One of the most salient points of Seth Godin's Tribes book is that in the long run it is much more profitable for most businesses to create a deeper community with stronger and more passionate connections than it is to create a broader one that has strong reach but no message.

Without Relevancy, Nobody Cares

Do you remember the hype around the launch of John Reese's BlogRush about a year or so back? It was a blog focused ad network promoted through a MLM / pyramid scheme. The viral nature of blogs and the pyramid scheme helped it spread far and wide, but in spite of great growth it failed:

While the service is still going strong (serving a few million impressions a day) I just don’t see things improving for our users. The click-rates across the network are dreadfully low (and getting worse) as so many Internet users now ‘tune out’ links and other ads on sites.

Because of this, and many other issues, I’ve made the tough decision to shutdown the service.

John couldn't even get people to click the links because

• everyone in the program was a webmaster
• most of them were writing blogs targeted to webmasters
• webmasters rarely click on ads
• the links looked like ads
• there was no relevancy in the ads (other than many being part of the webmaster blog demographic)

There are a wide array of ad network based start ups - with virtually all of them destined to fail, largely because they can't compete with Google on relevancy. If a person learned only one thing from search it should be that relevancy is a key to engagement.

Content Becomes Advertising

But even beyond advertising...what happens if we think this process through to content strategy? If the web keeps getting more saturated, more relevant, more biased, with more niche competitors, and people are willing to give away content to help do their marketing, then eventually the user engagement with your content becomes far more important than what you advertise. Content is advertising.

The plain truth is, great content is the most effective way to advertise online, because to be considered great content, it can’t look anything like what we consider advertising. But great content does need to naturally demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable about your field of expertise, and that’s why it works so well.

Think about it… the advertising we actually enjoy is often witty and entertaining, but it doesn’t persuade us to do anything. Even a dry article about tax savings tips has more promotional value than most hip television commercials.

Selling Ads to Yourself

One of the biggest flaws that new bloggers make is putting too many ads on a blog before they gain enough market momentum to build a strong revenue stream, thus segmenting themselves into the perceived group of "spammy" blogs by other webmasters who could offer powerful links.

If BlogRush makes so little per pageview that John Reese can't justify running it (even with the benefit of being able to give himself a large percentage of the ad impressions for free) then how could there be any ROI for an end user/publisher? Wouldn't that publisher make more money by featuring some of their own best content in the sidebar to build a deeper relationship with their readers?

Increasing User Engagement

Traffic is nowhere near as important as engagement and conversion are:

One other thing you can do is get hooked on the traffic, focus on building your top line number. Keep working on sensational controversies or clever images, robust controversies or other link bait that keeps the silly traffic coming back

I think it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.
1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value.
2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent.

A big part of why I changed my business model (from serving 13,000 + customers at $79 each to serving hundreds of customers at $100/month each) is because it became obvious that as the web expands and search becomes more relevant, what you can offer packaged loses perceived value (unless it is quite unique and/or you are good at doing hype driven launches), while the value of depth of interaction keeps increasing.

I was a bit disappointed when I saw Rand out yet another website recently. Why was the site outed? Because they were ranking for SEO company and Rand didn't feel that their backlinks should count (and Rand wanted another excuse to promote his new LinkScape tool).

In his post Rand...

• claimed that the site ranking #1 for SEO company was an embarrassment to Google and other search engines
• wrote "Outing manipulative practices (or ANY practices for that matter) that put a page at the top of the rankings is part of our job"
• wrote "Isn't the goal of a successful web marketing campaign to build a strategy that is legitimate to survive a manual review by the engines and strong enough to be defensible even to those who peer review or investigate?"

While some may not feel the post was outing, that was the intent of the post...to cause harm to the business highlighted, and to do so for potential personal profit. As Nick Wilsdon wrote:

Yes, Google probably already knows about them but that's not the point. Once a SERP or a naughty company becomes a public embarrassment, it then gets "cleaned up". Google can't be seen to be gamed. There's an element of politics involved.

ShoeMoney also spoke about that topic in this video, titled Don't Make Google Look Stupid

And that in itself becomes an issue. Sure most of us want to be able to have our sites pass a hand review and stand the test of time, but when things are covered with a negative connotation from a negative frame it makes Google more likely to act against the "spam"...even if it was something that was fine for years.

I had a lively conversation with a search engineer about one of my sites where he stated that he thought the site's marketing tactics were a bit spammy. 2 other search engines chose to promote that same site editorially with shortcuts. Because of who owns a site it can be seen as being spammy, while the same site is seen as the clear cut category leader worthy of promotion by other search employees who do not have anti-SEO goggles on.

Where this "out everything on principal" strategy goes astray is when a person's assumption of how the algorithms and editorial policies should work do not match what the search engineers believe. To appreciate that, consider the SEO Book affiliate program. It passed PageRank for years. And then Rand outed it and it stopped passing PageRank.

Recently Rand wrote that Google engineers said that affiliate programs should pass PageRank. So based on what Google engineers say in public, editorial links promoting my affiliate program should pass PageRank, but because Rand chose to out it, it probably never again will.

Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.

Editorial affiliate links should count, but it was Rand asking "who does Google come down on" that was intended to harm my business to give himself a better competitive position. It was similar to the strategy of blasting Aviva to promote a list of directories people should buy - a profitable strategy, but not one with a north pointing ethical compass.

As to the absurdity to claiming that as a professional SEO's job to police the organic search results...I can only assume that a person stating such has never had a site hand edited (while seeing factually incorrect sites with spammier links and worse site designs continue to rank in the same results). If you read the Google remote rater documents you can see how things are open to interpretation. If you read the remote search quality rater documents leaked from 2003, 2005, and 2007 you can see how they changed over the years.

Years ago I might have thought reporting all spam was a good idea, but after experiencing and seeing the arbitrary and uneven nature of the editing it is not what I would consider a relevant mindset for SEO in 2008. When I was starting out in search my mentor told me "you can't really appreciate how the game works until you lose a site" and once you do, feeling like it is your job to out spam seems a bit small minded and short sighted.

If Rand really believes that "Outing manipulative practices (or ANY practices for that matter) that put a page at the top of the rankings is part of our job" then why does he offer a testimonial on the Text Link Ads website when Matt Cutts has clearly stated that buying text links is manipulative and outside their guidelines? Does he turn in his own clients for link buying?

Patrick's dedication to providing excellent services echoes in all of his employees and the company as a whole. Support and response times are exceptionally fast, and the process of buying links couldn't be easier. - Rand Fishkin

How can you suggest people should buy links and then out them for doing so? Someone is either being intellectually dishonest or economical with the truth.

This is an interview of my friend Dominic Mapstone, who uses SEO to help influence the media and make social change.

What is the hardest part about marketing a non-profit website online?

1. Having the client’s permission to divulge confidential information or even a photo of them in non-profit marketing is a big roadblock for all non-profits.

Most have to hire actors or dress a staff member up to pose for a staged photo, and they use hypothetical situations or characters in their advertising – nothing from a real case file.
On our website about homeless people all our stories are real and often include photos of the person and even the place they sleep at night.

At the end of each story you can click through to a forum thread and talk with the person in the story. Except for a homeless man Andrew, he was murdered so can’t really come to the forums right now.

I get client’s permission, give them an alias and am very well respected on the street so they know I will protect their interests. Far and away though, getting content and connections like this is the most difficult factor for non-profit marketing.

If you have permission to use content and record the stories and photos:

2. Knowing what stories to tell or picture to paint, from a marketing perspective is the next hardest thing. One story on our site is about a homeless girl who killed someone when she was robbing a store to fuel a drug binge.

On face value you wouldn’t imagine a story like that painting a flattering story of the homeless. But get into the context and follow her story as it unravels and it’s an educational and engaging story.

By the end of the page:

• you are cheering her on
• you understand homelessness more
• you have an idea of what I’m about
• and even know the name of my dog

A lot of people non-profits help aren’t that marketable. So picking the right story to present and knowing what facts to include and what to leave out is difficult. We have 100 stories we can’t use for every one that has potential.

3. If your topic area is exclusively non-profit, competing with powerful government websites which are usually PR8 or PR7 is to be expected and more recently Wikipedia always ranks well in non-profit topic areas.

Our websites tick a lot of the right SEO boxes, but the one factor we really outperform in is one not widely held as important in SEO circles.

When people visit our sites, they usually have found what they are looking for and don’t quickly click away. A number of people have emailed me reporting they have spent five hours or more reading our content.

With any website, researching what people are searching for in the long tail and in the popular keyword phrases and SEOing for it is important. But delivering on quality content once they find your website, from my experience has paid off.

Maybe there isn’t a ‘time spent on site’ gland that gets tickled at Google, maybe it’s just the old school SEO I’ve done all along.

Maybe the Google ‘time spent on site’ gland works the other way round – if people usually navigate away from your site promptly and revisit search results it’s telling Google a thing or two about the value of your place in their search results.

Either way:

Delivering on what your place in the search results promises for people clicking through to your site is food for thought for all website owners.

4. The other big challenge is chasing keywords in a for profit market with a non-profit educational website. SEO smarts are really helpful when your competition has a large marketing budget.

In Australia when teenagers graduate high school they head to the nearest beach for a week of partying. It’s a tradition known as Schoolies.
Tens of millions of dollars are spent at tourist destinations around the country so our competitors have a lot of motivation and strong marketing budgets.

Gold Coast Schoolies attracts over 50,000 people and destinations along the Great Barrier Reef such as Whitsundays Schoolies books out entirely.

Our Social Work interest in Schoolies as the most significant youth event in the national social calendar is protecting the interests of the young people and providing a peer education program for them (Schoolies Survival Guide).

Problems such a sexual assault, street violence, alcohol poisoning, drug overdose, and suicide are significant. There are also consumer rights and fair trading issues we get involved in to protect young people.

Maintaining a prominent position in search results has enabled us to engage young people via the Schoolies Forums and give them a voice and place to explore issues they will face at Schoolies.

When did you know that the web was going to be a key part of your strategy?

Back in 2003, I used SEO techniques, and applied marketing principals… to a few websites and then had more unique visitors than I had anticipated and some cash flowing into our non-profit from online sources.

• Being able to reach a wide audience attracted me.

Unique visitors per month for the websites: homeless.org.au 55,000 and schoolies.org.au 30,000.

• Being able to earn a passive income really caught my attention.

As an example of online passive income: I wrote a page detailing my experience catching and cooking mud crab. Checking our website stats I was surprised that it got attention online so I put some Adsense ads on it and the page brings in some funds for us every month.

It’s unrelated to our work and on a side website we own, but the concept of providing quality content people want to read and earning some bank from it, while I’m off doing what I really want to do on the streets is great.

• On a personal note the internet as a creative outlet and SEO as a competitive outlet have been great. Winding down after a difficult day by reading some blogs, getting into forums and updating sites is great for lowering stress.

How many people have you helped over the years? 

I started volunteering with the homeless when I was 17, in 1994. I graduated my Social Work Degree in 1999, and founded a non-profit organization in 2003.

A central philosophy of Social Work is to understand an individual’s situation in the broader context of society; and change society and social policy for the better, not just the individual’s situation.

So while I’d say it’s quite a number of individuals, the real business of it all is to change society and social policy for the better.

My SEO experience behind our websites has significantly increased the number of people I’ve been able to engage with and enlist in community development and social change.

I believe you run a forum to help homeless people. How do you lift up the spirits and give hope to a person who may be sleeping in an unknown location that night? How do you keep the tone positive when many people are struggling to survive?

Unknown location? They are all staying at the Million Star Hotel!

The tone doesn’t have to remain positive. Sure we try and keep a glass half full thing going on, but the fact that people are sharing and exploring their own brokenness with people as open about their own brokenness tends to make it a genuine comfortable place for everyone, even on a bad day.

Our greatest asset in the Homeless Forums is an excellent team of moderators / forum leaders who in the main are current or formerly homeless people themselves so have great familiarity with the problems faced by other members.

Every now and again someone throws a chair, but people understand in that community space, and moderators are expressly trained to be patient (to a degree) and engage members supportively.

A big deal with homelessness is the disconnection from family and the community. So the Homeless Forums enable people with similar life experiences to connect with each other in a supportive way.

A student recently asked in a thread why people visit the forums, here is one reply:

“When I got off the street I cut most of my connections with old friends on the street as I didn't want to slip back into many bad habits i.e. drugs.
I have trouble relating to most mainstream people so for me this is a place I can talk to people who not only understand a lot of my experiences but empathise and don't criticize.
When I'm here I can be myself rather than hiding my past or hiding from it.
Where else could I say hi I'm an ex-prostitute and recovering alcoholic and druggie now turned university student.”

I can take credit for the idea to promote a forum for homeless people, but the 3,000+ members especially the moderators are the ones who have developed it into such an effective gathering place.

Two notable threads include the personal journal of a homeless girl over the course of four years moving out of street life. The thread has had over 50,000 page views helping to educate people about homelessness.

In another thread, a homeless man in London is exposing a disgusting practice of wetting down foot paths where homeless people sleep to move them on. His efforts to confront this degrading policy of the Corporation of London via the forums have been covered by the BBC and other news outlets.

I receive a number of emails from people saying they have spent some time reading the forum threads and that they learnt more about homelessness then they could imagine from a book or university course. So it’s great to hear those interested in learning about homelessness are finding educational reading in the forums.

Shout out to Chicago Homeless, Los Angeles Homeless and San Francisco Homeless we haven’t heard much from you yet.

How do people find your site? What do you do to encourage them to register and contribute?

I’ve optimized the site to return in a number of homeless related searches and invite visitors to the website into the forums.

One of the most effective ways has been to share five stories of homeless people on our website and at the end of each story, invite readers into the forums to a designated thread where they can leave a message of support for the homeless person they just read about and read replies to their message directly from the person in the story.

We also encourage homeless members to print out a flyer promoting the forums and post it at homeless service providers they frequent.

Service providers who provide internet access to homeless people can use a start page I designed for them to set as their default homepage, with search boxes for the major search engines and links to popular email services along with links to sections of the forums: Homeless Homepage.

Do you see SEO growing as a strategy for you? Do you have to have other exposure to do well in search? What core SEO principals should be applied to non-profit websites?

Certainly, SEO has served us well so I continue to follow developments in the industry and invest time in our websites.

Links from newspaper articles are another great source of exposure and bring exceptional SEO benefit. Radio and television interviews are great exposure also. Regardless of if the site is for-profit or non-profit.

The media’s daily hunger for content is so significant as it needs just as much more content tomorrow and the next day as it published today. So there are some great opportunities for exposure via the media.

The most underutilized SEO technique in the non-profit sector is deep linking and the most common mistake is simply trying to elevate their brand, rather than chasing topical keywords or geographical distinctions.

How does your online presence influence life offline? How do you get the media involved in issues?

We get a lot of phone calls as a result of prominence in search results, so I feel like a switch board sometimes, directing people to the appropriate service.

One of the upsides is that the media also call looking for the best person to talk to about the latest news angle they want to cover, so I get first lick of the ice cream and can take media opportunities I’m interested in.

For anyone wanting media coverage:

1. The best starting point is to read the recent coverage of your topic on Google News and get a good understanding of the kind of news that gets covered.
   
2. Then pick out a journalist from these stories. Write a good press release and send it to the journalist.
   
3. Note the easiest stories to get in on are industry or other people’s news. You don’t have to be newsworthy, just be able to supply a timely comment about what is newsworthy.
   
4. Having a media contacts page listed on your website is a good practice also.

We also get weird and wonderful requests from people who find us online. One lady gave us a whole lamb from her butcher as some kind of offering in memory of her father who died recently.

I had to call a priest to check if it was some weird religious thing I should avoid getting involved with, but he said it was fine, just her way of celebrating her father’s life. So the homeless staying at our shelter ate every kind of lamb cut there is for the next few weeks.

As a non-profit, every keyword topic area we are involved in and dominate online strengthens our Social Work position offline – impacting people’s lives.

Should non-profits buy links? How do they get exposure online when the network is already so saturated?

Rather than buy links I’d encourage non-profits to hire a Masters student or PHD student in to do some writing for them (just call your local university and ask the faculty to recommend a student), or allocate some staff time if you have in-house experts.

Workshop in-house your topic area and ask what’s missing in terms of information online? Have a really quality position paper or article written on that topic, publish it on your website and update the Wikipedia to reference the article.

Consider the reference worthy content you could create for a few thousand dollars and you would now own highly link worthy content.

The document would also be great for long tail searches and the writing style and substance would no doubt register on Google’s semantics quality score.

Quality substantive content needs a lot less link juice to attract search traffic.

Here are some potential link sources free for non-profits:

• Submission to the Yahoo Directory is free
• Libraries link to quality content from local non-profits
• Local government websites link to local non-profits
• Also Google offers Adwords credits to some organizations

Non-profit organizations are also forever in contact with each other so use your existing real life networks to make some online linking connections. They are the best contacts to ask for deep links with descriptive anchor text – to programs or events you profile on internal pages, reports or even just your contact us page.

YouTube

• Google really hasn’t got a handle on YouTube yet; the search function is crap and doesn’t help with misspellings like Google organic search does.
• At any rate, Google is heavily promoting YouTube videos in organic search results. The potential for SEO’s from all backgrounds to take advantage of this is wide open.

Have you used any for profit sites to help fund non-profit sites? Should non-profit sites consider adding for profit sections to their site to help subsidize the costs of running their website and organization?

I do some work as a Life Coach and feed the funds into our non-profit work. I also do some Search Engine Optimization and increasingly funds are flowing in from this work. In the future I’d like to get more involved in Reputation Management as I know the media and public relations side of it and think there is a growing market for it from a dual public relations and SEO perspective.

It’s not likely that a lot of non-profits are in a position to operate a for profit website on the side as a means of raising funds. But where it is possible it can be a productive source of income.

Stay Protected

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

If you want to prevent any of your Wordpress blogs from getting hacked make sure you keep your software up to date, and follow other basic Wordpress protection strategies, like - securing your admin folder, removing the Wordpress version number from your theme's header.php file, creating an index.html file in your plug-ins directory, and removing other common Wordpress oriented footprints like a "powered by Wordpress" signature in the page footer.

Get an Early Warning

Another thing you can do to protect yourself is to get an early warning if/when your blog does get hacked. You can subscribe to a Google Alert for site:yoursite.com viagra OR cialis OR levitra, and so on...as Patrick explains on Blogstorm.

If one of your blogs gets hacked fix the others before it is too late. Some plug ins make it easy to update/re-install Wordpress.

Stopping Comment Spam

Not quite as bad as full hacking, but comment spam is still annoying. There are a couple good plug ins to help prevent comment spam as well, including Akismet and Spam Karma.

Other easy suggestions on this front are to require a captcha and force first time comments to be moderated before appearing on the site.

Google IP Address Targeted Hacking + Cloaked Spam

One of my blogs was recently targeted by a blog hacker that inserted links into the site that could *only be viewed by GoogleBot*. You typically would not notice such a hack unless you subscribed to a Google Alert for your site, saw yourself ranking for some of the spam terms, and/or when your Google Search Traffic started to fall.

The issue with such a hack is that it is hard to know if you wiped it out, even if you update everything. When you use Firefox's User Agent Switcher you still will not see the links because you are not surfing from one of GoogleBot's IP addresses.

In fact, for this particular hack you can't even see the links on Google's cached version of a page unless you view the text cache version of the page.

Once you click the text only cache link tons of pharmacy links appear in the page footer. This screenshot was taken from a Texas Instruments blog post on security and safety

Google currently has indexed over 20,000 pages with this particular hack.

How This Type of Hack Influences Google Traffic

Earlier this week one of my writers who loves blogging complained that search traffic was dropping slightly, and then after a few days of minor decay the search traffic was cut in half. Keep in mind this site gets much of it's traffic from organic links.

Our Google traffic started to fall off slowly, and as more of the pages with spam in them got indexed the fall off became sharper. After a week or so traffic may be a small % of what it was...or if they just spam a couple pages the change in traffic may be so minor that you never notice it. The traffic decay rate depends on...

• the crawl priority of your site (how frequently it gets crawled)
• the number of pages you have on your site
• how bad your site gets spammed (number of spammy links and pages, etc.

You can see what portion of your site got hit by searching Google for "spammy footprint" site:example.com and comparing that count to the total number of pages Google shows indexed for site:example.com.

How to Clean Up Your Wordpress Blog

Regular updates are a plus to make it easy to revert to a prior version if needed. And if you find yourself upgrading software after a hack make sure your server is clean (save old files elsewhere) and install fresh. You probably want to change your database and Wordpress passwords after upgrading, and if you are not sure where the hack was you may also want to change your theme.

There are a lot of different ways people can hack into a Wordpress blog. Some spam hunting ideas include...

Using SSH to look for recently modified files and/or weird new files that were added to your site. Some hackers may also add files to the root of your site, or above it hidden somewhere on your web server.

Some hacks may be via a Wordpress plug-in. If you have inessential plug-ins installed see if others have complained about them getting hacked, and see if you can remove them. I think some hackers that get into Wordpress go so far as adding plug-ins that position spam throughout the blog.

If your database contains spam in it then you can run the following MySQL query (from Michael VanDeMar) to find many of the most common types of Wordpress link hacks.

If you can't find any spam in your Wordpress database, then...

• look for files that have been added or modified
• back up your files and database
• disable plug ins
• delete all files (except for maybe your config file and .htaccess file - and verify those have not been edited as well)
• update your blog to the newest version of Wordpress
• change your MySQL password and your Wordpress password
• install a new theme
• download necessary plug-ins from their original sources if you want to keep using them
• make sure you performed all the steps at the top of this article to try to keep your blog safe.
• if your problem was a shoddy host that got compromised then its a good idea to shift to a better Wordpress hosting solution

If The Hacker Was Using IP Cloaking...

If the hacker was using IP cloaking you can't be 100% certain that the spam is gone until Google tries to index new pages on your site and/or re-indexes old pages that were hacked.

You can find files that have been indexed in the last day or last week by using Google's date based filters.

If you updated your blog a few hours ago you can also do a regular site:www.example.com search on Google and set the results to 100 per page to find any pages that have been re-indexed in the last few hours. Once the search results come up you can search the search results page for hours ago.

One note of caution is to check the actual page's cache date at the top of the page. Sometimes when a cache is really new clicking on the link will show you the new page, but sometimes it will show you a cached page from a few days back. When you see a new cached page without the spam links hopefully your spam problems are almost over and your site is on the road to recovery, with rankings improving as Google caches more pages from your site.

Remember to set up a Google Alert for your site so you can track if any spam links magically re-appear.

Your Turn

I have only had a couple blogs hacked in my many years of blogging. Did I miss any obvious tips and/or wisdom you can add to the above post?

Due to the rough scale of PageRank, outdated toolbar PageRank scores, hand editing of toolbar PageRank, and a variety of other factors, it is somewhat hard to get confirmation from Google if a link source passes PageRank. The slow way to test is to make 1 link be the only link you point at a site and then let it age for a few months. Then, if a toolbar PageRank score appears it probably passed PageRank.

If you are competing on the competitive parts of the web, building only one link and waiting around for a few months is likely an ineffective SEO strategy. So then what else can be done? How can we speed things up and get the show on the road?

If you control the linking source it is quite easy to tell if that site passes reputation. Simply link to another site with slightly misspelled anchor text, and if the target shows up you know that the link is passing some reputation and authority. For example, someone could link to this site using seoq book, and then if this site started ranking for that then I would assume that the link is passing some amount of reputation and authority. Then you could later go back and fix that spelling error.

If you *do not* control the linking source, then it gets a bit harder to test it. What you could do is add a modifier to the anchor text. For example, if this site did not yet rank in Google for best SEO book you could use that as the anchor text, and see if it shows up in the search results after the linking source is indexed.

You can also use this sort of technique to test 301 redirects & see if they pass link authority. Please note that when using redirects it is best to keep the topic fairly well aligned to minimize the risk that the PageRank might go away.