JstaTad
I think the reality is that in order to prevent this from being gamed the same influence and author authority factors in place for Social Sharing will sort of be in place for +1 being a ranking factor beyond personalized results. I totally get the personalization part of it and how it could improve searcher experiences. The real question, as with Social Sharing, is what is the impact on results BEYOND personalization. Yes volume of +1's seem like an obvious signal, but I'm guessing "who" did the +1 is important from the perspective of how much weight a +1 gives in an Algorithm.
Right now I"m most curious about the potential impact on PPC ads. I would guess that a +1 icon with an avatar from someone I follow on the ad will be a big factor in improving click through rates.
Wrote essentially the same story a week and a half ago as it relates to the automotive industry: http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=85874
We have taken on the occassional client like this. It’s important to set up expectations, and get paid up front!Often times the advice we give them ends up changing their business model to something a little closer to reality.Great Post.
Congratulations. First Rhea now Lisa....Jim likes the ladies. I’ve always kind of felt that We Build Pages was just quietly toiling away making money while the rest of the SEO world was being loud with lots of blogging, and honestly being too busy blogging to be making money.Now they have a respected voice with a built in audience. In other words, they have probably been kicking our butts from a competitive standpoint all this time but didn’t have time to blog. Now they will still be kicking our butts with Lisa publicly "dancing in the end zone". It will be better than any TV ad or print ad in getting them recognition from potential clients and beyond the small circle of SEOs that have read Jim’s posts about being too busy to take on any new clients for a while. Hope you are hiring now Jim!Looking forward to continued great content from Lisa, with the Jim Boykin twist. Any chance of unmasking any of those Link Ninja secrets?
I’m not a McCain supporter. But this isn’t unethical. It’s smart. What’s dumb is McCain isn’t bidding high enough.
I love to read Marty’s stuff, but it looks like he forgot to take his meds or something the other day. That being said, both Marty and Li are right (or at least make good points) on the whole "avatar" issue. The problem is they have different primary goals for success in Social Media. It looks really hard to "do social media right", or at least the way its zealots say it should be done, and take those, for the most part unmeasurable, results to the bank. Whereas search engine rankings are very measurable and concrete.The person that eventually bridges the gap between social media ’ethics’ and SEO success will be very wealthy some day.
The post that started this whole stink: http://www.semvironment.com/nude-adwords-keyword-data-exposed-with-google-analytics/
This really sounds almost criminal to me. These guys figured out a way to see what the real search queries were on Google AdWords just by using filters in Google Analytics. The data was out for everyone to see, not like in the Google Search Query Report where half of the clicks are just listed as "Other Unique Queries". Google apparently has shut off access to this data now so the data can’t be seen.What does Google have to hide? They want us to be relevent with our advertising, so why don’t they give us the tools to make our advertising relevant. Broad matching keywords is increadibly irrelevant without utilizing the negative keywords gleaned from the Search Query Report. But the Search Query Report is half a loaf because Google hides almost half the clicks in some instances by using "Other Unique Queries" instead of the actual search query.These guys obviously found out how to see all the search query data and Google shut them down. But the cat is out of the bag now, Google can share all of this information but refuses too.
I think my biggest issue with them all is that they all seem to keep coming up with more ways to spend more money and not coming up with anything to actually improve conversions or sales.
Miriam, I don’t know how Acura "Advances The Future" but my watch has been doing a great job for years, and I’m pretty sure I don’t need to spend $50,000 on a new SUV to do it better than the watch.
I’m a little fed up with the "lip service" also. If you want to buy your way to the top of the rankings with paid links its very possible. We have been telling clients for years that those paid links could all be wiped out tommorow, but I’m starting to doubt that will ever happen. The second one paid link gets devalued, 5 more pop up. Google will never be able to catch up. They can change the ranking algo, but they really risk losing relevancy in doing that...
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree about some directory link building. Free one-way links are still giving all of our clients great value and great ranks. Yes, its a hell of a lot of work, but contrary to all the talk abut directory link building being dead...its just not. It still works, and works quite well if you stay in the right neighborhoods.
I’m in Virginia and not really interested in going to Philly, the DC metro area has plenty of interest already. Simon Heseltine and Debra Mastaler have already had some well attended SEO meetups in Northern Virginia, and the interest and industry is already there.
Inflamatory headline, closed comments and request to link to the post instead. Kudos to him for doing such a good job on the link bait.
We started tossing arround ad copy ideas using WTF for some of our automotive clients after we saw this and our link builder Catherine came up with "WTF are you still driving that POS!"
GrayWolf nailed it. I blogged about something very similar last night. But his rant was a lot more thorough. I’d love to get more notoriety from my peers through Social Media outlets like Sphinn and StumbleUpon. But those are ego clicks. Blogging about content that potential clients would need to know may not generate the volume of traffic, but its at least targeted to make me more money.
Story: Top 20 Sphinn Users
Ok they are great, prolific Sphinners and Bloggers. Here’s my question do they have time to do jobs and make money. Or is Spinning their job?
We do a lot of work for other agencies that "white label" our services and pass it off as their own. But we tell the agencies up front that we won’t lie about our contractual relationship and let it be known that we are always one Google search away on our names from finding out who we really are.
It’s been somewhat lucrative for us and "ethically" I don’t think its that big of a deal... At some point the "secret" always comes out of "who’s who".
Wow. She’s playing on a different level than most link builders. You don’t see people give this kind of great information anymore. Just imagine the stuff she isn’t telling us.
Rose, as usual you are absolutely correct about the searchers not really being influenced by the branding message. The smaller the company and brand the more this is true. But that’s another blog post...
We work for some really well known "brand" names, and the majority of searches for their products are for the actual brand name. My feeling is that if they already know your brand name then the branding work has already been done by TV, Radio, Print, etc. At that point I think an ad copy that emphasizes the calls to action or conversion actions you want the searcher to take are more valuable than maintaining warm fuzzy feelings about the brand.
We can do the marketing on the post click side of things as we drive them to meeting our conversion goals...
One thing that I believe that they are doing and not telling anyone about is using the adbot to read site content beyond the landing page and then broad matching to that content.
We had a non-profit who had a site about cholesterol. Our ads were showing for words we were not advertising on and were not synonyms to words we were advertising on. The two most unbelievable were "big black girls sex" and "fat girls sex".
We did site searches for those keywords and found them on a one page PDF deep within the site - not in exact order either. We also had an herb with a very unique name pulling our ad that was mentioned in the sites forums and nowhere else.
We also have automotive clients who are not advertising on their competitors names, but Google continues to show new ones each day. I sure didn’t volunteer for that.
I personally believe they are ripe for a class action lawsuit with this stuff.
As for the headline - that’s just how the game in played now - you likely wouldn’t have read the article with a boring title. It’s link bait at its finest.
Lyndon is absolutely correct. Google is serving up ads for higher bidded, not as relevant, broad match keywords rather than show exact match keywords that are "exact matches" with higher quality scores and lower bids.
The only way to stop it is to use negative keywords.
Story: Discussion: Impact of Google +1?