Marketing Hipster

I was reading an article last week which I would love to reference here, but I have been unable to find where I had read it. It was in an actual print magazine and not online. The article featured a new “Brand Identity” company that helped both companies and individuals “clean up” their names on the internet. They interviewed the CEO and he spoke a whole lot of mumbo jumbo to make his job and what his company does sound real important.

Let me walk you through what they do and I will use myself as an example. Let’s say you would do a search in Google using my name Cord Silverstein. The search results are pretty basic. The first page has links to this site, my profile pages on MyBlogLog and LinkedIn as well as a link to the company I work for. As I said pretty standard stuff.

BUT, what if when you did that same search using my name and you would see this?!?!?!?!?

Oh my!! Look what the internet is saying about me! That’s some terrible stuff. What in the world am I going to do?

No worries because this brand identity company will come to my rescue. While charging their clients $10,000 a month, they will go out and register dozens and dozens of domain names with my name in it. For example:

• cordsilverstein.com
• cord-silverstein.com
• cord-silverstein-likes-puppies.com
• cord-silverstein-humanitarian.com
• cord-silverstein-american.com
• cord-silverstein-red-white-and-blue.com
• cord-silverstein-school-marm.com

You get the idea. After purchasing these domains, the company will build web sites for all these domains. The sites will be basic HTML sites and filled with absolutely useless content, but there will be a whole lot of it! (wink) While building all these content pages, the company will also go out and register these sites with every damn directory they can find to hopefully get a nice bunch of links pointing to each one of these sites.

Now if all goes well and after this company has sucked as much money out of me as possible, hopefully, the search engines will start placing these web sites in the top of the natural search results since my name is in all of the domain names. And if that happens, all those really mean posts about me will be pushed down to page six, seven, etc. And then the company will pat themselves on the back for yet another job done incredibly well! Hurray….

Here’s the question of the day. Is this anything else other than total and unadulterated spam? Are they gaming the search engines to hide the results they do not want to be seen? Or do you feel this is acceptable since the internet never forgets and this is an option for someone or a company to try to clean up their names via the search engines?

The best answer will have the opportunity to take my place as backup singer on the next Bee Gees world tour.*

* Not only is Cord not a backup singer for the Bee Gees, but the Bee Gees would not have him even if he begged with the voice he has. So in other words, there is no prize and Cord was trying, and we emphasize the word trying, to be funny.

Technorati Tags: Brand Identity, Google, spam, Bee Gees

I tend not to really focus any of my time or attention on SEO or search engine optimization here for many different reasons. The biggest reason is that SEO is seen by many as just tricks and scams to get better natural positioning in the search engines. And unfortunately, some search engine optimization companies and people have said and done things that have put themselves on the same levels of honesty as used car salesmen.

Rumors are running rampant that Google is preparing this weekend to update their page ranks and every SEO and his brother are scurrying like roaches when the lights turn on to do everything they can to get their page ranks increased. I have been reading articles by people using terms like “link trains” and “link baiting” and I finally decided I wanted to say a thing or two about SEO and about some of the buffoons who are seen as “experts” in this field.

You want to learn about SEO and how to do it right, here it is:

1. Build a web site with technology that will allow each and every page of the site to be read and indexed by the search engines.
2. Architect the site so that each page has the appropriate navigation so not only search engine spiders, but also real live users will be able to surf the site easily and quickly.
3. Write great content that users will find interesting and that they will want to recommend and come back for more.

That’s it. You can make it a lot more complicated, but it isn’t. It’s not about gaming the system and seeing how many links you can get and writing articles that use the same word 400 times in it. It is about very simply building a solid web site on the back end and then writing content that your target audience will want to read and interact with. It is time for people to realize that getting into the top 10 of natural search results does not guarantee success. How many times have you gone from a search result to a page and thought, “What a piece of crap” and closed that page and moved on?

Some of these SEO gurus really blow my mind. I was reading an article today on a site which is ranked under 3000 in Technorati. The guy has over 2000 blog reactions, but he has under 250 people registered for his RSS feed and a very low Alexa ranking! He has gamed the system with BS link scams, but he has absolutely no readers, no community, in other words he has nothing.

All hacks off the stage!

P.S. There was absolutely no chance that I would link to any of the hacks I referred to above and give them yet another link.

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, natural positioning, search engines, Google, page ranks, link trains, link baiting, Technorati, blog reactions, RSS, link scams, community

An interesting thing happened yesterday that I wanted to get your opinion on. I received a comment on this blog that read:

“That cartoon is funny, espcially the PH with the ghostbusters sign through it. Like you, I am competing in the Bloggers Choice Awards, although not in the same category. I hope my email is not an intrusion.

Anyway, I would like it very much if you would go to URL and vote for me for best _____ blog and best overall blog as well, if you feel my blog is of a high quality. I really think I have a legitimate shot at winning. If you are open to spreading the word, that would be cool as well.”

Now this comment was left from a blogger who has NEVER commented on my blog before. I do not know this person and have never been to their blog. I really felt like the author was just going from blog to blog trolling for votes and that this comment was nothing different than the thousands of other comment spams that I and every other blogger get everyday.

So I immediately deleted his comment and posted the following comment:

“I have removed your comments from the site which is the first time I have ever done this. I think you are pretty sad to come to someone else’s blog and beg for votes for your blog… Grow up and realize that begging and spamming will not get you where you want to be.”

Needless to say, the blogger in question was not particularly happy with my response. He sent me several emails questioning my “hostility” and why I was so mean. 

I tried to explain to him that blogging is about creating and developing relationships and coming onto someone’s blog that you do not know and have no relationship with and immediately start promoting your blog and asking for votes is nothing more than comment spam, in my humble opinion. I added that if he does with other blogs, he will get similar responses. He of course, disagreed.

What do you think? Is my thinking wrong here? Was I too hostile? I would love to hear your opinions.

Technorati Tags: blogger, comment spam

Let me start this post by saying that I am coming to the party a bit late on this one, but this weekend I finally got to catch up on my feeds and had to comment on this.

MyBlogLog launched towards the end of May, a tagging system within MBL that users can tag blogs with keywords that can identify what specific blogs are all about. To be honest, I had not read MBL’s blog in a while, but when I logged into MBL and saw it, I thought it was a good, but pretty basic idea. What I did not realize until I read a post Andy Beal had written that MBL asked their users to tag blogs they believed were spammers with the term, “Schmoe” which stood for “Social Media Optimizer”. Yea, see you use the S and the M and the O and the rest of the letters don’t really matter other than that it helps spells the word Schmoe, whatever…

So Andy on his blog asked when did Social Media Optimization become spam? Which I thought was a pretty good question. MBL really did not have an answer for that, but I would like to ask another question. If MBL wants to actually put in some safeguards to stop spamming, wouldn’t you think the first thing they would need to do is actually define what is spam on MBL? I went over to MBL’s blog as well as their help section and I could not find anywhere what MBL defines as spam.

I thought that I would give them a hand so they might actually stop putting the cart before the horse and layout what I consider to be spam on MyBlogLog.

1. A blog that does not have any original content of their own. If a blog is just pulling content from other blogs and not adding any of their own content and are just doing this so they can have five layers of Google Adsense ads on their site. That be spam!
2. Any MBL member who signs up for a community and then posts a message on that users community which says something like, “Hey, great blog. Come check out my blog at www.ineedattention.com”. (Oh by the way MBL, I see the spam link for messages is still just a mailto.) Definitely spam..
3. Any member that has a scantly clad woman as it’s community picture. This is spam except if the blog is about scantly clad women then it is just fine.
4. A member that just goes out and joins communities and becomes contacts with hundreds of other users without having any interest in their blogs. Spammer…

To be honest, I can’t think of anything else. Can you? If you think I missed anything or you disagree, please let me know in the comments and I will update.

MyBlogLog, I really think this issue is more a semantic issue than anything else. Your “Schmoe” term is just bad. All Social Media Optimizers are not spammers. That is just like saying that all Search Engine Optimizers are spammers. More importantly, it seems that using this term is a direct insult to many people who have played a part in making MyBlogLog what it is today.

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, tagging, MBL, keywords, blogs, Andy Beal, spammers, Schmoe, Social Media Optimization, spam

I already mentioned in a previous post that like many others out there, Marketing Hipster has been inundated with spam comments recently. Even though Akismet is doing a fabulous job catching them, I have been amazed at the sheer numbers I have been getting over the last week or two. I was thinking what could be done to stop comment spam.

My first idea was to equip my computer with a powerful laser that could pinpoint these spammers IP address and my laser would travel through phone and cable wires right up to their computer and fry their computers, toast them! Yea, laser… Oh but before that would happen, I would take over their computers and have a picture come up on their screens with a picture of me with a big smile on my face and giving them the finger. I then woke up from fantasy land and thought that maybe a more realistic idea was in order.

Now I believe there are only two main reasons why spammers use comments on blogs to promote their wares. First off, at the off chance that someone would see their link and click on it, very unlikely, but still a chance. The much larger reason is for the search engines to see the link and give the spammers web sites better visibility in the search engines. If this is the case, why not take this opportunity away from the spammers? Why couldn’t Google create a spam site that bloggers could submit a copy of the spam to them and then Google could ban their sites from it’s search engine? They already do this for SEO.

Without any visibility, their web sites are out of business. I know this seems rather simple, but sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ones. Why wouldn’t this work? Let me know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: spam comments, search engines, spammers, Google