monetarizing that attention using advertising only works if the advertising revenue covers production cost. Some sites make a lot of money this way, but big money content sites are in the minority. Given the low return of a lot of web advertising, other webmasters opt for cheap content production. But cheap content isn?t likely to get the attention required these days, unless you happen to be Wikipedia.
Perhaps a better approach for those starting out is to focus on building brand / engagement / awarenesss / publicity / non-search distribution. As Aaron points out:
...the sorts of things that PR folks & brand managers focus on. The reason being is that if you have those things...
- the incremental distribution helps subsidize the content creation & marketing costs
- many of the links happen automatically (such that you don't need to spend as much on links & if/when you massage some other stuff in, it is mixed against a broader base of stuff)
- that incremental distribution provides leverage in terms of upstream product suppliers (eg: pricing leverage) or who you are able to partner with & how (think about Mint.com co-marketing with someone or the WhiteHouse doing a presentation with CreditCards.com ... in addition to celebrity stuff & such ... or think of all the ways Amazon can sell things: rentals, digital, physical, discounts via sites like Woot, higher margin high fashion on sites like Zappos, etc etc etc)
- as Google folds usage data & new signals in, you win
- as Google tracks users more aggressively (Android + Chrome + Kansas City ISP), you win
- if/when/as Google eventually puts some weight on social you win
- people are more likely to buy since they already know/trust you
- if anyone in your industry has a mobile app that is widely used & you are the lead site in the category you could either buy them out or be that app maker to gain further distribution
- Google engineers are less likely to curb you knowing that you have an audience of rabid fans & they are more likely to consider your view if you can mobilize that audience against "unjust editorial actions"
A lot of the most valuable content on this site is locked-up. We?d love to open this content up, but there is currently no model that sufficiently rewards publishers for doing so. This is the case across the web, and it's the reason the most valuable content is not in Google.
It?s not in Google because Google, and the other search engines, don?t pay.
Fair? Unfair? Is there a better way? How can content providers - particularly newcomers - grow and prosper in such an environment?
Source: http://www.seobook.com/how-prevent-content-value-gouging
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