"Educating" the Market
Is outing & writing polarizing drivel hate baiting or a service to the community?
It is all a matter of perspective, isn't it?
Some people would like to claim that it is one thing when they do it & something else when somebody else does it.
Unfortunately for those who want to have their cake & eat it too, consistency matters.
Even these guys know that.
If you brand those who fall outside the guidelines or get hit by updates as scammers to be avoided, then when your company gets caught working an angle & "scamming" (based on your own past sermons) your own judgement gets cast against yourself.
Is that fair?
In a word: yes.
Any belief system that is imposed onto others, but unacceptable when imposed upon the person who states it, isn't a belief system at all. It's duplicitous hackery at best - possibly much worse.
If your own company doesn't follow your own advice, then what does that say about your value systems? How many people have had their potential held back by listening to your misinformation & making the unfortunate mistake of trusting you? What does that sort of behavior do to the reputation of the industry? Now everyone else is suspect because you pitched bogus pablum at newbies.
To speak publicly about the pitfalls of doing "blackhat" techniques and then turn around and be caught red-handed for the same just gives credibility to the naysayers claiming our industry is filled with slime balls.
If you want to be a polarizing asshat, then don't be surprised when you eat your own cooking. To expect anything less is an open expression of ignorance of the field of inbound marketing marketing.
Comments
I don't have anything too insightful to say except bravo on the best use of the
I've seen in a long while. Well done :)...so thank her! :D
I'm just taking a guess here...
I intentionally didn't put a name in the blog post
I'm following the Twitter conversation between you and @daveminchala
If people want to know, they can figure it out from there.
Aaron,
Sorry this is a bit unrelated but I couldn't find a way to send you a direct message and your twitter account looks like you don't use it much.
Since you wrote about Mahalo and sites like it in the past I was hoping I could get your take on this post. Am I just seeing mosters under the bed? howtonotmakemoneyonline.com/2012/05/is-google-pandapenguin-only-for-english.html
... were either removed or reduced during the past few updates. Further some sites which declined due to Panda may have rose during Penguin due to a combination of Google...
Further, some of these algorithmic layers may be applied sooner or more heavily inside the United States. Google can be more aggressive with filtering out undesirable things in the US-based index because it is a far larger index of content they are starting from. It wouldn't make sense for Google to be as aggressive in the Philippines with filters, in part because they are starting from a much smaller base index of content...and then that content is further split across both English and some regional dialects like Tagalog.
Thanks Aaron,
Still looks strange. In the past when I'd see people complaining on forums that they were delisted from Google or banned from AdSense and their Alexa stats looked like that while their site was obviously targetted to US visitors (local professional directories, services, etc) it was a pretty good indicator that they had been buying traffic, clicks or otherwise linked to from bad neighborhoods.
Really hoping this is about Danny Sullivan and his site hosting ads for TLA and then saying the ad department was a separate entity and essentially out of his control. Laughable!
...but this is precisely why the "marketing ethics" styled conversation is so brutal. Literally everyone who mentions how you should stay away from spamming somehow profits directly or indirectly from that which is labeled as spam. When I saw an article about the above incident it did indeed have a TLA ad right next to the article...which does send mixed messages of course, especially since the firm that had the above issue happen has former TLA employees at the core.
The big issue is that in many ways Google defines many things that are scalable, predictable & profitable as spam. This is not based on virtue, but based on their desire to be the main manipulator of their own results. All others shall do it only as Google permits. The Panda algorithm hits the eHow.com website as a form of spam, but that same content creator enjoys PREMIUM status when their content is posted to Google's YouTube.
The self-serving nature of such relationships is anything but accidental. Grant Google greater control & feed into their ecosystem AS THEY PERMIT, ALONG THE LINES OF WHAT IS MOST BENEFICIAL TO GOOGLE and you get a star. If you create higher quality content but don't give Google their cut, you may well be a dirty rotten spammer.
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