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@virginmedia broadband customer services woes

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Virgin Media Broadband Customer Services Sucks

Update:I wanted to add that eventually my problem was resolved. FWIW I think VM do have people who are genuinely dedicated to delivering a quality product and that there are amongst their number some very good CS people. My personal thanks go out to Sam T  for her professionalism and successful resolution of my issue

So, I’ve been a Virgin Media customer for longer than I can remember ( > 10 years). I’ve just got off the phone with Michaela at customer retention who despite having heard every detail of my complaint, was unable to talk to a colleague within the company and explain things on my behalf. She advised that I should spend a little more of my precious time writing to them, so that they could make me wait a little longer and inconvenience me a little more.

I’m naturally averse to doing that, as like you and many others out there, if there’s one thing that narks me more than most, it’s corporate bullshit. Especially corporate bullshit that’s designed to wear people down and systematically pick people off through sapping their will.

My VirginMedia Broadband Slows down of an Evening

Recently I’ve been having broadband issues with a service that I pay something like £25 per month for. Up to 20 meg broadband as I believe it’s called.

The ‘Up To’ words are quite important of course, as I doubt anybody using  their 20meg services ever gets that. It’s a theoretical figure that assumes that all being perfect, you could get in theory.

I digress. If I’m honest, I’ve had issues with their services for months. Sometimes of an evening, it’s just rubbish, it slows down to the point of unusability. I’m told that this is due to throttling. Other times I’ve been told that it’s due to a cap, in that if I download x data during the day, my ability to download data during the evening will be curtailed.

Hmmn, well I’m not one of these people who download films, or music or any of that other high bandwidth intensity stuff.  I just do the whole twitter, FB and surf thing. Most of the time I’m answering customer emails or ftp’ing the umpteenth tweak to a script I’ve hacked, or reading up on quora or stackoverflow or some other obscure techie thing that weirdos like me like to play with.

On ‘fast’ days I used Speedtest.net to gauge download and upload speed. I can’t remember what speed exactly but on such days it was around 14MBPS. TBH, I was happy with that. It was fast enough for me and didn’t leave me sitting there thinking ‘Where’s my 20mbps!!”

Over the past 5 days or so I’ve had very poor service. So poor that it’s been unusable. From 6pm it’s not even worth me trying to get online, it’s akin to the old days of 14kb modem dial up only worse. As I touched upon earlier, I’ve had times like this before, which I’ve grinned and borne which have usually sorted themselves out. Not ideal, but not really worth the short term pain of speaking to someone in India, who usually antagonise me with tech BS platitudes at best or at worst insists that I restart my modem or router to restart services.

Apparently, my Virginmedia Broadband is suffering from low SNR

The other day, having had an FTP upload ceased midflow, the proverbial straw had broke my back and  I decided that it was time to give the guys at Virginmedia a call. I explained to Ganesh that the service was not working and blah blah blahed about how it usually sorted itself out and that I’d already did the restart router/modem things and…well, Ganesh bless him, was no doubt duty bound to ask me to do it all again and after a time the answer back was that I was the recipient of an SNR issue in the area.

SNR – hmmn I thought, Signal to Noise Ratio, Subscription Network’s Rank, or Subscription Not Really worth a carrot perhaps!?

See on other times, I’ve been told other stuff.

Faulty modem, faulty router, attenuator adjustments required for signal boosting, server failure, cable failures, network faults…the list could be endless.

SNR is a new one though, so awesome, excuse number I couldn’t really care what number it is.

If I’m honest, I couldn’t really care less what the reason is either.

I pay for a service and expect to get it. I demand continued service at a level that I’ve paid money for. Whether Virgin Media care or not I do actually spend in excess of £900 per year with them. Yep, £900 to pump a few signals down a cable which includes a nice £1.50 per month for my paper bill troubles.

I’m told that my current woes will be fixed by June the 2nd. The SNR is specific to my area will be resolved and all will be well.

VirginMedia have nationwide network issues

In these days of web democracy one can quickly find out if one is alone in ones experiences.

A quick search on Google shows that people in many parts of the UK are having issues with the Virginmedia service. http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=virgin+unusable+of+an+evening shows a good smattering of results bemusingly from the virginmedia community pages themselves (well done Virgin, trying to own your online rep)

A look at some of those threads reveals all manner of things relative to exchange capability, the changing nature of users (Gamers, Video, Audio etc), SNR and  Over subscription (probably the most grating, why take on new customers for a service that isn’t delivering to existing customers).

Why I think Virgin media Customer services are poor

In the world view that I inhabit, customers who pay people money to do things for them have some basic rights. Besides all the legal obligations and various duties of care, people like me believe that where a customer is inconvenienced above a certain threshold then at the very least, the company that has caused them problems should at least try to recognise that and recompense them for their troubles. To put customers through various loopholes and give them the run around is to be frank, complete and utter crap.  If a customer isn’t very happy and explains the reasons why, calmly and dispassionately the correct response is to do your utmost to find a way to help. It’ll help if I explain the sequence of events, otherwise I just sound like some rantsmith with an axe to grind.

I won’t include the previous two days of calls to Ganesh and co, as  I’m sure you’ve better things to do, but here’s how it played today.

I called VirginMedia and eventually got through to someone in…India – I explained the situation (again) and was told that technical services might be able to help. I explained that actually, no, they wouldn’t be able to as I wanted to complain about the service and not seek the same responses to answers I’d already heard. Alas, he was insistent and I dutifully waited and explained to technical support that I already knew what was wrong and just wanted to talk to customer services, they argued their corner and eventually patched me though to customer services who listened and made the right kid of noises, until that is they mentioned that I’d get a pro rata refund only.

Pro rata refund only – I typed that again because as I type it, it releases a little more adrenalin and fires me up a little bit further. So, for my 5 days (and numerous other periods of disconnectedness) I’m to receive a pro rata sum. £25 / 31 * 5 = £4.03.

I should add that yesterday I went out and bought a mobile dongle from O2. Long story short is I’ve spent £30 because I need to have services indoors due to the fact that my service provider wasn’t providing me with a service.

I explained this to the nice lady at Virginmedia and explained that I was less than satisfied with what she was offering and that in my view, the offer wasn’t that good. I’d already laid out £30 of my own money, not to mention the time spent on phones trying to resolve it or the hassle of being unable to do what I needed to do on the various evenings I’d had no service. Her hands were tied, she was sympathetic but unable to provide more than a certain level of recompense, she could pass me to customer retention who might be able to help (at this point I’d expressed a view of exasperation an was on the verge of cancelling contracts).

After some time waiting about for the next available operative – Cue Michaela at customer retention – There was no record of what I’d said previously, the nice colleague at customer services hadn’t explained my situation, so I then had to explain it all again and convey the irritation I felt at having paid money etc blah blah blah and that I was now seeking reasons why I should even continue to be a customer and pay them the £900 per year that they currently get hoping that the reasonable response would be something along the lines of “Mr Watts, very sorry to hear about all this, we don’t want to lose you and appreciate the royal pain in the arse that this must be so in recognition we’ll give you at the minimum a sum equal to your reasonable loss that we hope compensates you…we do value your business etc etc” Reasonable huh? But no, Michaela bless her cotton socks, despite being cognisant of every nuance of the situation, tells me that I should WRITE to customer services and complain!.

Me: Um, I’m doing that now, verbally, to you at customer retention. Can’t you do this for me? Can you not convey my concerns to the relevant people who can help me, and take a decision and deal with my concerns? I’ve already invested a considerable amount of my time trying to resolve this.

Her: No Mr Watts, I’m in customer retention, the procedure is that you complain to customer services by letter and an appropriate person will deal with it.

Me: I really don’t understand why despite listening to all I’ve said,  that you expect me to waste even more of my time trying to resolve this! This call is recorded right? Can’t you just forward the audiofile so they can listen?

Her: More petty obfuscating nonsense determined not to help or resolve

Me: Ok, thanks.

I’m not astounded by all of this, I’m simply flabbergasted that a system designed to help customers who have issues could be used in a way to frustrate and aggravate. Changing services to another supplier is fraught with all manner of headaches. Unknown quantities, time out to e there when they turn up being but two that spring to mind.

I’ve thought about writing to Virgin media customer services, I’ve thought about writing to Neil Berkett or Richard Branson, or OFCOM  even but…really, to continue with this merry go round of nonsense serves little purpose other than to waste even more of my time. Customer service shouldn’t be a revolving door of buck passing and annoyance. It should deal with customer issues and get the problem resolved. Customers don’t want to know about policies designed to restrict company loss, they want to be treated fairly and efficiently with no nonsense. There are of course exceptions. Rude people, chancers, conmen and liars should be given short shrift, but I like to think that I’m neither of the above.

Naturally, I’m a little pissed by all this - It’s a lovely day out and I could have been out in the sunshine or reading a book or doing some work but…

Consumers have few tools these days, the most effective are those that get eyeballs and get brands to sit up and take note.If you want to help me, or maybe make others aware of the kind of things they can expect from Virginmedia when things don’t quite work or go wrong, then you could share this post on Twitter or Facebook or wherever else it is you hang out online.  Maybe someone else will get some insight in to what they can expect.

No related posts.


Dear Google, Stop Trying to Control the World’s Information

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Yet Another Woe No More Analytics Post

So, Google decided to take the gloves off and twist the screw that little bit harder down on organic search. Caution, I suspect I might curse and swear and rant a little but hey, you can always hit the back button :)

I’m not going to rant about the outrageousness of it all as that’s been said by all and sundry. If you’ve landed here and don’t know what I’m talking about then, the short explanation is that Google have made a move in the name of privacy but have added a pretty hefty “by the way clause”  that’s sending shock waves through the online marketing community.

Put shortly, if you are one of these people who enjoys crunching numbers and delivering actionable insights derived from user queries to a domain then, that’s all about to change as you will no longer be able to determine the query part of the journey. All you’ll know is that they arrived on your site from Google. If it’s a paid click then no worries there, Google will allow that to stay as it’s valuable to the advertiser and useful to Google.

Valuable in the sense that advertisers need to know how their adspend on Google converts. (No point spending money if you don’t know how well it performs)  and useful to Google as if people don’t spend money their whole house falls. Google isn’t interested in how your organic campaigns perform or convert. There’s no money in it for them.

Privacy – We Care About Your Boss Snooping On Your Search Behaviours

Senior Google folks  have played the privacy card saying lots of things around how currently, people can spy on what you are searching for and that’s all a bit terrible.

It isn’t for me to say that that’s a big pile of horse shit other than many people don’t really buy it and are choosing to use language that’s a whole lot more culturally base. What I would say is that I’m far from convinced and somewhat disappointed by it all as to be honest, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t think that they’d ever encroach on this ground and that they’d be happy with existing levels of cash flow and profit, which if memory serves for Q3 were around the 10 billion dollar mark.

I’m not going to point to  lots of examples, you can take my opinion or leave it, but in my view Google isn’t a fan of SEO at all.  They know precisely how much commerce is generated through their platform and perhaps understandably would like more of the actual marketing spend to find its way to their bottom line. Put simply, if  SEO is too easily measured, too easily demonstrated that X spend on SEO channel equals X ROI then quite rightly marketing budgets are going to be adjusted to reflect this. This of course means less of such spend for Google.

Sure, Google have produced 100′s of videos, run webmaster forums designed to support webmasters, there’s WMT and a host of other initiatives designed to deliver help and insight in to creating better websites. Yet for me, like most things Google does these days, the impact of these are always two fold.  Owning the message for me is an important part of controlling or influencing what it is you want people to believe. There’s no point in saying you’re a plumber if you are dressed in a Dr’s outfit holding a chainsaw. If you want to be the authority, the go to guy, then you’ve got to walk the walk and make sense to those who care about what it is you purport to deliver for them. Who you going to trust? That brand new shiny SEO agency who give you lots of probables and perhaps’s or that nice authoritative search engine who sends you buckets and buckets of free traffic daily, giving you tools that allow you to query their data and take actions that’ll improve your bottom line.

 

SERPs Should Be Diverse Ever Changing Places that Reflect the Interwebz

For an age and then some, Google have come up with all sorts of double edged swords that have been presented as being user focused tweaks designed to improve the user experience.

Whilst a sizeable number of these have, a side benefit (for Google) has often been that SEO as a channel has often been marginalised. Let’s have a quick looksy at just three that are fresh to mind (i’m sure there are lots of others).

Universal Search is Lovely and For You, You Lovely Users

Take Universal Search – User gets to see pretty pictures and youtube videos and news items related to the query. Great, just what most people need, right? We all need pictures, news from time to time and videos too. Google saves us the time of typing the extra words like news, or pictures or videos to our search term and just shows them regardless. It’s no accident that they all appear above the fold too right? Right where we need them, distracting our attention and pushing down those other pesky organic results that little bit further down the page.

Net impact for organic  site owners in positions 4, 5 or beyond? SEO became that little bit more difficult. Difficult meaning, costing them more of their marketing budget to get where they need to be.

Google Instant – Giving Users  What They Need Instantly, Coz Percolated Takes Forever to Brew

Take the whole Google instant thing – great bit of UI, see results change before your very eyes as you type out your stuff. The really cool part is that Google can even show you related terms with high adwords publisher interest and funnel you to where they’d like you to be.

Net impact on organic is that  long tail searches with low CPC’s tail off as people are steered to head terms with more value to Google.  Why show you stuff that’s obscure or that advertisers aren’t aware of? Google doesn’t earn on those.

Pandas – Big Fluffy Lovely Bears You Want to Hug

Then there’s the so called Panda update(s). Designed to remove crap from the search results for terms important to searchers. Stories abound of how all sorts of crappy content farms have been hit and pushed down the SERPs. Great! Yay! But wait, there’s also lots of stories too that suggest that quality publications have also been hit and the affect on search generally has been to cause flux and disruption across lots of otherwise relatively stable verticals.

Net impact on organic is that yet again the message to site owners is subtle yet clear. Organic search marketing is a risky use of your marketing budget. Be too successful or too aggressive then you might fall foul of the many hundreds of vagueries that pepper the Google guidelines. Far better to spend you marketing budget on something safe and measurable, something like adwords perhaps.

Facebook is Evil and Doesn’t Respect Your Stuff – Come to Google – We are Lovely and Do No Evil and Give you Your Data

Google+ is that new social network where you can do a lot of what you already do on Facebook but just find that your main friends and family aren’t there or if they are, then they aren’t really doing very much. My weird friends and family aside, the fact remains that a reported 40 million people are now on it. Google has been a little guarded around how people are using it and probably have a plan around how it all ties up and binds their multiple properties in to one little happy Google web where we all spend our time using the 100′s of Google products to satisfy our busy lives because that’s exactly what facebook is doing and it scares the pants off of Google stockholders!

If you aren’t sticky then you’ll end up getting stucky

The Google of old was a place where most user activity was downstream – People came, searched, found and went on their merry way.

Today the web’s changed, technology and the barriers to entry have changed. Web properties with huge user bases have the ability to change and adapt at a frightening pace.

Facebook could for examples sake, release an amazing new way of finding content, delivered on their platform. The access to billions of ‘likes’ and user metrics from embedded code is providing them with terrabytes of user behaviour which, make no doubt will be used to develop products and tools that will be monetised and value added. Google knows this and would be foolish to ignore the threat to its model and product. Removing the ability of landing pages on visited websites to read the query string is a big step in insulating  itself from further encroachment on what it considers to be its own intellectual property. In one fell swoop it can deny such properties the ability to glean this.  The fact that it’s presented as a progressive privacy move would be near on genius, if it weren’t for the fact that they are stuck between in a rock and hard place and have no choice other than to make an exception for its advertisers.

So ok, a lot of what I’m saying could easily be shot down as conspiratorial – the subtleties of Google are such that they seldom do anything without a back up plan or reasonable point of view for doing so. I’m merely reflecting my gut and echoing the sentiment of a lot of what I’ve read either publicly, or to an increasing extent discussed privately behind closed doors. There’s a 1001 other conspiracies around Google, its algo, its penalty systems, its quality raters and more. There’s no surprise there, it’s a consequence of secretive mysterious organisations that people will add 2 and 2 and often get 5.

 

Google isn’t evil, don’t be farking ridiculous

To say Google is evil is of course ridiculous. I have many fine friends who are lovely decent people who work for them, impassioned clever people with dedication and a love of the web. I don’t doubt that the majority of the employees within it are of similar mind, striving to deliver and iterate and incrementally improve upon what it is they work with. But let’s not pull punches on what the wider impact and actions of more senior decision makers are here either.

A Message to you Googly

Just because you’ve built a product that’s changed the world, generated massive wealth for millions via a product that has the most buy in known to modern man, does not mean that you can just rampage unchallenged and change base fundaments at will! Come on, guys, you know this already – stop making out that you’re this infallible piece of humane perfection that is putting us all first all of the time with no thought for personal profit! We don’t believe it, we aren’t idiots! If anything you have a whole lot more responsibility to do things for the right reasons; half cocked excuses that purport to be one thing whilst being another cannot be hidden in the depths of a secret sauce, they are transparent for all to see, as this case quite clearly reveals.

Please stop trying to be everything,  stop trying to control the world’s information, that’s fucking dangerous and leads to tyranny! Just be happy with what you have, what you’ve created and continue to enjoy the billions that you’ll continue to make YoY. We don’t fucking want you to be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple or Amazon or insert long list of others… Just focus on what you do well. We aren’t dummies, you know that. Just stop, please? Thanks.

Related posts:

  1. Is the unwritten contract between Google and Webmasters broken?
  2. Dear Redacted

Is the unwritten contract between Google and Webmasters broken?

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I’m writing this on a phone so forgive the formatting and lack of links and screenshots, i’ll tidy up later.

There’s a lot of change on Google these days, a lot of activity in spaces that Google were once content to monetize with ads.The clear separation that once existed between Googles organic results and its paid ads inventory is becoming increasingly blurred as it pushes on into query spaces that were once the preserve of a diverse bunch of web publishers.

Unwritten Contract? WTF – Explain Yourself Man


Defining the contract is important, it went a little like this. Google would spider and index webmaster content and show the outputs to user queries in its web results. It would overlay these with ads and monetize through clicks from people interested. It wouldn’t participate in the SERPS directly unless there was a clear deficit in the marketplace. The distinction was clear and plain for all to see. Organic and paid were separate, Google wasn’t in the business of ranking its ad supported services over competing services. It was not an abuser of its monopoly position.

So, let’s look at a very recent change and ask the question, “Has the unwritten contract between Webmasters and Google been broken?”

For this query http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=distance+from+rome+to+geneva I’m seeing that Google now displays a map, with the distance and a link to directions above its organic results.

This reduces the likelihood of a click through to an organic result and helps drive traffic to Googles map product. You can see it in action in the graphic below.

 

 

In a week where the search giant announced a change to it’s tos regarding the map api, what are your thoughts on what appears to be yet another step of many encroachments into the organic space? If you were Google, you might well say, ‘Encroachments’ wtf, how very dare you but read on, as it’s a little more sophisticated than that and Google well knows it.

It’s our dinner plate and we are going to eat it

Last week or so it was ‘what’s my ip‘ and their learn more hyperlink.Providing users with both an answer to their query and a link to a Google page explaining. Net effect, other tools and publishers all lose as google pushes its own content.

Whilst some might “say no big deal move along”, others might see the wider implications of things like this and note how Google continues to eat at the table of organic.

What may seem like innocuous moves, the reality is that they often reduce people’s need to leave Google (take dictionary queries or date/time/currency/math based queries) taking traffic away from publishers that build content and thus increasing queries and ad clicks on Google. If the user finds what they need, then why even leave Google. Net impact, happy user, blissfully unaware of the slow death of content creators.

The logical extension of much of the above is that ultimately, Google finds ways of replicating what others do to a point of Google becomes a super affiliate feed of products and suppliers. Organic traffic becomes marginalised and joe public is hoodwinked under the guise of a better search experience. Meanwhile publishers become poorer dying a slow death and Google grows richer.

If you’re a brand then you might be safe or erm, maybe not as this post about yelp describes.

Before anyone shouts deal with it, or that’s business, or go build a search engine and do it yourself, please, let’s try and be intelligent here and react from the perspective of a publisher. Many of the “Google deserves it all” type debates have been done to death so I doubt anyone want’s those back and forths rehashed. My view is that with great power comes great responsibility. Google has a responsibility to behave in ways that aren’t anti competitive or that stifle creativity.

Publishers built the web but it’s ok as we’ll just replace them

I’m more concerned with what if anything publishers can do about it. Sure, the answer of build a fabulous product that everyone wants and loves and needs rings true, but that doesn’t do much about the fact that for many people, a chrome browser or a search box on Google is their default way of finding things. If Google keeps chipping away like it does, then one day it might very well be your cool ecommerce/travel/hobby/science/news/art site that gets marginalised.

Without traffic, publishers on the web can’t survive. The unwritten contract that once existed between Google and webmaster is effectively broken.

What say you?

Meantime, here’s a nice track by the O’Jays

Related posts:

  1. Google Position One Accounted for 75% of Clicks #ajaxserps
  2. Dear Google, Stop Trying to Control the World’s Information

7 gift ideas for men and geeks

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Christmas  Gift Ideas for Geek and Dudes

So it’s Monday morning and a year to the day of the first post I’ve decided to edit this one and add and subtract  a product or two so, here are a few gift ideas for dudes and geeks.

Looking for Xmas gifts for ones dad or brother, or boyfriend or husband  at Christmas is never easy – I’m not saying this post will make that task any easier either and most of these ideas for Christmas gifts are quite probably a little out of the budget range for some, but…,you might be feeling generous so what the hey. There’s a mixed bag ranging from a tenner up to a couple of k, so fill your proverbial boots and happy Christmas shopping! 

Zagg Sparq Ipad/ Iphone Dual USB Charger

iphone chargerFirst off, a damn handy present for iPhone heads like me would be a
iPad iPhone Dual Portable Charger in the manufacturers words “Energize your digital life with four times the portable power: the ZAGGsparq 2.0 is the standard for on-the-go charging. Convenient for travelers and business people, it carries four complete recharges for most power-hungry smart phones. The ZAGGsparq 2.0 recharges with a standard outlet and provides two USB ports for powering mobile devices. Perfect for everything from cell phones to hand-held gaming systems. Dead batteries and expensive spares are a thing of the past.” Looks pretty good if you ask me!

150 things every man should know

150thingsWe men like random stuff, so here’s a book that looks a lot of fun and is probably going to be a big success -”150 Things Every Man Should Know: Telling You the Things Your Best Friend Can’t” .  Fundamentally a lot of us are a little bit dumb and could do with reading stuff like this, just to remind ourselves or save face of asking a smartass who does. Not quite worked out the how to shave without cutting yourself bit yet? (see below for another answer)  or not sure of your ‘having a piss etiquette’ or what about more mundane topics  ‘tie tying’, ‘tyre changing’ . The dude it seems has written a book to solve all these woes. I haven’t read it, but if I got it in my Xmas stocking, then I’d probably smile and read it.

Macbook Pro

macbook-proI must say I’ve always like Apple products , they are stylish, reliable, cool and geeky. My daughter has a mac book, she’s had it for a while. I’ve never used it but it does have a certain style and difference to it that for whatever reason, traditional PC manufacturers just haven’t quite managed to emulate.  We had a visitor to the office the other day who was raving about the coolness of his new apple macbookpro saying how fast and light and generally brilliant it was and I must confess I did start to think, hmmn, I see where he’s coming from.

In any case, you can buy a Macbook Pro for as little as £749 for a 13inch or for £1795 you can get a new MacBook Pro 17inch with its 2.8GHz processor 4GB ram 500GB hard drive.

iPhone 4

iphone-apps-1Next up on my I’d love to have is the IPhone4 – I still have an iphone 3g, – I like it, it’s very cool, it has bundles of apps and does lots of cool stuff. It is kinda deficient though in some respects, it’s missing the whole video thing. I can’t upload video content to places like youtube and posterous,  it isn’t as fast and it’s really crap for battery time. That said, it’s an amazing piece of technology that I can read emails on,  read webpages, tweet, facebook, audioboo etc.

So please, any budding Father Christmas’s out there who’d like to treat me to one,  I’m pleased to tell you that you can buy the  iphone 4 new from  £610-00. Yep, a lot of money for a phone, but this is no ordinary phone after all. This is a phone on steroids.

Android Phone

androidOr maybe you don’t like Apple stuff – perhaps you are turned off by the whole idea and want something a little bit more flexible – Android smartphones look pretty cool and their functionality is pretty much on par with iPhones.

I’ve seen a few videos over the past year or so, one in particular that caught my eye was augmented reality – in plain speak this a feature that overlays what your camera see with map and locational data. So lets say that you are in location x and want to get a better feel for where you are, then this phone hooks up with things like Google street view and has the ability to label places and reconfigure the vista as you move. Another neat function was the ability to hook it up to Google base and get prices from shoips without even entering the store – need to get the best priced camera in Tottenham Ct Road? No problem just walk down the street, enter the product name, point and scan the high street and the various prices will flash up on your screen overlaid on the shop it locates. This HTC Hero Sim Free Android Smartphone is listed at £369.99 from amazon.

Braun Series 7 Shaver

braun-series-7I hate shaving, most men do. Show me a man who enjoys a shave and I’ll show you a man who erm..has too much time on his hands. My daily shave ritual usually entails, lathering up, plugging in a new mach 3 shaver head bought at the exorbitant price of around £9 for 5 shaves. Every now and then ( more often than not) I cut myself. It’s a pita – face bleeds, tissue gets stuck to said cut, and you sit on the train looking like the dummy who cut himself shaving again. So, no more of that methinks, it’s time to save on my shave! ( ok poor choice of pun but you get the enthusiasm, no? ) Enter the Braun Series 7 790cc Shaver in addition to the fact it has the words 790cc in its title ( WTF motorbike engine size speak) it also sounds like it belongs in a start trek episode and is adorned in the same colours as what miss 7 of 9 used to wear. It has  an almost robot R2D2 look to it, leading me to conclude that the designer was definitely a trekkie and star wars fan too. It isnt cheap mind, but over time It would certainly save some time, pain and money too.  It’s priced at £165 ( reduced from the RRP price of £249.99) so even if you spend just £5 per week to shave, you’ll be quids in within a year and have less war wounds too. Jesus look at me, I sound like a fonkin salesman.

X Rocker Pro Gamer Seat

x-rocker-proI like the look of this – I might even buy Jord one for Christmas. Its a seat for gamers. I’m not that much of a gamer myself, but I could just nestle down and have more of a go with this thing. It has surround sound, sub woofers, wireless, it even vibrates too which is bound to push any gamer experience up a notch, and for fat boys like me, might even be adaptable to some kind of massage game. Do they sell massage games for Xbox? You can buy the X-Rocker Profor £129.99 or get it at boys stuff for £199.

So there you have it, just a few ideas for xmas gifts. If you happen to make a purchase from any of these links I should point out that I do get a small commission ( painfully small I might add). That said I have shopped around and believe it or not amazon in most cases was often cheapest simply because of the various relationships its established with product providers.

I can’t tag this post, my db is borkden, so please no whinges or whines about my lack of categorisation or tagging, ta! Happy shopping!.

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Is your expert link builder worth the trouble?

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Don’t buy questionable link building packages, buy good ones

I was just talking with a friend about link building. He’s a small biz chap with a good product and looking to try and grow what he does.

He asked me for my thoughts on link building and it got me thinking of the variety of services that are out there.  The game’s changed, primarily due to the increased perception of risk generated by the chatter and dings delivered by Google.

It’s basically pretty stupid to pay anyone for anything that takes a cheap arse ‘button press’ type approach to link building. 1000 directory submissions, 20 blog posts and 100 forum sigs might seem fairly attractive, especially if it’s packaged up in a £50 one time fee parcel with promises of boosts for your target keyword/s.

I probably sounded almost cliched but I found myself talking to him about  creating genuine conversations and buzz and how that one of the best ways of achieving that might be to build a fully integrated platform that enabled him to do so, which might possibly mean creating the most kick arse resource in the country/region/planet for his  niche.

I pointed him to a resource that’s fairly niche in the home improvement vertical and showed how they were enabling their visitors to ask questions, give feedback, review products and how they could read  product  how to’s with guides and tools and videos and podcasts  along with the usual social box ticking.

There were a few other generalisms but the point of it all was to try and convey the idea that if you set out to make stuff that is  link worthy, as in kick arse useful content that people will want to share on youtube,  niche home improvement/green/save the world/ type communities, blogs, social networks etc, then half of the battle is won.

I guess I was trying to say that even if his end product out there in the real world is top class, well priced, sought after that if his online shop front didn’t do the same then in lots of ways, he’d be wasting his time. Why do people expect inferior shitty boring user experiences to rule their niches?

Socialise get down, let your souuuul hit the waves shake it now, go ladies, it’s a living dream… *

I don’t need to bang a drum that says that the web is becoming increasingly social. Anyone with half ounce of eighteen pence knows this already. The fact is that if you have a bog standard, say nothing space on the web, then by and large people just aren’t going to talk about you.

So I kind of went full circle and said something like your link building company should really be talking to you about these very things. Your brand, your product, your offering. How they’d go about creating something viral perhaps or how they’d use his voice and identity and add genuine value to the places that they engaged with on his behalf. He’s a small business, he can’t be everywhere, but maybe his link building company can give him some stellar advice as to how he can get others to do so. If they can’t then there’s a chance that they are stuck in some time warp creating very little else but shit.

Sure,  you CAN go and buy links of course. You can go out and spam forums, blogs, pr networks with your stupidly crafted laser targetted anchor text and build links  that way. It’ll work too, for a time, but eventually you might get caught up in some mess that see’s your domain Pandarised or Penguinated. I won’t mention Karma. I won’t mention the offence you’ll cause to all and sundry as you pay a bunch of wankers to go pollute the web with your pony “hi nice post” type comments, or your useless kill me now type shitty guest blog posts, or your no one gives a hoot type add no value to the world type press releases as I hope that’s a given.

 

My closing words were something along the line of ask this ‘expert link builder’ what it is they’ll do.Cut through any old bollocks they give like directories, shitty press releases, guest blog posts in spammy networks and instead listen to those who talk about you and your brand and their understanding of what it is that you are trying to achieve. If they can’t understand that then, I  doubt that long term you’ll get any links worth having.  Sure, there may be some short term SERP success; but if it’s built on a house of cards, then it’ll eventually fall. Far better to take a long view and do it properly the first time around.

Thanks for listening.

 *

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Dear Redacted

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Dear redacted

Further to our discussion the other day, please find a bit of a brain dump below. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about then it’s no surprise that we’ll keep treading mud, so hopefully this will help :)

Just like those big buy now messages with phone numbers that we see in printed media, it’s crucial that web pages also have similar calls to actions. It may seem obvious, but today, your site is devoid of all these. People will not dig that deep to find a way of calling or emailing you. The web’s a big place and they can easily just go elsewhere.

Search marketing as a marketing discipline has evolved over the years and increases in sophistication yearly. This is inevitable as platforms like Google, Facebook et al seek to monetise and deliver quality experiences to their searchers and would much rather that people clicked on their ads. That said, they have to maintain an illusion of natural algorithmic search as few people would hang around if they simply offered a page of ads.

My view with regard to redacted has been from the outset that on-line, it has a whole lot of potential and with the right drive and coherent vision should do very well.Whilst I may have banged on about code and what not and a less than ideal CMS, it isn’t entirely about the code and the structure, it’s far more than that.

The content of a website in 2012 is a vital component of any successful strategy, both on and offsite. You need to be creating content that creates content elsewhere through links and conversations back to you.

What’s that I hear you say, elsewhere!? Yes indeed, elsewhere, just like you’d want people in the street or the local community to tell their friends about their positive experiences, the same can be said of the web (but more on that later).

Visitors are but a click away from going elsewhere, so it’s vital that we make the best opportunity of every visitor we get. We should be looking to determine what it is they do when they arrive, how they got there, what they did, why they did it and more. The installation of an analytics  package like GA (Google Analytics) is a great start and we’ll be able to gain insights from this as time progresses. Through looking at user journeys and tracking sign ups and conversions(sales)  we can then take decisions that will impact future choices around direction and products.

Today,  I do appreciate that the organisation isn’t really run that way and that many of your staff aren’t really attuned to embracing a web based vision and all that this entails. Somehow, this needs to change. If it doesn’t then I’d be surprised if we gained much traction. This may seem like a gargantuan task but it isn’t really, it’s just a case of getting buy in from others and setting it all in train. Your staff should jump at the opportunity and your users (if happy) should be more than willing to provide a little paragraph or two as to their perceptions.

Creating conversations

Internet usage is on the increase. People seldom use old methods to find things or learn things. If we provide a service/product in a space then we should be looking to ensure that we offer people as much as we possibly can in relation to this.

The most successful sites on the web have rich engaging user experiences that ultimately translate to sales.They are easy to use and effectively create conversations.

They are invariably,  websites that are ’alive’ and embrace user interactions with the people onsite, offering their potential/existing customers a means and ability to follow up on their purchases, experiences, treatments, leaving reviews for example, praising the experiences they’ve had or sharing content via share buttons. Websites that are socially connected with places like facebook, twitter, Google and other open platforms make all of this a whole lot easier.  Facebook pages, G+ accounts and twitter profiles are all great places to share and build audience. You’ve made a great start with these, we’ll look at how we can build on these going forward.

Search engines increasingly look for signals from these places and use these to determine interest and relevancy. Links from other websites like these and others in related spaces are seen as votes the websites that they link to. The more votes a website gets from other websites that are deemed to be related or of authority help boost performance in the search engine results for keywords that websites would like to rank for.

It’s almost a virtuous circle of:

Website creates fantastic useful user experience >> user is happy so talks about it elsewhere online in blogs and forums or other social media >> search engine sees conversation (link back to website) and assigns temporal boost >> website ranks better for keywords >> more users see websites for searches >> circle is repeated.

Rinse repeat.

If  people aren’t talking about you online then it may  be because there is little to talk about. It may be because your sites content is old or out of date, or just doesn’t add sufficient value to the space. The internet contains a wealth of choices that people can quickly gravitate to. It’s important therefore to do one’s very best to give people something that answers their questions and increases their confidence.

The wealth of products and services  offered by redacted  is a testament to what you have built – your vision, your experience, your passion and commitment. That said, this isn’t necessarily being transmitted on-line.

The site as it stands has little of the freshness and vibrancy that your paper marketing materials offer and of course lack that personal touch they’d get from meeting staff.

There are ways of remedying this. A few ideas are as follows.

No one knows that you do it unless you tell or show them

Show people what you’re all about.

Give people quality visual insights.

Create a youtube account for redacted. Upload videos of redacted perhaps.

https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?service=youtube

Get your product specialists to wax lyrical over what they do and how they do it and upload them to the site.

Put these on the pages of the products that discuss the various services.

Install a blog and get product specialists to enthuse about what they do. Show the human side, show people that friendly engaged specialist full of knowledge, advice and insight passionate about the vale that they will bring to prospective new business.

(you might want to draw up a house style and format that people adhere to perhaps, unified message etc)

There will be resistance for sure, but why shouldn’t these people be prepared to talk about what it is they do? I’m sure if they are told that through doing so, they’ll benefit too. Enhanced profiles, increased sceptic trust, greater reach and dissemination of their message.

Talk to your customers, ask them for their thoughts, get a few paragraphs or send them a survey. Put those thoughts on your product pages. Show people those real world valued experiences.

In short, you alone cannot inject the required passion, enthusiasm and content that is needed to excel online in 2012 and beyond. Places like Google are becoming increasingly competitive. Local businesses are legion and compete with each other to occupy what are in effect 1 or 2 effective spots in a Google results page.This is likely to contract further.

Be the best.

Hope that helps, catch up with you soon :)

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A Value Added 2013 to all

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2013 – Wow, how’d that happen?

I don’t post much these days (you noticed huh?).

You could say I got bored with stating the obvious or adding to the general noise of the blah blah blah brigade.

There’s little value add to that.

“Value add” seems to be a prevailing theme that keeps popping up a lot for me these days; be it in my conversations with friends, face to face, or with my kids veiled in failed subtleties designed to try and impart that little something without the alienation part, or online in a comment or a tweet somewhere.

I tend to look a lot more before I leap these days. No point making mistakes if you just keep on making them eh!?

Today, I like to think that in a lot of my actions I’m far more considered; I like to think that I give things a whole lot more thought than I once did. Sometimes I practice what I preach and sometimes I’m pretty sure that I don’t, but hey, I’m trying! That’s all of any of us can really do, right?

Online, back in the day when I could be bothered; I must have spent a few thousand hours reading, and occasionally chiming in to a bazillion debates around search related stuff from absolute positioning to z-indices; the aim of it all? No points for guessing, but at some level it was to add value, both to myself and the people I was either trying to help or debate with. I learnt through debate and discussion, I enhanced my ‘street cred’ (or destroyed it dependent upon your perspective) and generally helped myself learn the many facets of an industry I felt strangely compelled by back then.

Sometimes it was fun, other times it was all a little painful and more an exercise in walking through a minefield of egos; weighing up the personalities, appreciating the politics of the day, choosing the right words that made the point and assuaged the finer delicacies of a similarly flawed lump of flash and bone.

The online watering holes have come and gone, some have changed ownership, others have withered on the vine, some just ran out of steam, others have just disappeared; whole fora with 10’s of 1000’s of posts along with a few good individuals, some announced and some not so.

For the announced, the reasons are oft clear; a lack of resources, lack of will, lack of patronage – could it be argued that at some point in the analysis of their decision to withdraw, that their perception of their situations concluded a lack of ‘added value’ too?

Maybe they’d decided that the space was too crowded, that there wasn’t enough love to go around and the effort required to get them there just wasn’t there –  Who knows?

The upside is that some places continue to progress despite being sold, despite changes of personnel at the helm. The old guard thrives – People like Jill Whalen  and Bill Slawski continue to serve, along with other fine stalwarts  challenging, debating, and educating the old and the new around the ever changing face of ‘online’. The thing they have in common? ‘Value add’ perhaps? The commitment and energy to help someone solve a problem – cut through a seemingly intangible – demystify a complexity, because of course, anyone can build a forum, install a blog, create a community platform but not anyone can add sufficient value and sustain that impetus over time.

There are of course 1000’s of other places and personalities online all of which add their own flavour and taste to the mix – that’s the beauty of the web, anyone can create a persona, create a community and cultivate a following – success is a relative measure; capital growth, number of employees, turnover or followers will invariably have different meaning to differing people but at some point, anything worth anything will be adding value, else it’ll just die a death.

We all have our aims and goals and some us will have our clear milestones set out aligned to job title x or house size y, bank account balance z . For some of us, a lot of that won’t always be immediately apparent. We’ll struggle with career paths, relationships, life choices, unforeseeable events and drive ourselves mad agonising over options A or B if we’re lucky and A through Z if we’re not so.

All of us will in later years look back and reflect upon things that we think went wrong or didn’t pan out as we thought they might.  We might recognise times where we were used to further the aims of others and upon recall perhaps, bear mild resentment to such folks or ourselves choosing to hold on to it all, gnash teeth, plot revenge, and rail against the injustice of it all allowing it all eat us up until we’re dead.  The luckier among  us having experienced the same, will be able to accept such things as an integral part of what was required to get us to where we’re at today older and wiser, ready to impart the benefits of our experience to those we may mentor or nurture down the road.

Most of us in reality will be somewhere in the middle of the two; some things are a whole lot easier to forgive than others and few journeys of note can be absorbed or  detailed if traveled too quickly. We do have a choice though; one choice adds value and the other doesn’t.

Happy 2013 all, may your decisions be good ones and your mistakes few, keep on trying!

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PPC Conversions and Local Business Search Marketing

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Niche products, volume, PPC, landing pages and matters arising

I was talking with someone the other day about the challenges faced with getting new business for what was a very niche product. The product is the type that has limited demand, is very niche but adds huge value to the people who want it.

We briefly talked about what they do and how they currently do it, what appears to work and what doesn’t. We touched upon the various online channels particularly with regard to PPC, SEO and Social media. I didn’t get too deep, but my takeaway was that it wasn’t really working as well as they’d liked or expected.

It might be useful to others, to run through a few things as they come to me. Nothing too structured, just a general meander through some of the issues and what we can at least begin to try and do about them.

Pay Per Click Ads

PPC is of course great in theory. There’s a wide range of tools available that enable folks to selectively target search  terms and localities tied to a budget theoretically enabling people to find people in search mode and deliver them a best fit experience for their query.

Of course this sounds ideal and whilst in terms of easily identifiable ROI is a far improvement on a channel like local print media, it still falls short.

The biggest issue for niche product providers is often in volume. Let’s take a term like ‘counselling courses’ and let’s assume that it’s a business serving the city of London.

Today, according to the Google Adwords tool, for what appears to be a very modest budget of £100 per day, a business looking for people using the search term of ‘counselling courses’ could expect around 20 clicks.

This is based on 570 ad  impressions for a bid rate of £2 per click with a total spend range of between £24.50 – £30.

If we up the minimum bid a little to say £5 per click then we end up paying around £78 per day and we’ll get an estimated 31 clicks.

Within the above, we’ll have to account for a little ‘ad curiosity’ from competitors and general tyre kickers.

It’s tough to get an accurate figure for what this will be but we can be pretty sure it goes on.

The good news is that Google provides tools that enable you to block certain IP addresses from seeing your ads, so a competitor that rocks up daily and clicks your ads costing you money can, over time be blocked.

The bad news is that it’s all a little bit reactive and that once you’ve been charged, then it’s a bit of struggle to get refunds, and of course more than a techno headache to identify them in the first place, especially if you’re not very technical.

Getting back to the general cost, we should of course be tracking our clicks and see how well they convert. We’ll need to define what exactly counts as a conversion as these can vary from business to business. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that for this example we are measuring the final sale as evidence of a conversion.

Our visitor has clicked on an ad, has landed on our fantastically put together landing page, and has signed up for a course that we charge £495-00 for our.

Our hypothetical  one day event course cost breakdown excluding course materials might be something like:

  • Venue room hire: £150
  • Refreshments and lunch:£15 per person
  • Staff:£300
  • Marketing:£2200

So, at the upper click tier we can see that we need at least 5.5 people to sign up just to break even and 6  to make a profit.

This would appear to be relatively easy to attain. After all, potentially over 1000 people could be clicking through to our advert in a 30 day period, meaning that we only need to convert at a rate of 0.6% to begin to make some money.

Great. But is it? And how easy it to convert at those levels? How many people are simply curious? How many people can make it to the venue on the dates outline? How many people will really believe in the product enough to sign up? How many people will hit the back button and research other courses?

Let’s explore that a little further.

The answers to these intangibles might well be academic but it’s certainly useful to think about them and when we do, we begin to appreciate the ways in which the web is accessed and structured. Through doing so we can begin to address them and hopefully reduce fall outs, tail offs or whatever else you’d like to call them.

So, why would someone hit a back button?

It’s useful to draw up a list and ask ourselves questions that might deter a sign up.

Lack of information on page, no method of payment, too expensive, lack of confidence in the product, venue date unsuitable, wasn’t really interested anyway, too much information/page confusing/poor layout.

Let’s explore these now.

Lack of information on page

Our page should show all that relevant stuff like time, date, course information, intended audience, speaker info, benefits, reasons to attend, travel options,sign up page, payment options, contact options of addresses and telephone numbers, social media presence.

It sounds like state the obvious but how many people fall at this hurdle? We really need to check and recheck that we are providing the absolute minimum at worst.

In some scenarios it might be easier to create a mini site that gives extensive supplemental info, especially for courses that are likely to be repeated over and over. Where this isn’t feasible, then consider ensuring that a link or banner to your course page is dominantly displayed throughout the domain. If you are running more than one course then ensure that this links through to a core courses landing page.

No method of payment available

Having payment options is really important, especially when it comes to of the moment PPC transactions where a person has cost YOU money just to read your content.

You want to get that person whilst they are in buy mode, you want them to sign up NOW, you need to do everything you can to encourage them to do so.

Thankfully there are great tools out there that enable to make such things a whole lot easier.

EventBrite is one such example enabling businesses to sell tickets for their events which have the added benefit of being re-circulated to 100′s of other sites like Events Near.

Paypal also offer a suite of businesses integrations that make taking money and payments that much easier. Worldpay is another.

 

Too expensive

What is the market saying? Are you competitive? What is your USP, why use you over a competitor?

It goes without saying that you should know exactly what it is you are bringing to the table and what it is you are offering your prospective sign ups.

How will using you make their lives easier? How will paying you £495 get them to where it is that they think they need to be? Is your sales copy answering these questions? Will an early bird sign up be that all important carrot that’ll make the difference?

You have to try and communicate the value of your product and tell people how it’ll enrich their lives.

Lack of confidence in the product

Related to the above really, but what is it about your product that sets it apart? Do you have testimonials from others who have used you previously? Video citations perhaps?

As simple as it sounds, you really do need to bolster your product, Don’t just assume that everyone will have heard of you. The world’s a big place. Try and create a feeling that what you offer is special. Limit spaces, make it exclusive.

People like to feel that they are a part of something special, something that is of limited resource, something that has value. Try and create that.

Venue date/ Venue unsuitable

People often lead busy lives with limited opportunities and time to do things that are important to them.

Is it possible to offer multiple dates? Can this be a monthly gig? Maybe you can run your event in multiple locations at different times? Call it a travelling roadshow perhaps.

The easier you make it for people to attend, the more likely it is that they’ll sign up and the more likely it is that your PPC click won’t be wasted.

Wasn’t really interested anyway

Tyre kickers and time wasters are a fact of life. If you track your visitors and what it is they do and notice that IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx keeps costing you money, then once a month perhaps, you can go through your web logs and identify and exclude them from future click activity. If you’re a little devilish you can even serve them up custom messages comprising hi,  feck and off :D

Too much information/page confusing/poor layout

Consider how your content looks to your visitors. make it logical, include calls to action and don’t over load your visitors. Consider using expandable sections, use positive imagery, ensure that your buy now buttons are visible both at the top and the bottom of the page. Ensure that your content renders across platforms catering for the dizzying array of devices that people use on the web.

If you can afford it, consider talking to a conversion optimization specialist to see if they can help or guide you further.

Other channels

PPC is of course but one tiny facet of the web economy and I couldn’t possibly begin to cover them all today, it’s just too big a piece with too many overlaps but perhaps it’s at least sparked a dendrite or two.

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The Magic Box of Glut – Wizards, Sampmerians, Elves and Pink Marshamallow Castles

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The Magic Box of Glut

Once upon a time there was a magical world called Glut – Everything happened in the world of Glut, the people within it did all manner of things. They built pink castles from weather resistant marshmallows and cool lakes made out of lemonade and beer where hamburger flavoured fish swam. Some folks knew how to make really fast cars that ran on magic beans made by their friends in the forest of emeralds.

It all seemed ideal in the world of Glut but progress was slow. Few knew how to fish for the hamburger flavoured fish and the magic beans that grew in the forest of Emeralds were known but to the people of Fark. The bottom line was that news traveled slowly in Glut, information was often controlled by the powerful and where it wasn’t, it was difficult for merchants to gain wide reach or appeal for their ideas and products.

Up on a hill next to a mountain in a place called Gooleg  there lived two special wizards.

They were clever wizards backed by the powers of InvestorLand who knew that everywhere they went in the world, people had ideas that they wanted to share so they went to a little known place called Altavistaland and took on the mighty wizard Inktomi where they learnt the secrets of  Retrivicus Informanicus. They went to Microland and bought the ingredients required and built a big magic box.

The magic box would enable people to learn anything they liked – they’d be able to ask it questions and it would scour the world and find them any answer they needed. They of course, needed the worlds help and explained to merchants that they would visit them and scan their products and ideas and help spread their love to the world. Merchants who didn’t want to play were free to put up a little no thank you sign outside their stores but in reality, no one did.

People and merchants alike loved the magic box and word spread like wildfire. The two magicians became very famous and gained riches beyond their wildest dreams. Merchants clamoured to have their ideas and wares included in the box. Soon the box was brimming with everything and people even began to stop using their brains.

For a time, all was well and the world flourished as people innovated – the pink castles grew bigger and artificial rainbows could be summoned at will thanks to the inventions of Fred the artificial Unicorn maker.

The two magicians needed many hands to keep their box working, they employed little elves who had special powers that ensured that answers and information was checked for accuracy and usefulness. Over time, some residents of Glut felt that not everyone’s ideas and wares were freely accessible. The wizards and their elves protested and fought to assure the residents of Glut that information was provided based on a secret recipe that determined what was and what wasn’t useful. Not everyone  was convinced  secret groups formed and protesters formed outside the walls of Gooleg. Among the protesters wagons arrived filled with people from Sampmer land.

The Sampmerians were a clever breed of Gluts who were renowned for their own magic skills, they called meetings and put up posters imploring folks to come to them with their magic box problems. For small fees, the Sampmerians would help folks get their stuff in to the magic box. They used magic that few can could understand, some called it a dark art but it was much cheaper than paying magic tokens to answer every question.

The folks at Gooleg didn’t really like the folks from Sampmeria but were smart enough to realise that ordinary folks of limited magic token liked what they did. Rather than be accused of heavy handedness or worse still, vested self interest ( a terrible crime in the land of Glut) the guardians of the box drew up charters that dictated how or why a merchant would be selected for inclusion. These charters were often edited and changed to keep up with the magic practiced by the folks from Sampmeria and used warm smooth language that seemed to be fair and simple to follow.

The Sampmerians on occasions noticed that the box guardians removed merchants from the box, often silently. Where this happened Sampmerians would often protest and outline the hypocrisy of the box and call for greater transparency. Others would tow the wizard line and point at how a merchant had used a banned piece of  magic to get them to the front of the answer queue, effectively cheating the fairness of the box.

Sometimes the box guardians pulled out their trumpets and stood atop their castle of Gooleg and proclaimed that a well known merchant had been removed from the box for using the darker arts of the Sampmerians whilst saying that they adored the compliant merchants who were more than welcome to use the advice offered by the white hatted Sampmerians.

The Sampmerians at their hearts had a simple message around how hard it was for the wizards and their elves to keep up with everything and that through them, people could set themselves free and compete with the Sadrowists * at a much cheaper price.

* A Sadrowist was a name given to folks who always appeared to have answers for folks before everyone else, they often wore off white or yellow tinged tunics to give their answers and they always answered above anyone wearing white alone, their hats were always pristine white and the wizards and elves loved them.

The rules of the magic box whilst not explicit, appeared to dictate that only people who paid with magic tokens were allowed to wear non white clothes everyone else had to wear white, there were no exceptions.

When people asked why this was, the guardians of the magic box explained that the box needed magic tokens to work properly, and magic tokens were a scarce resource and the acquisition of which was a multi-varied skill that whilst not everyone was able to master with ease;  could in theory be acquired in sufficient numbers if try tried hard enough or had enough value in their answers.

After a time, ordinary people using the magic box became a little bored with the same old Sadrowist answers and found ways of using their own personal magic scrolls to get answers from the folks in white further down the queue. This was in part due to a perception that the elves and wizards weren’t really playing fair anymore and that people preferred to ask who they wanted rather than someone who’d barged their way to the front through access to magic tokens.

The magic box itself was a little like a Tardis. From the outside it was small but on the inside it was infinite, full of doors and rooms and alleys and vales. The box was patrolled by the elves and rooms were often inspected for compliance with the ever changing charter.

Merchants within had to wear white hats. Anything that was construed to be a shade darker and merchants risked being removed from their rooms within the box. The nature of the magic box meant that sometimes merchants had to push harder to get the front of the queue when a question was asked. When they did this, their hats would sometimes get grubby in the jostle and it was hard to keep them clean. Not everyone cared of course and people getting the right answers to their questions didn’t really care if the answered’s hat was a little bit dirty. Yet, the merchants knew their hats needed to be scrupulously clean so took great steps to ensure this was so, spending many magic tokens monthly to do so.

This of course made the folks at Gooleg very cross as they much preferred the merchants to spend their tokens with them and become Sadrowist in deed and nature. A fact of the power of the magic box was that if people didn’t use the Sadrowists then the power of the wizards and elves would diminish and the evil emperors Applejob or Zuckerface might rise in ascendancy

This meant that the folks at Gooleg could never really rest but for fear of aggravating the crowd, couldn’t be seen to overtly attack those who’d they’d built their fortunes and riches around, so resorted to elaborate measures to deter the Sampmerian followers.

They bred special animals that could sniff out the scent of a Sampmerian and apply blanket locks to the doors of merchants who’d used them, they’d call them cute little names like Puppy or Kitten rather than Rottweiler or Lion. This was devastating for the merchants forcing some to adopt Sadrowist garbs. Many starved and their families withered, for some it meant whole villages would be forced to eat cake. The wizards and elves proffered that if you had no magic tokens then your value to the world was limited and that ultimately there were better people around to answer user questions.

As time progressed the wizards of the box realised that they were winning the battle and that ordinary folk were a little bit thick and didn’t care or realise that the wizards were gathering the worlds information and silently killing off the originating sources. For some questions they began to answer things themselves. Elves were tasked with providing direct answers extracted from what was already known and where it wasn’t, then users were given an option of opening one of three doors to ask the originator themselves.

After a few years of this, the merchants had sold up and the wizard and their elves owned everything. Everyone worked for the wizards and to question them meant death and starvation. The pink castles turned grey and dank and the Unicorns all disappeared. The lakes of beer and lemonade had big fences erected around them and the hamburger fish had been eradicated, replaced by the fishes that tasted of horse.

The end.

No related posts.

Slapped with a bouquet of barbed links

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Spam spam spam!

I was going to say something about Interflora but It’s pretty much been said by virtually the whole SEO world now so I won’t but I will talk about various issues arising as there’s always value in pulling that apart.

In terms of penalties, of the 10′s of 1000′s of brands one or two brands getting dinged every 8 months or so is hardly earth shattering (unless you’re the brand of course) but imagine if Google dinged a brand every week or other week?

What then?

Today, the scale of Google being spammed across most verticals by brands of all descriptions is HUGE.

Few brands ranking in Google today for 100′s or 1000′s of keywords have a totally clean profile, in fact it’s fair to say that most will be more than a little grubby, especially if they’ve used companies in the past who advocated any of the tactics that Google has since frowned upon.

Few will hold their hands up and most will vehemently protest at how their tactics are Google compliant and blah blah blah… What else can they realistically say?

Just go and look at who’s ranking in your favourite vertical and answer with hand on heart that company X hasn’t used a tactic that under a microscope isn’t just slightly questionable. It’s all in the interpretation and of course, who’s doing the interpreting.

Who created this link monster?

Maybe we can actually blame Google for creating this mess…

It was they after all who back in the day bragged about how cool their algo was using Page Rank and anchor text to divine the importance of a web page. Prior to this, people just wrapped links in URLs or sarcastic words of praise or used ‘here’ or ‘this’ or ‘that’ to point to stuff that they thought was worthy of a mention.

Post Page Rank  and Google and the whole marketing world said to itself “Oooh” so if we do a lot of that anchor text stuff we’ll all get a ranking boost in this Google thing and make more sales etc.

So of course, lots of folks in the online marketing world started writing advice to their clients around encouraging people to talk about them with their keywords and the rest as they say is…

Short history,  Google introduces nofollow and slaps websites for blatant manipulation of link profiles, offering reinclusion routes for those prepared to fess up and clean up.

So, what sensible brand after this latest flexing of brawn  would knowingly engage in tactics likely to get them slapped? Knowingly, probably none –   and herein begins the problem.

If links still power the web (they do) then whoever can sell an idea that delivers lots of citations in a safe way, will win lots of interest from clients. SEO’s by their nature will look to see what ranks a page and will seek to replicate/do more of it.  It’s a base definition for sure, and the whitest of white hatters will breath in sharply and protest but…meh, whatever.

Press releases, advertorials, guest blogging, hosted content etc have all be vaunted as safe tactics at some point or other because they were seen to have relatively high bars to access and were sold as being totally Google compliant which along with a sensible link text approach could add value and would deliver second order benefits to their web presence.

Let’s have a look at a couple of these:

Press releases – Once upon a time these were a standard means of announcing something cool. They cost money to access and had strict rules that said things like, no anchor text,  few links, quality editorial pieces etc etc. Over time, they all turned to SEO shit of course. Companies that provided the services got greedy and said themselves “hey we can make money here and help folks spam the Google” So they did, and they added various SEO options and set various tiers and turned it in to little more than a Google manipulation service.

Advertorials/Hosted Content - The name’s a bollocks but hey, it’s with us now so lets look at what it is. A paid editorial piece. Nothing wrong with those either, we live in a commercial world and for years journalists have been talking about people for a buck. We see them every week in the Sunday supplements, those travel pieces sponsored by big travel brand. Then along comes the world of Google and folks get all smart and realise that they can be a little cute and creative and inject a few links here and there to their various products. Newspapers desperate for every income stream they can muster start selling these as products and advertisers are more than keen to line up for these citations from such lofty publications. Net impact, yet another Google spamming tool.

Actually, I’m going to stop there as you know exactly where it’s going with guest blogging too. Yep, if used aggressively yet another tool to spam the Goog. Sold as a great way to engage readership, stimulate content but ultimately another notion that’s mainly fucked over by lazy bastards looking for a cheap link to their content of dubious value.

Shoot the Gamekeeper?

To be fair to those comfortable folks at Google, they’ve at least set out the rules to try and protect their cash machine and said, if you are going to get people to link to you and want us to rank you fairly, then we need you to let us know that where money has influenced such decisions, you need to wrap them up with a link condom.

It stands to reason that they don’t want folks being able to say that money corrupts their index as to do so is a very slippery slope. Can you imagine if everyone just bought links left right and center? Word might get out that through doing so, you can get lots of free traffic and spend a whole lot less on Adwords. Yep, Google would implode…

But hey, I’ve probably said this before as have a ton of other folks working in this space called the web.

Post Flower Slap

So where next though? What will the agencies and brands around the world be talking about on Monday?

How many will be getting down and dirty and unpicking their spam profiles? Moreover, need they even bother!?

Let’s face it, Google has a habit of smacking a brand periodically, sending shock waves throughout as folks gasp and OH EM GEE, yet the reality is that for most, it either continues as usual or the historical status quo remains!

I won’t single out verticals as we can all but go and look at anyone we so choose and see the most blatant spamming of the Goog by most of those occupying page one, if not today, then at least in the months or recent years previous as those actions of the past help them stay where they are today.

Guidelines shift and what is ok today, isn’t necessarily ok tomorrow as Google determines the line and any tactic that threatens THEIR line is probably at risk, especially if it’s discussed within circles of potential embarrassment.

You might think that on the back of these that everyone who’s doing this will stop it and fall in to line, yet previous high profile dings like this clearly haven’t halted the onslaught, it still goes on and companies will still get aggressive, especially if  they’re brazen (or stupid/clever) enough. A view might be that it’s worth taking the chance that among the 1000′s of brands across the web, that it won’t be them who gets singled out for a banning.

You’ve only got to go take a look at CPC’s in the flower vertical to realise very quickly that the organic rewards for a position 1 or 2 across the flower vertical is just massive and the more cynical among you might go as far to venture that ultimately it was more than worth the risk and that the ROI on’spam tactic’ investment was simply stellar.

Little but not often

Google really  doesn’t do this kind of high profile thing too often as to do so might put them under the spotlight and attract a potential negative PR whirl spin not to mention alienating its user base who expect to see these brands in the SERPs for their queries.

Could we say that businesses are potentially being a little lazy in their link acquisition efforts choosing to use agencies who either have little creative talent or are just stuck in some old school  ’rinse and repeat’ mentality that achieves little?

Is there any credence to the notion that  Google really doesn’t want folks to merrily use SEO folks anymore at all? Is it simply that SEO goes against almost everything their business model thrives on? Do things like this simply reinforce this notion, or is Google simply policing its index and it’s more a case of SEO’s making a big deal out of something that would otherwise be a private affair between Gamekeeper and Poacher?

The biggest takeaway is as it ever was is that if you do anything at scale and it isn’t tied to cool or funky or hip and it hasn’t generated the various other expected signals then potentially, your’e exposing your website to scrutiny and a possible whacking. That I think, is the real message that Google wants to send, fear encourages compliance and adds that little extra weight to the notion that SEO isn’t too safe a vehicle for marketing budget. Some will listen and some won’t.

Until the next one I guess…

 

 

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Buying and Selling Links to Rank on Google in 2013

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Everyone buys and sells links

So, if buying links that pass Page Rank is against Google’s terms of service and to do so means a potential ding to your rankings what should you do?

Of course, it all comes down to how you define paid and what is and what isn’t a bought link.

Are the links that came about due to the hours of research put in to a piece that investigated or highlighted common interest piece Z bought links, or are they free earned links?

It’s a serious question.

The Hypothetical

Journalist/researcher Fred for example is paid by organisation Daily News.

His job is to write good quality pieces for editorial.

Editorial works closely with marketing and they have lots of conversations around how they grow market share and increase general profitability.

Marketing works closely with sales, and sales are always coming up with ideas for helping them succeed online.

Sales suggests to marketing that it would be really cool if editorial wrote a series of pieces that explored holiday venues in Africa. Marketing uses a few online tools and decides to focus on Egypt, simply because they noticed that last year there was huge spike in search volume and that perhaps it would make sense to ride that crest again, by catering to that query space.

Marketing sits down with sales and begins to thrash out a plan. Marketing talks to editorial and mentions that there’s a shed load of interest in Egypt and that it’s looking to create a splash both off and online and will be looking to sell ad spots to support it.

Editorial, tows the line as it knows that revenue is important and trusts the views of marketing.

Editor John sits down with Fred and explains the brief. Fred goes off and researches all the players in the Egypt holiday query space and draws up a big list of players in the market.

Fred passes his early research back to John, who passes it on to marketing. Marketing and sales sit down and sales say thanks very much.

Sales plan is simple, contact players and explain that they are doing a big piece on Holidays to Egypt  and how they’re inviting interested parties to be discussed. They mention how they have a huge readership and how they’ll be likely to rank for a host of Egypt related keywords too, which will likely drive sales and revenue to those who play.

Sales get back to marketing and explain how they have 4 big brands on board, all happy to pony up £xxxxx for the privilege of being discussed in this in depth piece.

Marketing talks to editorial and sits down with John and Fred enthusing that holiday brands A B C and D will be co-operating with them to supply various pieces of information and prizes to help create an amazing textual piece for publication.

Fred goes away and crafts a top quality piece replete with stunning visuals, competitions and what not. The piece links to the various brands where appropriate in ways that are apt and everybody is happy with the outcome. Fred doesn’t care about nofollow or jump links or noindex. Neither does he care about anchor text or brand signals.

He doesn’t know that anchor text isn’t really so important anymore and that actually, the link juice is what matters and that the on site SEO, brand strength and authority of the linked to site will take care of any requisite ranking ability down the line.

Fred isn’t aware of the details that sales made  with brands A B C and D; it isn’t Fred’s job to know, Fred’s just happy to get paid and is pretty pleased that his work will be shown to 1000′s and inform interested parties looking to Holiday in Egypt.

In terms of Fred’s piece it’s simple – If the publisher uses the words ‘Advertorial’ then Google expects them to use nofollow on any outbound links  that may benefit as a result. Google’s view being that it doesn’t want it’s index to be influenced by paid advertising. However, if the publisher does this, then the piece itself becomes less attractive as an advertising proposition as the Advertiser may be primarily attracted by the link juice provided by this premium publication. It knows that the piece is likely to be scraped by other lesser publishers too and that the link juice accrued should help it rank for it’s own list of desired terms.

The Real World

Let’s look at a real world example of how the Guardian newspaper has established various partnerships in the travel vertical.

Taking the query ‘cruise the river nile‘ as an example, we’ll see that in Google UK the Guardian’s travel site ranks fairly well at position 3 just below the fold.

The url of http://www.guardianholidayoffers.co.uk/holiday/2934/cruise-the-river-nile is the landing page and within that page is a link to a page that discusses the partner with a phone number for those who wish to contact them in this case ‘Discover Egypt‘  which links to an internal landing page of http://www.guardianholidayoffers.co.uk/discover-egypt.

A booking link exists also, but this uses various devices (captures) to ensure that the partner itself gets no link love from the domain.

Safe, compliant and Google friendly, super affiliate, Google partner, no blatant link or advertorial here.

The only site that benefits link wise, is the mothership of “guardian.co.uk” which of course spreads its link juice throughout its domain.

The benefits to the Guardian here are great.

If the relationship with ‘Discover Egypt’ ever sours, the Guardian can easily transfer the relationship to a new partner and continue to rank for their ex partners brand name. Quite a win for the Guardian and of course another reason for the existing  brand partner to stay on board through the leverage of the Guardians SERP strength.

All good huh?

Okay, let’s look take a quick look on the parent domain of Guardian.co.uk  and see if  their partner benefits by way of a link.

Here’s a good page here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/jun/18/middle-east-bargain-holidays-egypt

Not surprisingly, the page also happens to rank for “Holiday deals in the Middle East ” incidentally, it also carries Google Ads.

This page contains lots of links to lots of suppliers, but nothing to the actual partner, but wait, what’s that at the bottom of the page.

It looks like a link to another sub brand of the Guardian’s at  http://www.ivebeenthere.co.uk/tips/36923 and low and behold that page links to their travel partner of discoveregypt.co.uk. How very shocking.

 

Putting to one side the complex issue of relationships, and sub branded web properties to one side for one minute, we’ll see that the resource page here http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/jun/18/middle-east-bargain-holidays-egypt says nothing about it being an advertorial and we have no way of knowing what motivated the writer or the editorial team to produce it.

We can but surmise, and try and make a judgement call based on our knowledge of how this stuff works but that’s all it’ll ever be.

None of the links on the page have a no follow element and the page itself is freely accessible to spiders and bots. It doesn’t appear to be benefiting any one singular property alone and we’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise.

We can but trust in the integrity of the publisher and assume that all is above board.

We’d have no idea if any of the web properties linked to paid for the privilege  we’d have to ask them individually to find out and even then, they may well have an NDA that prevented them from disclosing. For Google to try and police such a scenario would of course be insane.

A scan of the code  shows that it does contain a good solid do follow link to its other sub branded holiday  property at http://www.guardianholidayoffers.co.uk/holiday/4421/carthage-roman-africa-and-moorish-tunisiaI thus contributing to its ability to rank for related keywords.

Nothing wrong with that either, just sensible sub branding with SEO benefits that flow through. Why wouldn’t a business try and benefit itself? Who can categorically prove that everything it has done in the way that it has is to benefit its ability to rank in Google?

From my SEO perspective it  is clear. Create a high quality reference page that people will cite and perhaps link to.  Get the page to rank and benefit, fill it with related useful links to a bit of ‘UGC’  and put these on a separate domain to ensure separation and licence to thrill and where possible allow users or partners to get customers to comment on holidays they’ve had and who they used, link out to lots of other domains for free and make it difficult to argue that the page exists for no other reason than to help a person interested in that topic.

Clearly today,  the Guardian doesn’t do Advertorials  but it did in the past, just like a range of other papers who’ve seen themselves Google dinged, just go and do a site:guardian.co.uk advertorial query to see a nice selection of its past endeavours. No use of nofollow, noindex, exclusion by robots protocols or anything.

Is this some huge sin to get your knickers in a twist over? No, not really. Legacy systems are always a problem and the biggest headache for many publishers is that what is acceptable in 2009 isn’t necessarily so in 2013 especially as Google lets so many things slide for as long as it does.

The Takeaway

The takeaway at first glance is perhaps simple – create a proposition of value that is sophisticated enough to sidestep the scrutiny of blatant accusations of lazy link buying. Create a quality offering that adds significant value that is compelling and useful to your users. That may seem glib and may be quite hard to digest from an agency with limited budget perspective, but it’s an honest and  realistic way forward.

At second glance, it’s probably a little more intricate as not everyone is a Guardian newspaper or big brand with unlimited funds. If you can’t afford to do it properly then maybe it’s a signal to back off and try something else. If you can afford to though, then it’s clear that with a little time and effort quality arrangements that win in the SERPs and don’t get you dinged can be maintained in a way where all parties can benefit.

The Guardian example is a little tripartite in construct. Mothership, UGC domain, and Super Affiliate Value Add domain that benefit all constituencies. User wins, Publisher wins, Advertiser Wins, as does Google via its ad network and quality answer to user queries.

If we wanted to ask ourselves is the Guardian selling links or are its partners buying links then from the traditional Google type of understanding the answer would be no, however when we look at it all it’s clearly nonsense, as investment has been made and people all over various organisations have worked hard to establish relationships and that they’ve all been paid for doing so. The end product is one that works and is Google guideline compliant… or is it?

Dig dig dig dig

If we dig deep enough and dissect and ask questions then we can begin to skew it all and cast doubt, but I guess therein is the benchmark, if it really is a job to decipher, if it really takes a high degree of experience to ascertain, then it’s probably ok and will stand the test of scrutiny. Google doesn’t want this SEO stuff to be easy, it wants you to work damn hard for your link love and in some cases would rather you didn’t bother or where you did that they get a little kick back in to the bargain via adsense or partner ads.

It’s been said a million times by folks smarter than me but if you buy links in ways that make Google look stupid then you are asking for trouble, if it’s too easy, or too obvious then at some point you’re at risk of it being interpreted similarly by a distinguished Google engineer.

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How easy is it to determine a good or a bad link?

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Is that a Good Link or a Bad Link?

I played with a new tool this morning. It was some kind of link evaluation tool.

It purported to tell you whether a link from a URL was good or bad or somewhere in the middle.

Cool, I thought.

So I gave it a go and popped in 6 URL’s. All came up with wildly wacky results, all were deemed to be spam, all suggested I should do something funny with them and run away screaming.

Haha.

I’m not going to link to this tool, but I applaud the effort and love the little bit of it that will generate lots of discussion both for what it’s trying to do and some of the more wackier outcomes.

It might be fun to actually think some of it through and explore the whole notion of good and bad links and what might be a good signal and what might not. The bottom line is of course, that none of it matters really as ultimately it’s what Google or (if you like the traffic) Bing think of it.

It’s in that vein that I write this.

Link Tactics, History and Interpretation

If we track back over the years, we might find all manner of references to how Google determines what is a good link and what is a bad. We’ll find that their position has shifted over the years as they’ve reclassified their determination of what the web should be and how useful or useless a resource might be.

There’s been reams of discussion around quality rater documents and how they’ve classified URL’s as offensive, offensive being not becoming to the standards that Google wants to index or rank very highly.

Pagerank, specifically; linking structures that been determined as schemes designed to have manipulated Pagerank or link juice, have been called out as ‘dangerous’ and against the Google guidelines. Pagerank sculpting as it became to be known was thrown in under the bus as a tactic that might get you in to hot poodo.

There’s also been the general ongoing war on paid links and the various high profile dings given to companies who’ve been caught out.

Usually, these have been fairly high profile brands. At other times, they’ve been targeted at bloggers who’ve been perceived as having a fairly loud voice and audience. The tactics identified as bad, seem to change yearly. What was ok in 2006, isn’t necessarily ok in 2013.

The general rule seems to be that the moment an effective tactic is discussed within the SEO community to the point of ridicule, then Google comes out and makes a pronouncement, usually by video or if especially egregious, at some high profile marketing or search type conference.

Here’s a list of a few tactics that spring to mind that have drawn commentary at one point or other.

Directory Submissions – Generally accepted as spammy and a low quality signal.

This discussion from some time back gives a little insight in to how the ground had shifted from a position where a directory link from a place that had editorially evaluated a listing and wasn’t a free for all was a good thing (Yahoo, ODP) to a position where due to everyone and their cat building a directory to cash in and effectively sell links for page rank and anchor text purposes, wasn’t. 

Debra: In the past Google/you have stated directories with strong editorial policies were OK to submit even if they required a submission fee to be reviewed. Is this still the case?

Matt: That’s still the case, but bear in mind that Google will ultimately decide which domains or directories to trust. Just because a directory claims to have strong editorial oversight doesn’t mean that it will meet Google’s criteria or that Google will trust the domain.

Debra: If an editorially run directory offers a sponsored listing option, do you consider them (the sponsored links) paid links and against your TOS?

Matt: Adding a nofollow attribute to sponsored links remains the best practice for any website.

In other words, Google decides, and if you ask folks to pay to play then it might be a good idea to wrap the link in a condom, else risk the wrath of a Googler in a bad mood some time down the line. 

Sponsored Blog Posts – Not very bright if done wearing size 15 shoes.

This seems cut and dry right? If you go to one of these websites that pays mummy bloggers to write about stuff on those blog networks, then you’re asking for trouble. Easy to identify, be it from a manual or algorithmic perspective.

if(($post_count_with_money_kwanchors > $defined_percentage) or ($links_per_post_to_singular_domain > $defined_number OR ( $links_to_money_kws > 1 AND $web_graph_shows_more_of_the_same))  might be one easy way of folding in an algorithmic stance which could be overlain  against whatever other set of metrics they might like to check $spends_money_on_adwords $is_a_brand etc etc.

Press releases – A rapidly diminishing tactic of efficacy, abused by users and platform holders

For a time, and even today these can be and are a useful tactic to employ both for general PR and SEO link benefits.The idea is that you get your great news item out there and all the cool news folks interested in your niche will see your stuff and write about it too. Hey, even Google will use your stuff and output it in their news results so you can even get on the first page for car insurance.

You can still get on the first page for car insurance, but in the UK at least you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the page and using places like PR Web for example just won’t cut it anymore.It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that someone in the Googleplex might just have read about things like this http://service.prweb.com/pricing/package/advanced/ and decided that generally, weightings from such things should be adjusted in some way.

Barry posted a link and a quote from a Googler that said:

I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.

Quite unambiguous, you might think and hey, they can’t catch them all but its pretty clear in its intent which is “hey you guys, press release tactics are on our radar too, so be careful if you use these too as we might just ding yo ass if we catch you”.

Advertorials – A recent Google post by Darth Cutts set the record straight on these

Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.

The message is simple – do this and you’re dinged. In this particular example they dinged Interflora and stripped out some of the Pagerank from newspapers who were selling these too.

Widgets, Themes etc – A great idea, oft over done for search ranky benefits

Here’s the thing. You create a cool theme or widget for bloggers or site owners which is cool as it does stuff and adds value. However, from a Google perspective it’s not cool at all, if you also get a little link love from your actions as it’s not really earned in the way that they’d like it to be.

As far as widgets go, the code it uses might be a little javascript or an iframe that folks can just pop on in.

Of course, once people like us get a hold of them we tend to get link erections and offer up funky ideas to boost your link pop too. We might have said stuff like “Hey mr browser, just in case you are really old and can’t parse this html stuff, we’ve include a special bit of code called noscript which will show people what to do. Yeah, it has a link to our clients too but don’t worry about that, it’ll help your rankings…”

I am being funny of course, not everyone did that kind of stuff but some did. Some didn’t even bother hiding it and some just left a little brand link to the originator.

For themes it’s not half as egregious, but it can be over cooked too and generally, 1000′s of links from a footer in 2013 just isn’t the best thing to have in a link profile, especially if you come under scrutiny either manually or through Penguin.

Here’s Google’s head of webshhpam Matt Cutts again, talking about the value of links from widgets and themes

… links from article marketing, widgets and other pre-curated content types are unlikely to drive search rankings or visibility

Competitions – Link to me using this link text and win a prize/cash payment etc

Some folks took a view that one of the other possible reasons behind the Interflora penalty that lasted mere days because they are a brand and spend lots with Google  was that they were getting bloggers to write about them via a mechanism called ‘Competition’ the rules set out that all you had to do was do something simple like write about flowers and you’d win some roses or some other silly gift that wasn’t worth very much. However, the link value to Interflora was another story altogether which might well have helped them to rank for cool search terms like flowers or roses or valentines day.

Back in 2007 a very nice chap named David got dinged for something similar. He ran an awesome competition with some fabulous prizes. Someone named Jenni tried to warn him at the time, but he decided that it was good to go. Word spread and everyone was buzzing and bloggers talked about him and entered and linked and…you can read about how he recovered here.

So these tactics aren’t new, but they require a little thought and consideration around how they might be interpreted first.

Affiliate Schemes - Pay people referal fees and get them to boost your link profile whilst at it

There’s 1000′s of affiliate schemes out there. Outside of tradedoubler or CJ for instance, some folks roll their own. For a time these aff links were great for site owners and all very innocent. Some people realised that with a little server side jiggery pokery folks could have their cake and eat it. People using your affiliate add code would often use on topic anchor text as they wanted people to click through and hopefully make a purchase. this way, they’d get paid and the merchant would be a happy bunny.

Some of us realised that there was a bit of a missed link opportunity here and that with a little thought, such schemes could be tweaked to add a secondary benefit. Users could be redirected with session Id’s or Cookies and link love could flow through to a decent organic landing page too. header status 301 mr Google and boom, watch those rankings rise.

Of course, like anything a little bit crafty that’s done to the extreme and bragged about, Google eventually gets to hear and makes a pronouncement on it, usually expressing the view that you use nofollow. Subtext of which is that if you don’t, then it might be interpreted as an overt manipulation of your backlink profile.

 

Guest Blogging/ Hosted Content -  Let us provide you lovely content for your readers, all we ask is that you link back to our client with a few silly words in the anchor text

Dear publisher, we love your site so much and was wondering whether you’d care to run a cool piece on your website. We’ll even pay towards your hosting costs as we think that content like yours is just the best.

I’ve had emails like this. I’m sure you have too. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with this at all. But in Google’s world there’s everything wrong with it. You’re using money to get links to manipulate your link profile and if they just let things like this slide without nofollow attributes being applied then, they’d never make any money cos people might say, “Sod adwords, this is more profitable for me”

The tricky thing is that it is a good tactic for boosting your rankings, provided that you do it in a semi intelligent way. If that footprint is all too present and in the opinion of Google your content is of low quality or otherwise spammy, then you’re really asking for either a demotion of the ability for your blog to rank or pass link juice. If you are the guest blogger and you’re not thinking your tactic through, then you risk poisoning your link profile and seeing your site tank.

You might want to ask yourself whether it is really natural to get #n new links per week from blogs for money keyword that are the same.

Here’s that Matt chap again, talking about guest blogging

 

Forum Sig Links

Most half decent forum software these days has cottoned on to the ways of the Google rumpers of this world and have given site admins the ability to either nofollow signature links or hide them to the likes of bots and what not. That said, there’s a ton of unpatched or old software out there that gives people an easy link and an opportunity to inject some juicy link text.

These can be pretty powerful (amazed that they still work) and some firms actually hire people to go out and acquire. Some clever bastards write software too that enables you to do a mass blast, or stepped attack and build up x number of links in y days. xrumer being but one of many.

Comments on Blogs

Hey parse_poster_name, I loved your post on string from title tag  before reading this I knew very little, I’m now a little wiser. Thanks Money keyword in name field

Similar to the above, folks are still running around and doing this type of stuff manually and programmatically. If you’re a blogger then you know all about these wankers and sigh if they make it past your comment filters.

Fact is, they still work and people are still massively ignorant about the reasons why. Innocent/not very bright bloggers often think that these commenters are just being nice so happily leave their comments in place, pleased that someone has taken the time to comment on their stuff.

Google’s position is clear and defaults to the standard nofollow, link to them at your own risk perspective.

So you get the general picture. People do a lot of things to get links and get people talking about them on the web, that’s a given. Yet what isn’t so clear or easy to divine is how these tactics are interpreted. Do we really have to nofollow EVERYTHING to be safe? What about people who link to us naturally? Don’t they sometimes use methods that might be considered dodgy? Do we really have to run around webmaster tools or majestic seo constantly evaluating our link profiles, contacting webmasters, forum owners, blog commenters etc?

If every link on the web was nofollowed then it would be a level playing field. Nothing would count and we could all get on with working out what it was that did ;) But of course that isn’t going to happen so we are left in a bit of a pickle.

We can hope that we never get misinterpreted by a human or an algo and just carry on building, writing and serving our clients, readers etc and hope that the various signals we’re creating everywhere are enough to keep us safe from the vagueries of the black box that is Google

Or

We can be proactive and fuss over every little link in our link profile and chase webmasters and site owners to alter a link to comply with Google.

Or

We can hope that someone builds a very cool tool that takes away and a lot of the legwork and alerts us when things are going tits up and helps us to evaluate them before we go all disavow crazy.

But building that tool isn’t easy either. Sure, we have all manner of data dumps we can inject in to such a tool and draw all sorts of conclusions around link placement, link duration, singular, sitewide, link makeup, link numbers, site authority, social mentions, links in, link ratios, pages indexed, pagerank, markup to name but a few and even with these, it’s not exactly easy.

So lets look at what might be good and what might be a bad link (I’m getting there)

How do we determine a bad link?

So, if a page has been around for say, 2 years and it had no Pagerank and that site had no pages indexed in Google then we might determine that from a quality perspective, it would score low. We might use one of those metrics from SEOmoz or A hrefs or Majestic to bear this out.

How about if that same site was just born? No pagerank, do follow links, poor quality scores from the link scrapers cited above? Would that make it a bad link? Should we chase site owner?

What if there were 100 of these? And if there are, are they on the same IP address? Are they using the same code base? Do we really know when they were created? How do we know that the site owners hadn’t blocked the link scrapers?

We might look at the number of links on the page. Are there 100′s of links to other domains?

We might look at who they are linking to. Are the sites they link to reputable for instance? Are they porn or pills or poker type domains that are totally outside of out niche?

Does our tool even allow us to stipulate a niche? Is it niche specific? If not then why not.

Are the links on the page hidden either through css or some other silly method like noscript or noembed or insert what other method you can think of?

If the linking site is quality and is ranking in Google, then does the link stand the test of scrutiny? Is it a natural earned link? Or has someone paid them to put it there.

If it’s a dofollow comment or forum link then is it a genuine one?

Is it a sponsored blog post? Would it be apparent to Google?

I’m not even going to ask about what is a good link as I think we can all agree that it’s all pretty messy and ultimately, Google decides.

If you care about ranking in Google then you need to keep a regular check on your link profile and manually review those that look suspect and even then you could be going OTT and actually diminishing your ability to rank.

A decent well thought out tool that asked lots of questions, that dug deep, that iterated out a few times, that queried multiple sources, that cross correlated with the Google Api might be a good way of taking the donkey work out of it, but I don’t think it exists today.

 

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Online Marketing Executive Opportunity West London (Kensington/Earls Court Area)

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I’m working with a really great company at the moment, helping out with various bits and pieces related to SEO and Online Marketing.

I can’t say who they are but they’re a well established bricks and mortar travel company with a great  product and team and are looking to enhance what they do and expand their offering.

They are looking for is someone who is passionate about online marketing and SEO who is looking for a long term role where they can grow and develop.

If you are job hopping to just fill up a CV then kindly move on.

This is a great opportunity to learn and grow with a long established company that has verve and vision for its products and future. You will over time, become an integral cog in an organisation that has a global growth strategy. You’ll also get to work with me!

The role description is ‘Online marketing Executive’ and will suit a recent college leaver or Uni grad.

You’ll need to be UK resident and legally allowed to work in the UK.

Salary is subject to experience.

There are a few minimum requirements such as:

1.    1 years experience in a related role
2.    Understands link building strategy – pros and cons
3.    Basic html understanding
4.    GA experience
5.    Can demonstrate a clear understanding of Keyword Research
6.    Copy optimisation
7.    Social media understanding
8.     Sociable and friendly can do attitude
9.     Demonstrable evidence for your love of this stuff
Pluses will be:
  • A degree in a technology or marketing discipline
  • Tourism Knowledge

If you are interested then do please send a covering letter and CV along with salary expectations to m11ksp  at gmail.com if you want to know more and are at BrightonSEO tomorrow (September 13th 2013) , then @ me on twitter @robwatts and I’ll speak with you in person!

NO agencies or recruiters please!

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Giving Your Content Marketing Happy Outreach and Amplification

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Content marketing. It’s been a bit of a buzz phrase now for a time.

I’m going to write about what people should consider when creating new content and how and where they should distribute it.

If you don’t have the time to read all this. Here’s the TL;DR version. Give people what they need, answer their questions and be found where they hang out. Do it with originality and be the best.

A lot of content produced these days falls flat on its face. Chris highlights some great reasons why too.

Unless you’re some leading luminary in your field or A list celeb that gets watched like a hawk day in day out or are some big news organisation with a loyal following then the reality is that you can’t create a piece of content on a whim and expect it to fly; you have to have a strategy with well thought out aims and objectives and goals in mind with what you’re looking to achieve.

Too many people start with “Me”. They sit there and fire up a word doc and begin to rabbit on about how amazing their latest product is or how cool their service is highlighting its sheen and competitive price or retrospect about their recent corporate event posting lots of pics showing stuff that no one really gives a stuff about and then wonder why it doesn’t get shared, or ranked, or linked to or exited after 18 seconds of yawn.

The best content is the content that gets shared and gets referenced and linked to and ranked and visited, again and again and again. If we can understand why that happens and then embed that knowledge at the planning stage, then we really can create something that’ll stand the test of time and win in the game.

Content Marketing Winning Formula

So, what’s the formula? What are the ingredients that’ll make your content fly? That’s of course a multifaceted answer which very much depends on your audience.

How sophisticated are they, what are they looking for, what do they expect from you but above all how useful will you be to their needs.

Need is a big word for four letters. In our day to to day lives we all have needs (oh wait that’s five).

Content marketing to Emotional Needs

The need to laugh or cry, the need to feel loved, appreciated, needed, to be recognised, cared for.

Content marketing to Intellectual Need

The need to have our curiosity sated, our minds stimulated, our questions explored and answered.

Content marketing to Physical Need

The need to get materials or sustenance to sustain and clothe ourselves, build and obtain what we need to run and fulfil aspects of our lives.

Many of us often look to the web to satisfy these of course and there are many different types of platform that do these very well:

The social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter for instance encourage repeat visits (stickiness) through enabling us to create our little networks of friends and influencers where we can learn from each other, keep tabs, rub shoulders with the cool or just laugh at stupid picture or stories.

The research answer platforms of Google and Bing again encourage repeat visits through giving us hints and tips around where we should go to find the answers to our intellectual or physical needs.

So what do the platforms referenced above have in common? The simple fact is that they’re all great examples of content marketing platforms in action, and they all succeed because of what they produce. At the very top level they accommodate people’s human needs and people use them to gain satisfaction.

The satisfaction word is super important. How many of us really enjoy being frustrated!? How many of us would use Google daily if we never found what we needed?

I’m reminded of an excellent little book I read a while back start with why. If we ask ourselves what it is we are doing and why, then it becomes a whole lot easier to crystalise our vision and focus upon where we think it is we need to be going.

Why are we here? To promote our cool content!

What would we like to achieve? Get lots of sales and visitors and earn a squillion pounds so we can go live on a paradise island and drink coconut water.

Well maybe, but in order to do that we’ve got to apply a principle or two and reeeeaally get inside the heads of our readers and or potential customers and give them what they need

So how do we do that?

Starting with Why and Assessing Where To Go

Lets go back to starting with why. We want to get more visitors to our site and we want them to stick around and come back again and again and share our stuff.

Ok great, that’s simple. Let’s assess what needs we are going to meet and be mindful too that the more needs we try to meet the more difficult it’s going to be to get the piece to fly.

Why? Oh ok, well in short; generally speaking if we spread ourselves too thinly and try to be all things to all men then the reality is we are likely to fail. Agree? Good.

Having assessed the needs and our ability to sate it, where to next?

In short, we go everywhere. That is, everywhere online that we think that is currently answering the need that we’d like to address.

We’ll take copious notes and ask ourselves if we can do what they are doing as well or better. If we believe that we can, then off we go, if we can’t and know our efforts are going to fall short then seriously, why even bother? Should you really try to be Gucci when you’re nothing better than the Kwikimart?

You of course are nothing like a Kwikimart, you believe that you are the Gucci of your field and you know you can go above and beyond and kick this competitors arse or at least run him close.

You’re in a bit of a quandary though as the piece seems so big and you don’t quite know where to start. Well, that’s probably because you aren’t really Gucci yet but hats off for confidence and aspiration, you’re up and coming in your sector and people are already buzzing about what you do and you know you have a winning product and you’d really like to rank for that single vanity keyword with lots of volume but are a realist too and know that for today at least that’s a little bit ambitious.

Being an expert in your field, you know however that people have a lot of questions around your sector, not singular one word phrases but questions that start with “What is” “How can” “Help me to” “Show me the best” plus a whole bunch of other variants. You’ve already done your broader keyword research and you know where the volume is generally – you understand that there are so called head terms (one and often two word search terms that generally convert rather poorly) and the longer tail terms (search phrases of three words or more that are more specific and varied). You know all about buying cycles and research modes and understand that through being a part of this process you’ll help convert visitors to paying customers through injecting yourself into that cycle.

A Holiday in The Canaries

At this point it’s probably good to use a real world mock up example to illustrate the point.

In this scenario, you are a holiday company; a travel agent,  and you provide people with a means of booking holidays all over the world.

best-hotelsin-canaries-auto

You’re not the biggest travel agent out there but you’re pretty hot and love what you do and really go above and beyond in sourcing your holidays for potential customers. You care about quality and have a USP that sets you apart from the competition, you have a great app that allows people to enter a set of criteria and your technology stack notifies them the moment a cancellation happens so they get a chance to book at a low price last minute say.

Your website is relatively new and has a big mountain to climb for those high end location type holiday keywords, but you’ve made a good start and you’re gaining momentum and think you’re on to a winner.

You’re a bit like a hunter in some respects. You know where your prey hangs out, you know where all the watering holes are, the little niches in the forest that they congregate in. You know how to bait a trap and you know what kind of food lures them in.

Your keyword research and PPC test campaigns have revealed that your holiday seeking target may often start their journey with a search for ‘holidays’, or they might refine it with other terms and searches ‘Canary Islands’ or ‘Canary islands Holidays’ , ‘Canary Island Hotels’ they might have a wife too or a friend and tell them to take a look too.

You’ll know that they’ll go off and search for similar versions and variants. They might find themselves on a relatively large provider site like Thomson or First Choice. They’ll look for deals or luxury type or budget or starred ratings or hotels with best reviews. They’ll look at pictures, temperatures, facilities, price and compare and contrast with other sites they may have encountered. If they’re smart or overly cautious they’ll want to read independent reviews too so they’ll perhaps seek out tripadvisor. They’ll want to get there easily too so they may well refine further by checking out travel options and flight times and prices. They may find that they’d rather disintermediate and segment the process booking flights and accommodation and transfers separately.

Back to those Needs again…

All of those stages require answers to a variety of need.

The need to feel safe, the need to know they’re not being ripped off and getting value for money. The need to be reassured that it’s going to be a lovely sunny destination and they’re going to have a great time. The need to know that they won’t have to leave at 3am to get a flight maybe and on and on…

When we think about it, there’s not a single piece of content that could answer all of those questions in one hit. It looks like a massive task and we’re unlikely to be able to hit them all overnight. But we CAN begin; our understanding of the sector and the NEEDS of our audience will help inform what we do. Our knowledge of the competition, the breadth of the opportunity puts us in a fantastic position to create a series of content pieces that will win out. We’ll assess the core volume like a river and look at all the tributary phrases that run off.

Holidays > Canary Islands > Canary islands holidays > Compare holiday prices canaries > What are the best hotels in the canary islands > What is hotel amazeballs really like? > Reviews Of Hotel Amazeballs > Canary Island resorts > Pictures of Hotel Amazeballs > Canary Island Flight times > Airports serving the canary Islands, Airport name parking, Accommodation near Airport name….

Answering the questions

Ok so we know what the questions are and we are going to answer them. We have a brand style and we our messaging is pretty much sorted generally but what of our audience and more to the point what kinds of content are at our disposal and what will get the best bang for our buck?

We can have the greatest content in the world but if it isn’t being surfaced then it might as well not exist. So we need to consider how our content is likely to be distributed and by whom.

We might find ourselves in a situation whereby we already have some great people talking about us. We’ve a whole community of people who’ve mentioned our app by way of WOM on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs. Great, but probably isn’t really enough by itself. We need to get our content on cool platforms with big communities. It’s why we added those additional buttons on our images that enable content to be shared to Pinterest or Instagram. It’s why we were meticulous in selecting vibrant amazing imagery that people would like and feel positive affinity to.

We also know that certain kinds of content seems to get shared more than others. People like to have fun it would seem, the need to laugh and smile. It’s for that reason why sites like Buzzfeed excel. Easy to digest content that makes people smile. Of course, unlike buzzfeed we aren’t in the “ad impression” game but we are in the add an impression one and so anything we can do that makes an impression on our visitors is worth doing.

Through establishing footholds on domains with big followings we give ourselves that opportunity to raise our brand and draw people in. We need to understand the audiences of our partners and deliver them results. Buzzfeed, Facebook, Reddit all want content that’s great, that fulfills their users needs, that gets shared and generates ad impressions. They don’t want your boring product page that says nothing and in many ways neither does anyone else! Google wants to give its users what they want too.It wants to surface the best content, the content that answers need, the content that will bring them back again and again and again.

We mentioned previously the USP of our make believe holiday company – a nice simple shareable idea that people will share with others. A solution to people’s problems, in this example the problem of paying too much for holidays perhaps.

You’ll need to probably supplement your efforts with some cold hard cash, a bit of Facebook advertising perhaps or a dalliance with Twitter ads or Google and Bing PPC of course. Some of you will be ahead already having done the hard work of creating great engaged networks of followers and friends on your social platforms, a ready army of content amplifiers ready to do your bidding and share your content IF it’s good enough of course.

So it’s simple really isn’t it?

Think about the needs of people, think about how you can help them with their lives and they’ll like you for it and share your stuff with their friends. Bore them silly and they’ll switch off and you’ll get isolated and sent to Coventry.

 

Ps. We have a product dedicated to this very thing, check out our content marketing module

What should you do if your website traffic falls off a cliff?

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“OMG Our Search Engine Rankings Have Died!!”

First off, it isn’t funny, at all.  It’s totally traumatic.

If you’ve enjoyed months or years of traffic for keywords relevant to your business and it’s switched off overnight, then it’s truly going to impact you and your business. You have bills to pay, staff salaries to maintain and the loss of traffic is often truly devastating.

Second, they were never really yours anyway. They were always going to be subject to the actions and whims of another for profit entity.

Unfortunately, when it comes to dumb algorithms, there’s little kindness involved. If your website hits the thresholds that say rank this domain lower then you need to take action to reverse those aspects that may be contributing to your misfortune.

The search engine guidelines set out what is and what isn’t acceptable. Hidden text, spammy links, keyword stuffing being 3 top level well known no no’s. There are however a myriad of other no no’s which are often fuzzy and hard to pin down. We need to understand that ultimately, search engines (generally) don’t earn money from sites that use effective SEO so it’s no surprise that they’d make it all a little bit of a minefield. It’s easy to say “Make the best site for your users” but with only 10 spots available to have for each query, it’s understandable that companies and site owners will push the envelop a little to get ahead. It’s this process that often trips folks up which can often lead to ranking catastrophes. FUD is a powerful tool in dissuading the allocation of marketing budget

It’s important to differentiate between penalties and algorithmic shifts of course. Penalties are manually applied  whereas algorithmic shifts like Penguin  and Panda are changes to the way pages are scored.

What to do if your search rankings have disappeared overnight?

If you know what you are doing then it’s pretty academic. Why are you even here reading this?

If you don’t know what you are doing then don’t waste your time trying to figure it out.

You. Will. Drive. Yourself. Mad.

Employ an experienced seo specialist to look at the situation for you.

Algorithmic Search Engine Penalties

They should know if there has been a recent major algorithm change and will look at your website analytics to see if your traffic fall coincides with an algorithm change. If it does, then it’s usually either due to a Penguin or a Panda update.

If your website has been affected by Panda, then it is perceived to have a page quality issue. These might be due to spammy or thin content issues, or machine generated content that is considered to be of low quality.

Your appointed specialist should be able to honestly appraise your site and be frank enough to tell you that it’s lacking in quality.

If your website has been affected by Penguin, then you have a so called back link quality issue.

A backlink quality issue relates to the quantity and quality of the number of links to your website.

Sites that have acquired many links at once for example might be seen to be manipulating their link profile. Sites with lots of so called ‘money’ keywords in their anchor text might be another.

In the circumstances outlined; you’ll need to begin the process of fixing your sites on and off site issues.

The good news is that your appointed specialist will be able to help identify these and help you with a way forward, the bad news is that you’ll often have to wait until the algo has updated or refreshed before your site reappears for your keywords. Even then, there are no guarantees as with penguin for example, the link cleaning process may even remove links that offered value whilst retaining those that hamper. It’s critical therefore, to ensure that you use someone who has experience with these and the tools that help identify them

Manual Search Engine Penalties

In some cases, websites receive so called ‘Manual‘ penalties. These are applied by search engineers for what would be in their view egregious manipulation of the algorithm. There have been many cases of these over the years for all manner of organisations. They are a good PR tool for search engines as they send out the message that they are watching for exploitation of their resource and will punish those who try it on.

The good news is that you can clean things up and submit a re-inclusion requests whereby a search engine will review what you’ve done and reinstate your domain in search. The not so good news is that they may refuse it and ask you to try harder.

A friendly suggestion on the way forward

Finally, regardless of whether you have or have not had an issue; perhaps it’s time to take a long hard look at what you do and really ask yourself some honest questions around your content marketing efforts.

The web is only going to get more competitive, to rely on big profit driven corporations for non paid for sustenance is a little bit mad really.

The proliferation of platforms that are taking market share will only continue to grow. People are using an ever increasing level of device and apps to access information. Desktop PC’s, Laptops, Phones, Tablets, Phablets, Watches,  TV’s – Search engines are cannibalising content to keep users on site, social media platforms are doing the same pulling folks away from search engines in the process, maybe it’s time to act like search engines didn’t exist even; become the destination for your niche, be the best.

Good luck.

 


What Should An SEO Do For My Business If I Have A Problem

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It’s a fair question, and one that will get different responses from different companies.

Ultimately, your SEO will be looking to identify and unblock any bottlenecks and help return your domains search engine visibility for queries that are important to your business.

In this post, we are going to look at  some of the typical aspects that a reputable SEO company should be looking at if you experience a sudden stop or gradual drop off in traffic to your website from search engines.

Where has my search engine traffic disappeared to?

Businesses that turn to SEO companies for  help will often do so on the back of a crisis.

They may have seen a gradual decline in search engine traffic or a sudden drop in traffic that has a huge impact on sales or enquiries that matter to their bottom line. Such events are of course worrying and require investigation to see what is the problem and how best we can identify and present  solutions.

You’ll need to give your SEO as much information as you can. They’ll need access to your analytics package to view past traffic performance and your Google and Bing webmaster tools accounts  search consoles to see if there are additional direct clues.

You should also be candid with them and tell them of anything that you know that has been done to help them identify things for you. If you bought a tranche of links from a link seller or signed up for a dubious website promotion strategy then tell them.

Lack of transparency will not help you and will cost you more money in the long run and the SEO will likely find out anyway through their investigations.

Using the webmaster search console to help  identify  problems

The webmaster search consoles may tell your SEO professional if there’s a specific issue relating to the domain due to a manual penalty or an onsite performance issue.

The webmaster search console contains specific information about your domain, generated through the search crawl and the responses received. It will also show search traffic numbers and limited information around keywords, volumes, positions and click through rates.

Manual Penalties – Maybe you have a manual search penalty

Search engines will (but not always) notify webmasters if a manual penalty has been applied. A manual penalty  is applied for egregious abuse of search engine guidelines. These might be for link buying for example, hidden text or other spammy type activities that have been identified as unacceptable.

Where you have a manually applied penalty, you’ll need to file a reinclusion request from within the console. You’ll need to outline what you have done to correct any transgressions and politely beg for mercy, promising that you’ll never do what you’ve been penalised for again.

Generally, manual penalties are rare and there are often other reasons why a sites traffic has been impacted. Crawl errors are often responsible.

Let’s look at those.

Identification of Crawl Errors – Is your site generating debilitating site errors?

When a search engine visits a website, it effectively ‘crawls’ the pages using its search engine spider or robot. These spiders or bots as they are known are simple fetch and grab programs that read the content of the pages and then store and classify them in their databases. The codes returned by your web server are recorded and the outputs are then shown to you for analysis.

The crawl aspect of the search console will provide insights into how the search engine is evaluating the domain and will provide clues to any issues. Crawl errors are very useful as they help us see what may be going wrong onsite and contributing to poor performance.

Poor Robots.Txt File

An example of this might be a poorly formatted robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is a means of telling the search engines what should and what should not be indexed. It resides on your root domain and is accessed periodically by the search bots and spiders. Mistakes in these can often block an entire domain from being indexed, leading to very poor performance in search. A review of this file will help identify a problem.

Server Error Status Codes

The error code section of the search console is a great means of identifying on-site performance errors.

Server error status codes are generated by web servers, are numbered and have different meanings. Dependant upon the error, an SEO would advise and explain what each meant and how they were impacting your traffic.  The worst type to have would be 401 or 403 as these are effectively saying to the search bots “go away, you’re forbidden or not authorised” If the bots can’t read your content, then your content cannot be ranked or indexed in search.

More common search status errors are so-called 404 errors. These occur when a page that is requested cannot be found. The web server will often (subject to config) return a generic page that says page not found. The better ones are useful to users giving supplemental help in enabling people to find alternatives.

Server error codes are a useful means of gaining insight into poor scripting or server performance generally so should always be considered as an early part of the investigation process.

DNS Errors

DNS errors are often transient and can occur where the host server has issues relating to configuration or routing or hardware,  DNS errors will restrict access for people looking to read your content. This includes search bots. Persistent DNS errors will prevent your site being seen in search so it’s important to get on top of the issue should it occur.

Server Connectivity and Performance

Sometimes, your web server will struggle to perform and might have connection issues that impact upon page speed and content delivery. Where this occurs, it’s important that you address the causes and return the site to peak performance. An SEO should look at performance factors as part of their investigation as ultimately, search engines would prefer any pages that they return to their users to be fast loading and functional. A poorly configured web server or script will drain server resources and switch users off to your site. If this happens with too much regularity, then search engines will lose confidence and trust in your site as a resource and your rankings may be impacted.

Algorithmic filters due to Panda or Penguin

Other reasons why your site’s traffic may have been impacted relate to so called algorithmic filters. There are many types of algorithm and they are rolled out periodically or generated upon the fly. The two we’ll look at here are called Panda and Penguin.

The search console with regard to these, isn’t that useful as the data ranges we like to use to review such things are limited to 90 days. To take a good look at these we need to see historical traffic data over a longer timeframe as this enables us to look at traffic patterns and discount things like seasonality or general growth over time.

Using Your Analytics Package to Identify Algorithmic Filters

Panda

The Panda algorithm is aimed at low quality or thin content and seeks to demote pages that are considered to trigger these signals. Panda has had a number of iterations over the years and SEO’s have identified the dates which can then be referenced against website traffic patterns. The general theory being that if your traffic plummets coincide with the published release dates of these, then it’s pretty easy to conclude what the issue is through looking at your traffic within your analytics package.

It may of course also be very obvious anyway and a good SEO should be frank enough with you to say that actually, your site is appalling and you need to reevaluate your content generation model…

Sites that were built in 1999 may not necessarily meet the expectations of 2015 perhaps. A good SEO company will at least discuss this with you and help you appreciate the needs of today’s web users.  If you are answering a web query in 2015, then you need to be going above and beyond.

Penguin

The penguin algorithm relates to your link graph. Some websites have unnatural inbound link patterns or have too many links that are considered to be from low quality sites. Where this is the case, a good SEO will help you identify what these are and will be able to help with a plan that will disavow any low quality links.

Again, the use of your analytics package will help the SEO align your traffic with known penguin release and refresh dates so that they can confirm whether or not your traffic fall off is penguin related.

Content Issues

You may have recently undergone a site redesign, your developer may have used a new technology or url structure that impacted your site in a negative way. Poor metadata, duplicate page titles, non existent page titles, poor keyword selection are just a handful of issues that may be present on site. A good seo company will help identify what these are and show you the way forward.

Wrapping things up

As we can see, there are many things that can contribute to poor performance of websites in search engines; manual penalties, algorithmic filters, poor content, poor site structure and architecture, poor hardware and each of these can pull your site down for the queries you aspire to. A thorough examination of these issues will help you take the steps that will eventually return your site to where you’d like it to be. It’s a good idea to have an seo site audit  before issues occur as this can save many thousands of pounds in fixing subsequent issues arising.

Ps For the marketing DIY enthusiasts we have a range of products that can help you drive your business forward – maybe you need a   manual link report to identify potential problems with your link profile , or an seo site review to unify your thinking and know you’re on the right track , or a content marketing module to give your creativity a kickstart and finally there’s a full audit and strategy report to give you that full on perspective.

New Year – New SEO Products – Links, Audits and Reviews

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Hello – I’m excited to announce the release of some really useful SEO products for 2016.

The products are aimed at marketers and business owners and lazy SEO’s who’d rather not do the work themselves.

Presently, there are three four to choose from but I’ll be developing more as time allows.

It’s a bit of a departure from the usual SEO product suite announcement in that none of these products are produced via automation or some clever backend api integration.

The reports created will of course use a suite of the best tools in the business. For starters most will use a combination of Kerboo, MajesticSEO, SEMRush, Google, Bing and Moz – we also use a few other top-secret ones too but if we told you what they were then we might have to tickle you to death.

The nature of the type of reports produced means that you’ll have to wait at least a few days for whatever you buy. Sometimes you’ll have to wait longer dependant upon what you’ve ordered and the number of others waiting for the same. Look for the status update on the product pages for the latest turnaround times.

As I said, there are 3 4 new products.

A manual link report product, an seo site review , a content marketing module and a bells and whistles audit and strategy report.

The products are all different and tailored to the specific client that requires them. There’s no template, no fluff, no sausage machine in action.

To go too much in to the finer details of each would be to spoil the surprise and delight of your purchase.

What I can say is that I love what I do and have been doing it for quite some time now (20 years OMG).  I’ll provide you with actionable insights that will make a difference to your understanding of your business and niche. I’ll give you ideas and inspiration and will show you how to fix any general silliness you’ve managed to find yourself doing. I won’t tell you about anything you know already and I won’t kill you with charts and lists and intangibles.

You’ll find phraseology like – “This part of your site is sub optimal and my recommendation is that you change this line of code to this line of code” or “An analysis of your market shows that you have some major content opportunities at hand, my advice is that you do X Y and Z as a priority…”

I hope not to have to write stuff like “The majority of your backlinks appear to come from a suburb of Afghanistan, whereas you aspire to rank in the bustling community of NYC…” I’d prefer not to work with numpties if I can avoid it, so if that’s you then erm…sorry.

There are rare occasions when it’s clear that there’s very little to say or add.

If you are one of these fortunate people then accept my apologies in advance as I decline your request. Why not go spend your cash on nice holiday or give it to charity instead?

That’s it! Happy 2016 to you!

Ps For the referral minded among you, there’s an affiliate program full of half decent commission for completed sales.

PPs. For a limited time, enter BoxMeUp at the checkout for an additional 20% off

Don’t interrupt it’s rude…

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Interruption Is The Prelude to Engagement

“Don’t interrupt, it’s rude” at least that’s what I’d hear when I was little.

So eventually, you learn how to interrupt in a way that isn’t rude. You do so with timing, with skill and grace that reads the right moment and has the most impact. No point barging in all guns blazing, you’ll be heard but you won’t be really, people will switch off and carry on. You’ll get no engagement.

So, most of the time, I really don’t like ads. It’s mainly me, a little cynical at times. It’s an over 40’s thing.

I’ve been known to sit there and curse when they interrupt my favourite TV show, or when they stemmed a flow of really good tunes on some cool radio station or on my Spotify cheapo account when I had one.

If I had a list of pet hates they might go something like this.

  1. Happy Background Chirpy Builder Whistle tunes as some mellifluous sounding voice actor does the whole reasons to buy this product schtick
  2. The Hijacking of a great old tune I love to promote a product I don’t really care about.
  3. Charity ads that play mournful music as the next sad deserving case is rolled out full of desperate imagery of a life painted extreme
  4. Ads that use ringtones or factors of technology I own that make me reach for my phone or look door wards thinking the doorbell has rang
  5. Ads that use stereotypes to reinforce a perception via accents for example
  6. The John Lewis Ad.
  7. Ads that prey on the vulnerable – Loans, Insurance etc
  8. Ads that tell big fibs
  9. Ads that promote controversial products and use sex and style and the desire to be exclusive as part of their appeal – Vaping ads being one very recent type that makes me snarl.
  10. Quit smoking ads and their disgusting visuals

Of course, many of us seem to like them, I’ve heard friends sing renditions of  Go Compare adverts, I’ve had a friend mimic the Flake ad in humourous mockery and who hasn’t had a friend use the word “Simples”!? Crikey, I myself have been guilty of singing the We Buy Any Car ad in a Nelson Mandela accent. Any, any, any…

There’s no getting away from them really.

You can turn off the tv or switch over (like many of us do) or watch stuff on catch up and FF the ad breaks, make a cup of tea (that’s four cups in an episode of Jekyll and Hyde or Homeland) yet unless you’re profoundly hard of hearing then their ear worms will continue to get through to your brain. Sheer volume and weight of numbers over time means they’ll find a way through.

They certainly work else, we wouldn’t see them anymore.

Look at the analytics packages of a big brand that uses TV or Radio and you’ll see little spikes in web traffic. Look at the social media platforms for ads that the ad lovers like and you’ll see #tags and reposts and poses and skits and all sorts.

I’ll even confess to having a soft spot for the Malteser cup cake ad, but only because it’s genuinely funny and I fancy the lead.

And I guess that ultimately, that’s the thing isn’t it? Interrupting people sufficiently to gain their attention has to be packaged in all manner of ways to suit different styles and tastes. One man’s meat is another man’s poison after all.

I’m certainly no great ad creator but I do have an inkling for the processes that are at work. It isn’t so difficult to work it all out if you stop to think about the ads and what they are trying to do.  And if they aren’t funny or interesting or visually and/or audibly appealing or  sexy or ear wormy or shocking or endearing or otherwise noteworthy then they’ll have no impact.

A good ad will of course be memorable for all sorts of reasons – they’ll have impact and make a mark and leave us with an impression of the brand and the message that will linger. It’s a whole lot easier to achieve with a well thought out tv ad and that’s probably why they’re usually the preserve of big brands with the scope and budget to monetise them. They get to interrupt us when we are at our most pervious, when we are at home relaxing, watching our favourite things, off guard.

Online marketers do get to do the same of course.

They get to interrupt people virtually 24/7 via desktop computers, tablets, watches and phones via app alerts, emails, well crafted headlines and snippets that appear in the SERPS, content shared across social media, retargeted ad creatives that follow users around the web.

Those that do it correctly, get an engagement, get that all important piece of attention, that opportunity to convert the user and encourage a repeat transaction – but it all starts with an interruption of sorts, if it’s annoying, then you’re doing it wrong or they’re just not your audience.

Hat tip to Mr Trott for the thought train.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking News: Google Continues Cannibalising Search Results

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So the recent change in how Google displays its ads on its search engine has already pulled up a number of interesting outcomes with agencies that manage large accounts reporting a number of standouts.

An increase in CTR of 16% across SERPs should be pretty concerning to folks in the organic space, and frankly to advertisers as well. I’m not saying these results are instantly stealing 16% of traffic from organic results, but there’s certainly been a migration as a result of this change; however significant or insignificant is yet to be seen. Aaron at EliteSem

That’s quite a big chunk and is echoed by what icrossing saw too with big increases in CTR for the new ad slot.

  • Positive click-through-rate impact for top positions (+5%) and PLA (+10%), as competition at the top right has been eliminated.

  • Negative click-through-rate impact for positions 5–7 (-8%) as they moved from top right to bottom of the page.

  • Negative impression impact for positions 8–10 (-69%) and click impact (-50%). However since this segment accounted for a very small percentage of impressions in the “before” period, their loss doesn’t represent a significant impact.
    icrossing

There’s no doubt a slew of these across the web. Look at any account with a large enough dataset and you’ll likely see similar patterns.

But what does this really mean for organic? It’s pretty obvious what it means for PPC. In the short term, for competitive queries the new position four ad slot seems to be doing a sterling job at stealing organic click share. If CTR’s are up across ad slots, then it follows that available click share MUST be down for organic, even if we account for the loss of side ads, right?

I was talking with a client yesterday about conversion rates on site.

We had all been a little perplexed in how conversions rates had dropped off of late and had tried a variety of things to identify and reverse.

We looked at the usual suspects of onsite changes, page speed, competitor activity, sector innovations etc and were doing a degree of head scratching trying to establish what was going on. Most channel traffic was up, organic especially. The view was that maybe rankings had decreased for competitive head terms (nope) or that direct and referral traffic had increased due to PR activity and that was impacting conversion rates due to lower buyer intent (a fact, but also nope)

The client noticed that the conversion problem had occurred around the 22nd of February, which funnily enough was around the time that Google rolled out its new land grab. Aha! The smoking gun.

What was really interesting (but surprising) was that the inclusion of this new ad spot, appears to have impacted the click through on high converting pages for competitive search terms. Effectively, for every competitive position attained, visibility has dropped by an order of at least one position.

Is it really the case that people collectively have jumped the shark and no longer care about ads in google as they once did? Has Google created such a neat and compelling ad product that users are now more drawn to the ad than they would be the organic result? Are the ads more relevant today even? Is all that SERP diversity of images, videos, knowledge graph, news results and the like just a massive pain in the Goolies? Are ads the quicker route for commercial intent!? Maybe!

Of course, I’m surmising and using the data witnessed from one account. It may not necessarily be the same for every commercial query and determining what is and what is not a commercial query isn’t a walk in the park either. Just because a query doesn’t have ‘buy’ or ‘book’ in the string doesn’t mean that it’s an informational intent type query.

It’s only when you begin to dig in to your conversion data locally that you’ll even begin to notice, and even when you have your aha moment you’ll be none the wiser as to how to fix it.

In short, the only fix that matters is, to gain increased visibility for your commercial intent queries, and the only way you are going to do that in “Google Four Ad slots” is to buy ads.

Sure, you can up your activity in your other channels and up your efforts targeting queries of lesser commercial intent and create more wow moments in your PR and general marketing efforts but make no mistake. Those organic opportunities are continually diminishing as Google seek to eat more of that organic pie.

For those interested, it might also be interesting to take a little look at CTR generally and look at a few of the tactics Google has taken over the years.

Looking at CTR historically

If you look at click throughs around positions over the years you’ll see that it’s an interesting picture. Many of us will have read the various click through studies  detailing how pos #1 gets x % position #2 y% position #3 z% tailing off the further you go down the SERP.

Here’s an old  graph from Internet Marketing Ninjas showing the optify data

This is old of course and came from the days when there was a max of two ads above the fold at the top.

However, it does show the general picture and variations over the years show similar curves and it’s pretty safe to say that with the advances in PPC ads since (smart links, stars, better ad copy, blah blah) that those numbers and their respective share has likely diminished since as ad clicks, knowledge graph type distractions have gained click share.

Eye tracking and clicks

Heatmaps show us that generally, much of our attention is taken by the space above the fold.

A page loads, we scan it, see what we need and click it and many of the studies produced have helped inform ad placement, nav placement, button placement and the like.

This eye tracking study below shows the google of old 2005 and the google of  2015.  The golden triangle versus the um…red guy with no arms and legs.

2005 versus 2015

What’s really interesting is the whole background colour change in the ad slot in the image to the right. Note the background is some kind of distinctive yellowish colour.

Do a search today, and that colour distinction is no longer there. The only differentiator is the word “Ad” and that’s diluted by other distractions like ad links and gold stars.

four ads hotels in london
four ads hotels in london

Many of the features that Google used to show for its organic results, user rating stars for example are now seen in its ads, but increasingly, not in its organic results.

It would seem that increasingly in the organic portion, attention is taken away at every opportunity. One could be forgiven for concluding that Google sought to confuse the consumer by continually shifting such features around and blurring the lines between organic and paid. After all, we aren’t stupid are we? We don’t need to see the ads with a clearly defined different background colour, do we.

Some might say that it would appear that if it’s commercial and you monetise it, then the Google of today wants you to pay for those clicks.

For businesses looking to seek visibility for commercial queries, they are effectively a pay for inclusion engine today. If you want visibility, then they want you to pay for it.

It’s a risk laden strategy. Altavista did the same in 1998 and killed itself.

Users didn’t want ads shoved in their faces and users left in droves, enticed by the thing that was all Googley.

Google aren’t stupid and have learnt from the mistakes of their predecessors. They do lots of testing and use feature creep to change things. Revolutionaries they are not.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions around the bait and switch tactics and overlaps of paid serps versus organics. There’s no reason why they’d seduce users with rich snippets, only to snatch them away and leave them hanging around in their paid results, no reason at all.

If you are seeing similar things in your campaigns, decreased conversions whilst organic traffic has increased, and it fits in with these date ranges, do let me know in the comments.

Postscript

Just to be clear, I didn’t personally identify the reason for reduced conversions. A team member at the client put forward the hypothesis and the whole 4 ad slot scenario seems to fit. I’d love to say who that is, but client confidentially and all that stuff… Hat tip Nick!

 

Getting links like a laughing lady chewbacca style 2016

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The Candace Payne Chewbacca Mask Lady Story

I love the Chewbacca mask toy story of Candace Payne and whilst some believe it may have been intentional and designed to generate sales for a new toy, do you know what? I really couldn’t care if it was. It’s a great happy feel good thing and it’s made lots of people smile.

Candace Payne It's the simple joys of life 154 million views
Candace Payne It’s the simple joys of life 154 million views

It also reveals some interesting stats for those who rode the coat tails.

Generating page views on Youtube like a star wars droid on acid

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.00.43

The success on youtube was phenomenal – A sea of copies and copycats rushed to jump on the happy train in a bid to emulate the success or just have a bit of fun with it and as the above youtube search results show, they attained quite healthy channel views as a result.

Jon Deak (I’ve no idea if him and Candace are connected but he owes her a beer or two) 5 million page views. Incredible.

Newworld, 500,000 and rising.

Tyrone Magnus on a reaction video 270,000 +

Numbers to get advertisers moist in the jowls.

Search Volume Explodes Like a Death Star

A look at Google trends, shows the explosion of interest too. From nowhere, to ubiquity.

 

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.08.11

Where there’s search volume, there’s content…

A look at the web results, reveals that here in the UK too lots of folk jumped in and wrote about it, and why not, it was funny after all and Candace has a great infectious laugh.

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.12.45

Let’s look at three of those urls and see what traction they attained using a few tools out there.

The Facebook URL with Candace’s video has  (according to AHREFS) generated 674  unique domain citations.

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.25.40

The YouTube copy which we know to date has generated 5 million plus page views also acquired (according to AHREFS)  656 backlinks

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.30.18

A write up by aleteia.org generated 48 (according to AHREFS) backlinks to the url

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.46.39

As a result alteia.org (according to SEMRush ) has seen a healthy uptick in its organic traffic recently of 29%. Not bad for a story about a lady in a mask.

 

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.53.39

The story that just keeps on giving…

Even today June 2nd 15:00 GMT the meme continues and the story keeps growing new legs as Candace does the rounds and people continue to chat about it. Source: socialmention.com

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 14.34.37

So what are the takeaways?

What characteristics does this story have and what can we learn from them?

Well, I’m not going to say there’s a blueprint and here it is, ( I’d be fabulously wealthy cash wise if I could) but it’s useful to look at it and see if there are any common threads that we can at least consider and think about how things like this work and why they do so well and get traction and adoption.

The story is: Funny

People like funny, people like to laugh, who knew! If we can make people feel things with our content, then we are usually on to a winner. Do you remember the laughing baby thing? 4.7 million views and rising.

The story is: Original

How many videos have you seen recently that featured a cool new toy that was hilarious? Not only did you find the video funny, you also secretly wanted your own mask too, right?

The story had: Mass Market Appeal

Everyone (apart from Trekkies perhaps) loves Star Wars right? The franchise has instant mass market appeal across international boundaries.  A character like Chewbacca has been mimicked by many a person, in many a city across the globe. Laughter and Chewbacca in this example are pretty much international

The story didn’t seem to be: Contrived

We all hate fake – this story just didn’t seem so at all and as a result Candace was invited to lots of talk shows and has been enjoying her new found mini celebrity status

The story speaks to: Us

We love the story because it’s human and talks to us. We love an infectious laugh and we love that this could so easily be one of our funny friends, back from a store, in their car blah blah blahing incidentally on social media about a cool product or some other experience they had

The story is: Creative

Whether Candace intended it to be or not the story is pretty unique and creative! No one alive had ever shoved a chewy mask on their face and laughed inanely as an electronic Chewbacca cried out for affection.

Creating cool stuff isn’t usually this easy. It’s hard, especially if you’re in a boring old niche, but stuff like this shows that you need not have a massive budget to succeed. If you can come up with something that’s genuine and useful (this is useful as getting people to laugh is absolutely useful) then you are half way there.

I didn’t even touch on the number of social shares that the URL’s referenced generated, but they were pretty stellar too.

Candace, I tip my hat.

Update: I just also read that she and her family have also earned full tuition scholarships as a gift! Brilliant.

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