Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

Google basically called out Suite101 as the poster child site of what its “Panda” algorithm update was aimed at. Reports have found the site to be one of the hardest hit, and while the site has often been mentioned in the same breath as sites like eHow in the past, eHow has apparently gained from the update. When asked about it in a recent Wired interview , Google’s Matt Cutts said, “I feel pretty confident about the algorithm on Suite 101.” We had reached out to Suite101 prior to the publication of that article, but only since it was published, have we heard back. A representative for Suite101 pointed us to an open letter to Matt Cutt from CEO Peter Berger, in response to the comments from the Wired piece. Here is a sample of the letter ( read the whole thing in its entirety here ): We have certainly noticed that within the last week Google has stopped sending our content as many readers as it had in the past, resulting in a decline of 30% in overall traffic. We have been working to understand what separates successful content on our site from negatively impacted content, and have also tried to compare how other sites on the web rank for given Google queries. We do not get the sense that this “Panda” algorithm update is about filtering out “low quality” content. We do appreciate that Google is constantly trying to improve immediate user relevance for given search queries. That means that Google has to experiment with evaluating measurable properties of content in alternative ways. Engineers might refer to these properties or signals as “quality” (within the context of a given search query), but please do understand that when a representative of Google describes entire sites as “low quality” outside of engineering circles, this can be perceived as insulting by people who associate “quality” rather with an individual piece’s execution, angle and craft, and who have taken great pride in creating it. We take it that concise, high quality writing is a signal that Google de-emphasized with its algorithm update. That is a legitimate business decision, even if some of the content we currently publish does not benefit from it. Other factors have become more important, and we will try to understand them, and work to help those of our writers who feel that Google is the best distribution channel for their thoughts to improve their articles. For the sake of the web as the rich ecosystem it is, we hope that Google stays committed to: * a page-by-page evaluation of the web’s content, emphasizing its actual “content” over its display and polish * respect of copyright, diligently ensuring original content is not outranked by scraped content * impartiality in terms of content’s ownership, including treating publicly listed corporations’ as well as Google’s own content not differently from the rest of the web Another level of depth may be added to this discussion if the word “quality” were more fully defined. “Quality” without much more precisely defining it, especially when the quality mentioned does only seem to be a quality signal relating to a given search query, leaves a lot still misunderstood… We spoke with Berger last year , long before this update was realized, but during a time when search quality was really starting to come into question as content farm sites were really on the rise. Berger told us, “Every week, several thousand people apply to become Suite101 writers. While we only accept a portion of applicants based on our non-negotiable quality standards, we do have many successful writers on our site who do not consider themselves ‘writers.” “We see it as Suite101′s mission to enable people – anyone who can write well and with deep understanding of a subject – to achieve their goals,” he said. “These might be earning money, addressing large audiences, building up a personal professional brand, or simply enjoying creative freedom in a nurturing, peer-oriented environment.” Cutts has yet to respond to the letter, at least in the comments section, but it hasn’t been live very long, and Cutts is keeping pretty busy from the sound of things.

There’s no question that Google has been putting a lot of focus on local results lately – from the release of products like Google Places and Hotpot (the company’s personalized and social recommendation engine) to an increasing amount of queries simply retrieving local results – often above other organic listings.  We had an extensive conversation about this with industry veteran Bruce Clay at PubCon a couple months ago, and webmasters and SEOs have been stressing about it all over the web. In fact, just today, one consulting firm ran a press release talking about the competitive advantages local business owners have as a result of recent changes with Google.  Do local businesses have the upper hand in Google? Tell us what you think .  Consultant (and founder of the firm, LocalMarketingProfitFaucet  says there’s a new type of Google Gold Rush. He’s referring to getting the prime listings from Google Places, which Google will often place at the top of the SERPs.  "This change is having an immediate and positive impact on the local businesses shown in these Page 1 listings," says Adams. "The Internet-savvy business owners who understand how to take advantage of this are generating new customers for next-to-nothing. Meanwhile, a surprising number are still oblivious to the significance of this change. In fact, Google has revealed that only a tiny percentage of local businesses have even claimed their Google Places listing, let alone optimize it." "From our experience," Adams continues, "Google has always given preferential treatment to unique, multimedia content that is kept fresh and up to date. And of course, stay away from any black hat tactics that try to game the system. Google always catches up to these shenanigans. When they do, your listing could be banned with no warning and no second chances." If local businesses have the competitive advantage now, then some non-local businesses are wondering how they’re supposed to compete with that. After all, the far reach of the web has historically been an attractive reason to start a business in the first place.  In a new video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel, Matt Cutts (head of the company’s webspam team) addressed a user-submitted question: "In a search environment where local is becoming increasingly important (and more full on the SERP), how can an out of town company compete with the local based (and locally housed) competition without lying to show up in these results?" Cutts responded by saying, "The entire page of web rankings is there that out of town people can compete on, so the idea of the local universal results is to show local businesses, so in some sense, there’s not really a way where if you’re out of town, you can sort of show up (within our guidelines), and show up as a local business." "Now, if you are a mobile business – so for example, maybe you’re a plumber, and you get into your pickup truck, and you drive around in a particular area – so if you’re a mobile business, then in Google Places you can specify a service area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you’re based, but that’s only if you actually have some base of operations there," he continues. "You can’t be based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area in Wyoming if you have no physical presence there." "I think that that’s a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up, and I know that the team has really been paying a lot of attention to try and improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of businesses, and that will only continue," adds Cutts.   In other words, if you’re not a local business, there’s nothing much you can do about getting the kind of visibility the local businesses are getting, should Google deem the user’s query worthy of the local results. I might suggest finding queries related to your business that aren’t returning local results and giving these some more attention, and of course there’s always AdWords.  If there’s a particular geographic market that you’re after, but you’re not based there, you may want to consider setting up shop. In the end, Google is just going to do what it thinks will help users. Whether or not you buy that is up to you, but they’re not going to deviate from that stance, and if it encourages more people to buy AdWords ads, then so be it.    You can expect there to be a great amount of focus continued to be placed on local. The company even moved former VP of Search products, Marissa Mayer, to this area of focus, and with mobile becoming such a big part of the way people search, local is by default going to be a bigger part of what people are actually looking for.  Has Google’s increased focus on local hurt your search rankings and visibility? Let us know in the comments .

We recently looked at how Google and Bing use links on Twitter and Facebook for organic ranking, following an informative piece from Danny Sullivan on the matter. Google’s Matt Cutts has now addressed the subject a bit more in a new video uploaded to Googles’ Webmaster Help Channel .  Do you want social media to influence search rankings? Comment here . "We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook," says Cutts. "I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal." Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.  "The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal," explains Cutts. "So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings." To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is "looking at it more broadly within web search as well," according to Cutts. "Now, there’s a few things to remember," Cutts warns. "Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings." This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.   "This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being," says Cutts. "The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that." Would you like to see Facebook/Twitter links carry more weight in organic search? Share your thoughts here . Related: Google & Bing Are Looking at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking

There are a few interesting videos currently floating around right now that I thought would be worth sharing here. The first one is from Google’s Matt Cutts at a site review session at Google I/O. The second one is of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at the All Things Digital Conference, and the third is the recent LinkedIn Tech Talk event. Matt Cutts The Cutts video is an hour long, but we know many of our readers will listen to pretty much anything he has to say. "About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the Q&A might be interesting to you," Cutts notes . Carol Bartz Kara Swisher at All Things Digital was kind enough to post this video of her interview with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. "Yes, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did indeed drop the F-bomb on BoomTown quite expertly in an onstage interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference recently–and, yes, it was both expected and enjoyable," says Swisher . LinkedIn Tech Talk Last but not least, is the recent LinkedIn TechTalk. You’ll find this one a bit techier (obviously), but a number of you will probably be interested in this as well. "It’s a tad long with a running time of nearly 61 minutes, but if you’re interested in SCALA it will be well worth it," says LinkedIn’s Mario Sundar. If you have thoughts on any of these videos, please feel free to discuss them in the comments section below. With that, I’ll leave you to enjoy nearly 3 hours of content on one page (it’s cool if you don’t want to watch it all at once).

When search engines measure the level at which they trust Web sites, and that trust is topic-specific. What’s that mean for new sections of a trusted Web site? …

Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the " Bingathon ". So how did it perform? Well, it appears nothing " official " has been released yet . So let’s see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon. Did any of you watch the Bingathon? If so, what did you think about it? Tell us . Olivia Munn , co-host of the live event with Jason Sudeikis , tweeted the following… This shouldn’t come as any shock that Microsoft is claiming an early victory . Think about it, what is the real measurement for success here? What other live telethon launch of a search engine is there for comparison? Some of the search industries biggest names threw in their two cents about the Bingathon via Twitter… So we’ve heard what a co-host had to say as well as people in the industry , but what does the everyday user have to say about the Bingathon? Some Tweeters loathed the event … …while some Twitterers were just happy for the 24 hour commercial free Hulu , provided by Bing. Scanning through my #Bingathon search on Twitter I did notice that the overall feeling of the Bingathon wasn’t very positive . With that said I was able to find a few Tweets of people who seemed to enjoy the event… It’s really hard to say for sure if the Bingathon was a success, but it did manage to get people talking… even though the talk wasn’t 100% positive . So was this one of those " any press is good press " moments?

How long it takes to show results from SEO will depend on several factors, including age of the site and the level of competition. Another important variable is whether you’re working on a new site or updating an old one. …

If you wait around long enough, anything will come back in style. Now that the link economy has sprung up, flourished, and begun to recede, marketers are once again paying attention to customer needs. …

In the past, I’ve said there’s no direct correlation between editorial rankings and paid advertisements.