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August 16, 2007
In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for August 16, 2007:
Be Topical. Be Natural. Ease of Use. Encourage Distribution. Good advice for all the linkbaiters out there! I especially think folks should pay attention to #2: Be Natural: “Good linkbait shouldn’t look like link bait. The link-getting motivation should be subdued to a point where it’s not apparent at all. You don’t want to look as if you’re trying too hard for links.” Those are wise words that many a linkbaiter fails to grasp. If someone calls your linkbait out as such, it probably means you’re trying too hard. Linkbaity subjects are also much more likely to have long-term linkability if they naturally inspire people to point to them.
If you expect to see a huge jump in your search rank overnight - think again. Even though search engines are getting better at finding content quickly, it doesn’t mean they’re fully indexing, ranking, and processing that information at break-neck speed. For example, I made some big changes to a robots.txt file on one of my sites about 2 months ago. Google Webmaster Central told me that Google had accessed that robots file the next day. The affects on my Google rankings are just now starting to become apparent… and there’s still a ways to go. The best advice for long-term search optimization is patience. You should be able to see some affect within a couple of months. But the full benefit of optimization done today might not be realized for much, much longer. There’s no such thing as a quick-fix in SEO.
Speaking of robots.txt, Google has just announced some improvements to the way Webmaster Central handles the reporting of discovered robots files. In addition to more detailed explanations of how Google will handle your file, the new reporting feature also lets you know what other information has been parsed from robots.txt (such as sitemap notifications). The other big of robots-related Google news is the addition of REP (robots exclusion protocol) meta tag support. These meta tags make communicating with Googlebot about non-html files much easier… and they can be used at the page level! Robots.txt applies to entire domains… REP meta tags can be added to individual pages. More information and example implementations can be found at the Webmaster Central Blog.
Although the name of this post would imply something underhanded was being discussed, it’s not. In fact, I loved everything about this article except the title. The type of link buying being discussed here is the type of linkage that more people SHOULD be buying. Sure… free links are best. But when you do have to pay for them, this is the idea. The way I see it, links aren’t much different than advertising. And few people question the ethics of advertising as long as it’s relevant. Keep your link buys relevant, make sure they add value to the audiences of both sites, and go for it. How is that any different than, say… sponsored search results?
According to numbers from both Compete and comScore, USAToday’s readership has taken a fairly large hit since the hotly-debated revamp of the site into a social network. Remember back in March when the change was made? Matt called the USAToday remake “vandalism” and said he’d fire whoever made the decision to implement the social features. Even though it took longer than a week, I think he might have been on to something. However, despite these numbers, the debate continues. Donna Bogatin scoffs at TechCrunch’s analysis and argues that the social features really are adding a lot of value for users - just ask Digg how well social networking and news mix, she says. On the other hand, Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay says USAToday’s falling numbers are the “consequence” of ignoring their users. What does USAToday say? That everyone else’s data is wrong and their traffic is actually up since the revamp! What do you think? Have a great night, folks!
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