Preemptive Spam Penalties

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google's current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won't be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

And Jim wrote

And the blackhat club gets bigger.... and the waters get murkier and murkier.... if you're an SEO, you're a black hat. Only those who don't know what SEO is are the white hats.... Don't try to rank high on purpose....if you do then you've broken a google guideline

Corporate Marketing vs Individual SEOs

This event clearly demonstrates how differently Google treats major corporations vs individual SEOs (especially if they are publicly known as SEOs). An individual SEO who is great at his job can expect to be preemptively penalized to be made an example of, even while the competition are doing exactly what he wants to do (ie: the same activity is brand building when the corporation does it and is spam when Mr. Inman does it).

A corporation typically is out of the index for a few days to a week at most, even if they are operating at an industrial spam scale for years! When the corporations are relisted they may need to do a bit of rebuilding, but millions in profits from years of spamming allow them to invest adequate capital into growth.

This is why some of Google's editorial judgement seems so arbitrary and lame. The small player innovates, gets crushed by Google for being creative and innovative, then the monolithic corporations uses the same techniques to an industrial scale and are somehow better for borrowing/stealing the techniques. How does that process foster web innovation?

I lost a lot of links when a Google engineer decided to penalize one of my sites, and in the process all the links from my aggressive promotion costing 10s of thousands of dollars disappeared, while the fortune 500 companies in my field got a head start and competitive advantage against me by recycling my idea. I can't express how thrilled I was. That was the past and I am over it, but I think Google needs to take a close look at their own behavior when judging others.

Does Google Use Off Topic Linkbait & Widgets?

• An off topic transcription is a legitimate source of links, according to Matt Cutts - at least when you are syndicating Google's opinions.
• When you install AdSense for search on your site with the Google logo (aka paid link) it direct links back to Google (ie: not to their AdSense program).
• Google barters PageRank to push their business objectives.
• How is what they are doing any better than what the average SEO does? Should they hold themselves to the standards they judge everyone else by? How can they be seen as objective if they do not?

Be Careful Who You Trust

What is worse about this game of passing arbitrary judgement is that many of the best known SEOs praise each other in public only to snitch on one another in private (talk about being ethically challenged). One member who recently joined my training program read the training module about how affiliate programs can pass PageRank and asked Matt Cutts if they could use 301 redirects on their affiliate program "like Aaron does" so that he too could "rank for everything". Within a week my affiliate program no longer passed link juice.

Pick a Smart Professional Label

Google can not keep growing their revenues at an acceptable rate without beating the value out of others. If you are new to the SEO field and want to excel online, call yourself something other than an SEO. Using the label SEO invites arbitrary monitoring and punishment, and there are too many plastic personalities in this field willing to dime out a friend in exchange for a wooden nickel.

Last week I got this via email

Hello,
How would you like getting a logo’s (or) icon’s (or) seo report (or)template (or) Banner (or) Article (or) Header designed free of cost for your website. We are giving away these services as a promotional measure for free of cost. In return we need a link at your site for each services at home or internal page(Except link,resources,directory pages).

So to get a new services all you got to do is mail us back with the confirmation of link and the page where the link added for our site. If not interested in any of these offer,and interested to do three-way link exchange,please feel free to mail me back.

Awaiting for your reply,
Jeena.

Notice they were willing to trade just about any web based service imaginable for a link. A shotgun approach, but good for a few links I suppose. ;)

And today I got this, which is a bit of a higher touch and more focused approach.

Hi,
I recently started writing work for ______ as a content writer. I would like to write a guest post related to education/college/online education etc. on your site if you're interested in accepting such a post. If you are interested, please let me know and I can send you an article for you to look over.

The Deal:
I will write a good, useful posts/articles on education/college/online education etc. specifically for your website/blog, free of cost. But I will need a by-line to build up my writing career. In addition, there will be a link to the ______ site in the by-line. So, it will help all parties concerned.

Sample posts written by me:

• linkbait A
• linkbait B

Both articles were widely read and received numerous links from other bloggers. Thanks for your time and I am looking forward to your reply.
Thanks,
Susan Jacobs

The nice thing about receiving such emails is that if they reference their site and you compete with them you can simply set up a couple link searches from blogs to track down everyone that accepted their offer and then get links from the same sources, replicating their strategies while hoarding your own unique link sources. As a Technorati top 100 blogger or an SEO service provider you also get requests like these from people who do not know you own competing sites. This is yet another advantage of being well embedded into the web: you see new marketing strategies within days or weeks of them emerging.

This is also scary for businesses succeeding based on a low price-point strategy. Eventually a similar product or service will be available free (or with a hidden cost that only reveals itself down the road). You are better off charging twice as much and having half as many customers, as mentioned here:

On the drive to lunch I’d ask Ralph why he wouldn’t fill the order when we were making 20 or 30 percent margins on that ton of glass.. “Because they can easily afford to pay more” he’d say.. “and once I sell that crate it’s gone, it will take 3 months before I get another crate.. somebody else will buy it because it’s a specialty size with low cut-loss”, and if I sell it at that price, next time he’ll ask for another nickel discount.. “

The fact that people are trying so many different strategies to get free links show how powerful Google's fearmongering campaign against paid links is, and just how detached from reality the idea of link = vote is in a marketplace where everyone either knows that link = vote OR is gamed by someone who knows that link = vote.

The First Rule of Marketing

Some people hype transparency as the only effective solution for long-term sustainable marketing success. After they are already successful they can hype such false ideals and get praised for them, which only adds to their misguided notion of marketing. The truth is everyone wants to be influenced, but nobody wants to feel like they were influenced.

A Marketing Experiment

A few weeks back a friend of mine ran a linkbait announcing the best photography blogs on the web. And then he announced on his other blog that he was trying an experiment in using flattery to build links. I commented on that post

The first rule of linkbait is… ;)

Generally people do not like feeling like they are being examined or influenced by marketing. For that reason I tend not to talk about “lets see how it goes” until after the fact, and rarely then too.

What was the outcome of his linkbait? It was successful, at least for a bit.

But then award winners found out about that other post. In short order Dave was getting comments like

I just think you are completely underestimating how many difficult situations we are put in as high visibility professional photographers, particularly when it comes to internet ethics. Between finding our images on other photographers’ sites, finding our names in other website’s metatags without authorization, getting anonymous comments we have to moderate from envious competitors, and then being part of an SEO experiment … the amount of time I spend on unethical internet situations is discouraging to me.

and all the award winners were emailing back and forth about how the award was fake. So he alienated his target audience and someone even hacked his blog!

When to Mention Your Sites

If you ever wonder why I sometimes talk about marketing from a broad perspective without pointing out my sites and specific marketing strategies employed, this is yet another example why. The only reasons to mention your sites, stats, and marketing techniques are:

1. to drive traffic and help spread viral ideas quickly (it helps if you own a top blogger in your industry)
2. to linkdrop (a href is your friend)
3. to improve your own image (especially good when joining trade organizations or donating to worthy causes)
4. using the media exposure to help build your site's brand and credibility (as seen in goes a long way for building trust and making it easier to get cited again)

Everything is Gamed

Behind the scenes media gaming goes on everywhere everyday. But it is rarely talked about publicly because it benefits nobody for their customers to feel like they were duped, influenced, and/or manipulated. We would all like to believe we are smarter than that...but we are not. If we were, I doubt we would have hunted down and executed a man our country put in power, and maybe we wouldn't be angry at this joke. But sometimes the truth hurts. And sometimes lies kill.

Have Your Say!

Insert your message in the next Brave New Films video for $199 - not that I am saying you should, but 5 or 10 years ago it would have been hard to imagine this level of fan integration into the funding, creation, and promotion of documentaries. Where are we going to be in another 10 years? Will this video get 500,000 views on YouTube? Might this $199 be a cheap ad buy for people looking to appeal to this demographic? At that price point it is almost an impulse purchase for O'ReillyGoesNuts.com or BoneUsFoxRingtones.com. :)

Fund Anything

Sites like Kiva allow you to loan to business people in the 3rd world, and offers open ratings on past loan payments. If you are looking to make money in the process, outfits like Prosper and MicroPlace might work too. And Fundable allows you to raise funds for any cool projects or ideas.

Why Your Funding Source Matters

Is it cheaper to get funding and buy ads or grow organically from direct support? Getting capital from a VC may get you some coverage, but it is probably nowhere near as valuable as donations from hundreds or thousands of fans. 4 reasons direct support funding from fans is so powerful are

1. they minimize risk and create deeper direct connections
2. participants feel ownership, which creates meaningful relationships and project evangelists who provide emotional support and spread buzz well ahead of your launch
3. people care much more than they do offering free support (to appreciate how non-committed free support is, hundreds of bloggers talked about the launch of Citizendium, and I donated to the project like a day or two later - and was the first donor to the project)
4. successful projects show social proof of value as they pick up momentum

Using iGoogle or Google Apps you can easily create a page like this, which tracks brand mentions on blogs and other active parts of the web. If you know why people are talking about you then you can create more things they may talk about. If nobody is talking about you then you need to stir up conversation. :)