How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide
Feb 23, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Social Networks
When people speak about driving traffic through social networks, the first site that comes to mind is usually Digg. Digg’s popularity is obvious: as the numbers increase above the “digg it” (or “dugg”) button, the likelihood for increased traffic goes up as well. There are numerous posts that explain how an extremely popular link on Digg can bring you traffic and links.
A lot of people want to get their page on the Digg main page, but in terms of popularity of other online social mediums, it stops there. There are other means of getting good — perhaps better, when considering that it’s targeted — traffic, such as StumbleUpon.
Not long ago, I wrote about the driving force behind StumbleUpon’s popularity. To reiterate, StumbleUpon is highly personalized traffic based on your interests that is served to you when you are actively looking for new sites to discover. The service requires a download of a very easily-integrated toolbar that sits right under the Address bar on your browser. To begin using the service, you click on the “Stumble!” button on your toolbar, and you can rate a site with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down sign. As sites are continually rated with a “thumbs up,” the page is served to more and more SU users.
The toolbar, which was recently updated with more eye-grabbing icons due to StumbleUpon’s continuous desire to evolve and provide users with the best experience, is shown below:
StumbleUpon also allows you to “discover” new sites. In your regular browsing experience, you might find a site that you think would interest other people. The “thumbs up” icon works for all sites, and that is how new sites get into the database of StumbleUpon pages that are served to the end user during their stumbling session. When you “thumbs up” your site and it hasn’t yet been submitted, you’ll see this window:
The URL is inherited by default, but you can personalize your initial submission with a title and the brief description of the page. You can then categorize this into any one of the categories listed and you can tag it with whatever appropriate tags would benefit your visitors. Once the site is in the system, people will begin stumbling and learning more about the site you submitted.
How can you leverage your StumbleUpon influence to get your submissions noticed?
- Personalize your page. Upload an avatar, tell people who you are (fill out the “General” section), and share with the community what you like (the “Interests” section). If people are browsing the user community, they’ll get a truer sense of who you are.
- Join the communities relating to your interests and your business. To make sure that you are served pages that truly interest you, you’ll want to join targeted communities so that the traffic is desirable. You’ll also be able to contribute similar pages to the StumbleUpon engine so that they are added. If your page relates to these groups, they will be served to the group members. You can join up to 63 groups in the following main categories, which should cover just about everything:
- Befriend people who have similar interests. Adding friends whose pages interest you means that they will likely appreciate the pages that you’re submitting as well. It grows into a mutual relationship. People who like the pages you submit will befriend you and you will be serving them content based on the relationship. With the StumbleUpon network, you can have up to 200 friends.
- Stumble often. Just submitting and stumbling upon a single page doesn’t bode well for your reputation, and keen users will take notice of this. Stumble frequently. If people like the pages you’ve stumbled upon or submitted, you’ll likely also be rated highly in the community.
- Label and tag your submitted pages appropriately. When you tag your new submissions, be relevant. Pertinent tags will bring you the most targeted traffic from the users who specifically have expressed an interest in the topic you are serving content for. If you cover all the keywords (and tags) that you could possibly think of that don’t relate to your site, your popularity (if any) will be short lived when the thumbs-down button is pressed. Bear in mind that once the page is submitted, tags can be added and removed by the community members (which is a definite indication that they’re visiting the site!)
Why should you look at into directing StumbleUpon traffic to your site? Beyond the obvious benefits of extremely targeted traffic, the traffic doesn’t come all at once compared to a site like Digg. There’s the inherent benefit of having that “15 minutes of fame” on Digg until it crashes your server. StumbleUpon traffic is generally much more gradual. In one particular example, Neil Patel explains that StumbleUpon drove 17,209 visitors to his site in 25 days. Traffic coming directly from Digg is much less memorable, and most Digg users don’t venture farther than the front page.
An alternative is to consider sponsoring your site on StumbleUpon. Compared to the most obvious rival, Google Adwords, StumbleUpon traffic is sought and is the only page being served to the user at the time. It’s also incredibly cheap at $0.05 per visitor (with a maximum of 2,000 visitors per day). The results have been pretty amazing and provides “qualified traffic instantly” compared to Adwords, as indicated by a recent user’s experience. This may not always be the case, however.
So if you’re not interested in advertising, go social. The StumbleUpon community is a great way to find some pretty neat pages that you’d have never previously heard of.
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Damage Control: Using Online Media To Get the Word Out
Feb 21, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Business, Social NetworksChris Garrett said something really insightful yesterday: “It is a lot easier to damage a brand than it is to build one.” And so, with last week’s JetBlue cancellations that were largely a result of poor weather conditions, a lot of speculation began about the ability for JetBlue to return to normalcy and live up to its mantra: “to bring humanity back to air travel.”
Every business makes mistakes. Every business has to occasionally deal with damage control and reinstate the public’s faith. Some businesses will refuse to acknowledge defeat and ignore their most outrageous errors, while hoping that their customers will continue to be loyal to them (note: in such cases where the company doesn’t sufficiently address these issues, they usually aren’t). Others will live up to their mistakes and make apologies that the public, and everyone will notice.
JetBlue did just that. Understanding that their customer is everything to the success of their business was something that they needed to acknowledge. They started with a YouTube video where the CEO admitted that there were flaws in how the flights were handled, followed by the release of a Passenger’s Bill of Rights, and today, they came out with full-page apologies in three major newspapers.
The most notable apology is the YouTube video. JetBlue is truly getting it right. While the majority of its ridership probably doesn’t use YouTube, the YouTube community is as impressionable community. Its users are primarily part of the “younger” demographic that will likely see this action in a positive light. Thoughts like “wow, this company understands us and is talking to us” come to mind.
What other benefits do such mediums have? Well, the blogosphere is buzzing about this one, and it’s been definitely rewarding for JetBlue after an agonizing and unpredictable past week. I, too, would fly JetBlue again.
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Whenever I talk to someone about Digg, each person seems to have a different number of how many Diggs it takes to hit the homepage. Most feel that once you get to 60 you’re pretty much assured the homepage (assuming that your story doesn’t get buried along the way). Sometimes you can get up to 90 or so and still be in Upcoming.
Well today I saw something that I had never seen before – a story with 186 Diggs that was still in the Upcoming News section.
As you can see this story was up to 186 Diggs before being made popular. Once it hit 187 – it made the homepage:
In all my time on Digg I have never seen a story with this many Diggs still stuck in Upcoming. Typically when you have that many Diggs your story would have made the homepage already. So what could be the reasoning behind this?
a) Digg could be shaking things up a bit. From time to time – stories might need more votes before they are made popular.
b) This was a controversial story – there might have been such a quick & even distribution of Diggs and Buries that they were basically cancelling eachother out – thus once the Diggs beat the buries – it made the homepage.
c) This particular Digg user, AdimiralAdama, had three stories in a row in Upcoming. One had just been made Popular and one was sitting right behind it and all of the stories were political in nature. This could have just been a way to put a little diversity in what was being made popular without burying.
d) It was just a fluke.
Are we looking at a new part of the Digg algorithm or am I just looking at this too closely?
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Adding texture to illustrations or photographs is something that can pack that extra punch and make a graphic really pop with character. In this tutorial we will explore Photoshop’s bitmap and half-toning tools and effects. Much of this tutorial will be based on experimenting with the various options and finding out what works best for you.
Take chances and play around, you may find an effect that is exactly what you are looking for.
What is half-toning?
Halftoning is the conversion of a continuous toned image into a grid of regularly spaced dots or cells. These halftone spots vary in size to simulate the appearance of shading and light. Smaller dots appear lighter; larger dots, darker. This technique is used in printers, as well as the publishing industry.
If you inspect a photograph in a newspaper, you will notice that the picture is composed of black dots even though it appears to be composed of grays. This is possible because of the spatial integration performed by our eyes. Our eyes blend fine details and record the overall intensity
Lets begin by previewing the images we will be working with. An old toy robot, skyscraper, and a mouth.
1. Create a new document that is 630 wide and 400 pixels in height. The resolution will be set to 72 dpi since this is just for screen display.
2. Using various shapes and gradients create a background that you like. This will be the bottom layer of whole piece. The colors aren’t important here, but I used some bright yellows and pinks to give it a vibrant feel. Try using some gradients and use the layer blending mode to get some interesting results. I created some basic shapes with the shape tool and set the layer mode to softlight to give it some transparency.
3. Now take your source images and place them on a separate document. Select Image>Mode>Grayscale. Now select Image>Mode>Bitmap and you will have a dialog box with options for ‘Halftone Screen’.
Hit OK, and then you will get another dialog box with various options for frequency, angle and shape.
This is where most of the experimenting will come into play.
The various options for the shape used in the halftone screen are round, diamond, ellipse, line, square and cross.
All of these examples were created using a frequency of 15 and an angle of 42.
Back to our source images. I used the lasso tool to select the area of the mouth that I want to use. Then I used the steps above to create a bitmap then a halftone from that.
4. Next copy and paste this image onto your main document. You may need to select the parts that you want to use with the lasso tool and also play with colorizing and blending modes.
5. Repeat the process above for all of the source images you want to use. When you import them back into your main canvass play with repetition and scale to create a dynamic image.
Hints:
1. Try and always scale down the original source image before you convert it into a bitmap halftone- if you scale down an image that already went through the halftone process it will become blurry and loose the effect.
2. Play with the Gaussian blur filter before and after you convert an image to a halftone screen, you can achieve some cool looking effects that further push the image.
3. Mix it up by using the original image along with the transformed halftone graphic to give your final image some depth and confusion. Also inverting the processed halftone image can yield some different results.
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial on half-toning and bitmap effects in Photoshop. Stay tuned for more tutorials to come.
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Online Publicity and Link Building in 2007: An Eric Ward Webcast
Feb 15, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | CoverageWhile I enjoy writing about what I am learning from the extremely informative SearchMarketingNow webcasts, I recommend that you take some time out of your day to hear from experts on all matters related to online marketing (they only occur 1-2 times per month). This week’s presentation was given by Eric Ward, master “link baiter,” though he surprisingly did not use that term at all during the webcast! 
Eric is known as “the original link builder” with over 14 years of experience. Interestingly, this was something that he has been doing before there were search engines. The experience has allowed for Eric to watch how search engines have evolved and how search engines are now paying more attention to the links than they previously did.
Introduction
Links are generally important. They can have an impact on your click traffic or search rank. Some people don’t understand the role or power that links may or may not have in driving traffic and driving PageRank to your site.
Eric has performed inbound link analysis (by checking the server log or using third party tools) and noticed that certain types of links can have very different purposes, effects, and outcomes on your site.
Simply Speaking…
There are two audiences for links:
- Links that can be clicked on by people. This was the original intent of the web when Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW.
- Links that the search engines can analyze. Search engines and search bots began thinking that they can analyze the documents that are being linked to and can therefore make assumptions about what sites may be good. They can count and judge them by measuring the number and quality of links.
In SEO, links became important because search engine optimizers realized that search engines can reward them for these links. But this is a potentially true approach – not everybody should approach link seeking that way.
Types of Links and their Effects
There are four types of links:
- Links that help you with direct click traffic. A person encounters a link and clicks on it. It may not help with your search ranking, however, because the search engines don’t think that it is trustworthy. An example of this is a paid link or banner ad. It will send you traffic but not affect your rank.
- Links that help your search rank. You can get a lot of opinions on this. The truth of the matter is, for every given site or content, the types of links needed for this purpose can be different.
- A link that does both. These would be known as the “holy grail of links” or the “mother lode of links.” They help your traffic and search rank. These links are trustworthy and useful.
- A link that does neither. It doesn’t help with traffic and search engines consider it worthless.
At this point, Eric elaborates on the variety of links with illustrations (screenshots).
Example 1: Links that help you with direct click traffic but doesn’t help your search rank.
The best example of these types of links is an advertisement, either via Pay Per Click or a paid link services such as Text-Link-Ads or Adbrite or a paid press release service like PRWeb. This does not help your search rank. Why not? If buying links would determine search rank, then the person with the biggest pocketbook would be easily able to rank higher than someone who does not have such a budget.
Despite this, there are still good companies that you would want to buy links from. By buying links, it represents an opportunity for you to increase exposure or traffic but not necessarily get ranking improvement. Many people mistakingly think that buying links is a negative, but almost every website has a legitimate reason to buy a link.
Eric shows screenshots of Text-Link-Ads and Adbrite, and says that he admires the approach they are taking to help people find appropriate content to find links from. When you buy links, your intentions, goals, and objectives should be because you feel the audience of the site represents a legitimate logical place for your ad to appear. The most obvious example, he explains, is that if you sell plumbing supplies, you want your ad to be on a site that is geared to plumbers. It also helps to match the proper demographic.
Example 2: A link that does help your search rank.
If the search engines feel that a site is very trustworhty (in its own merit) and that site links to your site, some of that trust “spills over” to your site and improves your search rank.
The illustration in the webcast is of www.stormwaterauthority.org. This is a huge content-rich site devoted to the topic of storm water information, news, and events, such as gutter issues, building codes, etc. If you have a site devoted to that topic, what kinds of links would you want to go out and get if you want search engines to reward you with a higher rank? What would you consider trustworthy if you were Google? Eric shows us this links site from the EPA, which is a government site and is trusted. The particular page is specifically geared to stormwater sites — in fact, the header of the page says “Links to other stormwater sites.” The trust from the federal government is giving a tremendous benefit to stormwaterauthority.org in their search rankings. On the other hand, if stormwaterauthority.com was being linked to from CNN or ESPN, even though it would be in front of millions of people, would that make sense? Probably not. Search engines are looking for the perfect type of synergy (the “yin” and the “yang”).
Example 3: A link that helps with click traffic and search rank
This is very difficult to achieve but very nice to get. It is extremely hard to earn. These are typically not something you can get by asking for them: on such sites, there’s high-quality content, and the people selecting the content are picky.
In the illustration, Eric shows us a screenshot of Forbes Favorites. There are several categories – “collecting,” “education,” “the good life,” “health,” “investing,” “shopping,” etc. A user who finds links here would be inclined to trust the editorial choices.
Example 4: A link that does nothing.
The examples provided include the MFA (Made for Adsense), FFA (Free for All), and Splog (spam blog) sites. It doesn’t help you.
In particular, MFA sites are used when you see a page that is not created for any reason but to get someone to land on it by accident and click on an advertising link just to get away with it. The owners make a few pennies as a result. This is an unfortunate consequence of Adsense because people have created junky content to slap ads on its to make some money.
The illustration is a FFA page which slaps on all these ads on one page and serves no useful purpose. There are so many links on unrelated topics (make money fast, flash games, luxury condos, etc.) A reader cannot tell the objective or intent. This kind of page shows no useful practical business purpose for any search engine or person. You can spend your whole day trying to get links for sites like this but it will do very little for you.
Recap
Links can improve search engine rankings if search engines feel they are a trustworthy indicator of quality, but this would be different for every site.
There is a polling question that shows that 75% of all respondents are spending $1000 or more on online advertising. Upon looking at the results, Eric mentions that this is probably why Google’s stock prices are valued at what it is. It makes perfect sense, and some websites do have to do this to survive. Not every site is meant to have great content that people gravitate toward. He looks back and mentions that there was a time when online advertising was met with such backlash. An example is the OpenText search engine — in the mid-90s, they suggested advertising, but the outcry was so strong that they gave up. Ten years later, this is Google’s core business model.
Recognizing Your Site’s Unique Link Potential
Every website has its own inbound link potential. A new site about Britney Spears will attract links of a different type and volume than a site about Aboriginal Spears. You should look for a perfect inbound profile for both search engines and people.
We compare the results of “aboriginal spears” (813) versus “britney spears” (over 25,000,000). From a linkbuilding standpoint, building for Britney Spears is a “nightmare and impossible to do” compared to “aboriginal spears.” For the latter, this is the kind of link building project that you can have an impact on — it’s a very niche topic — ten or twenty links in the right places could substantially help. Very few people would be effective in doing this with Britney Spears and it may not even be possible anymore.
Linking for Publicity vs. Linking for Search Rank
One of the things that I’ve noticed over the past few years is that the role of publicity and public relations and SEO and SEM related disciplines is merging. There’s a lot of overlap. As links become more important to a variety of people, the people in your company responsible for obtaining those links can be in these different areas. You might be attracting links for your search rank inhouse but using a PR firm for publicity links. The goal is still similar: to acquire those links to achieve an objective.
Some of the possible objectives for linking:
- Improved search rank
- Awareness among a niche audience (e.g. stormwaterauthority)
- Coverage by mainstream media sites: sites like CNN, MSNBC, or on the tech side, like CNET or ZDNET.
- Buzz among bloggers, social media, and bookmarking sites, or from online editors and site reviewers.
The classic example for all of these would be when a movie studio launches a website on behalf of a movie. The Spiderman 3 website is live now even though the movie is not coming out until the summer. The folks behind the site are interested in building everything (search rank, awareness, coverage, and buzz among bloggers). But not every site needs these potential objectives.
Beyond Google
Some sites can be found in other ways besides searching in Google. Thousands of editors write about and link to websites.
Some examples: Yahoo Picks of the Day, NY Public Library Best of the Web, The Scout Report, Child and Family WebGuide from Tufts, Exploratorium’s Web Picks, Berit’s Best Sites for Kids, BestHistorySites, Best of PhysicsWeb, Classroom Earth Best of the Web.
Some of these sites may not have as many page views as others, but they are all trustworthy.
Eric shows us Yahoo Picks and says it’s good for buzz and click traffic. The majority of the benefit is that the sites selected as a Yahoo pick will have thousands upon thousands of views. In fact, you can even submit a site for Yahoo’s consideration, though not every site has a submission form. If you want to be listed, you should actively seek out the editorial staff.
User-Generated Links and Social Linking
Those of us who use the web on a daily basis could potentially have a site somewhere where they bookmark or share sites with people in some form or fashion. There are many user-driven site discovery tools.
- Social bookmarking sites (furl.net and blinklist.com): Links are in a publicly available location so that anyone can see them if you choose to share them. Search engines are starting to pay attention to which sites are earning the most bookmarks from these sites. More bookmarks may indicate higher quality.
- Tagging services (Technorati and del.icio.us — the latter is a hybrid). It is driven by the user base itself. Millions of people encounter the content link to what they find. The search engines try to mine this data to help with results.
- Community content submission and voting services (Digg and Reddit). Chris Sherman calls these “harvesters.” These are sites where people can submit news stories, link to websites, and comment, and depending on the popularity, it is voted up or down. From a social standpoint, looking at this interaction is fascinating. On the other hand, people were sharing content this entire time (e.g. “Share with a Friend”) and now there are tools that just ease the process. This really is a logical evolution.
- The illustration of the Digg homepage shows people continually promoting a news story. “Like coffee, it percolated and bubbled to the top,” Eric says.
There are only certain types of websites that will benefit from this though. If you are a small company that does business in a small city, do you really care if people all over the world see you on the Digg homepage? Not really, and it may negatively affect your hosting fees too. It’s useful for some content but not all.
Link Building in the Social Web
From a link building standpoint, all of the aforementioned sites are opportunity. From Google’s standpoint, how much would you trust them? How much weight would you give? Any content that makes it to a social bookmarking site can be abused and people can game the system so that you can fool the search engines. There is this question of the tipping point — at what point is no useful from an algorithmic standpoint? I’m not saying we’re there yet, but you will find hundreds of these sites that make you scratch your head and ask why it made it to the main page.
Conclusion
To conclude, there are different types of links to be had and it should depend on your content and objective.
Should you do it yourself or look for outside help? The best solution: don’t outsource 100% of your link-building efforts to a third party. There is no outside party that has the passion to help you as much as you want to help yourself. You can definitely work alongside someone who can teach you the ropes, and that will help you get an edge. But if you work with a linkbuilder, you are one of a bunch of different companies that they work with, so they may not emphasize your relationship as heavily as you would expect.
In my experience, the best success is when people in-house work alongside the link builders, and the in-house folks become more and more comfortable with the process.
The challenge is to find the right person or service that is right for your content and site. I don’t think any link builder can be an expert in the pharmaceutical industry and the music industry. One of the biggest changes for me is that I am doing more and more work putting together the right people than doing it for them because there’s a lot of specialization involved.
Questions and Answers
Question: With Google in general, how do we deal with personalization?
Answer: Google is starting to look at your individual searching habits especially if you have a Google account and are logged in. Different results will be presented to different people depending on your search habits. If, for example, you are a teacher that has had a history of searching for animals and you are looking for “jaguar,” Google will serve content related to the animal and not the car. Right now, I don’t think this will have an impact on SEO. SEO firms that do the wrong type of linking may have an issue. Then there are other questions outside of this, such as privacy issues (how much of the stuff do I search for do I want Google to have?). People may feel frustrated for not finding desired results. The search experience may become less pleasant.
Question: Can you be penalized by the organic results, and can this hurt you in Google’s eyes?
Answer: If you have links that you didn’t actively seek, I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s probably a mistake or fluke if you are penalized for links that come naturally. If this were the case, you’d see competitors wanting to ban each other, like Nike and Reebok.
Question: Is the PageRank for each page unique or does the website share PR for all pages?
Answer: The answer isn’t uniform for every site. If I have a site with PR6 and I write a new article and post it today, will the article now show PR0? A month-old article may have a PR2-3 but not a PR6. It can trickle down and bleed over to other content, but it depends upon the overall site and Google’s perception of that site. The older the site, the more trust it has earned. Rightly or wrongly, Google loves old sites.
Question: What about reciprocal links?
Answer: I’m not against reciprocal links as much as many people who are. There are no absolutes with this method. You have to give me the specific scenario. But sometimes it makes perfect sense and other times it’s foolish or crazy. Think about the focus of your reciprocal links. In the plumbing example discussed earlier, if you intend to do reciprocal links here, reciprocate away. But don’t reciprocate links with a tanning salon, beauty parlor, or grocery store. By doing that, you’re sending off a signal, algorithmically speaking, where you’re not very discriminate about the kind of content you want to link to. If your goal is to show new sites related to the same content, then you should do so, but don’t do it for the search rank because it’s a quick way to failure.
Question: Why don’t PRWeb’s links count for search rank?
Answer: PRWeb is a press release distribution site. There are others like BusinessWire, MarketWire, etc., but PRWeb has done a fantastic job dominating the online press release distribution market. While I think that press releases should be part of your marketing strategy, you need think like Google: if I were Google, would I trust the links that appear in a press release? After all, it’s a paid link. The press release itself may be beautifully written and have great content, but it is coupled in with bad press releases on the PRWeb site. I would not say that the tactic is flawed or bad, but can the search engines feel that the link is truly trustworthy if anyone who can afford to do this utilizes this method of posting press releases?
Question: What’s the best way to obtain an .edu link?
Answer: You have to be careful and not trick anyone (like a professor with a blog) — it’s not a core business practice that you want to use. If your site is about something related to something covered by academia, it is easy. For example, if your website is about civil engineering, find the professors who teach about this topic, and check if they have an online syllabus or a “resources and links” page for something like “Infrastructure Related Content.” Reach out to the professor and let him know what you want to accomplish. Make the letter personal. Don’t approach them with the standard “To whom it may concern, please link to our great content.” Contact them politely and that can work.
Question: Is link building a long-term effort?
Answer: In my opinion, it depends on the content. It can be interrupted by huge spikes or a frenzy of activity. You should continually attract links by building great content. You can attract natural links without even asking in some cases. It doesn’t always happen though. You might also have content that is appropriate for a certain time or place. For example, a recent volcanic eruption caused for a lot of volcanic related content to go forward. There’s a spike related to items for Valentine’s Day. Now that it’s past February 14th, these sites may not be getting as much traffic but they can still begin preparing links for next year.
Question: I’m a smaller site and am just getting started. How do you compete with people with 30,000+ links?
Answer: It’s definitely a challenge. I’m a small site with 60,000 to 70,000 inbound links. It will depend in some regards to what the topic or subject matter of your small site covers as well as how competitive the niche is that you are in. If you are a small mom and pop business and you make hand-carved hummingbird feeders, my hunch is that you will have an easier time building links in your topical area in comparison to a ticket broker selling tickets to the Super Bowl. It is all dictated by the competitive nature of your niche. What any competitor is doing can be analyzed. You can look at what they do to help your link building effort. It is like breadcrumbs and you can follow the trail.
Question: When linking in a blog from a corporate perspective, are you better off getting such links to the blog or to the main site? Which has more impact, linking to a subdomain or to the corporate page?
Answer: I’ve done it both ways. Every corporation should make a blog on their own domain if possible. But you can also make stuff that is fun, like promotional items where you can have a Coke advertisement linking to a related site like olympics.blogspot.com. You should not feel like you should restrict your work in any way.
Question: How does “nofollow” impact the linkbuilding effort?
Answer: Nofollow is something that is appended to an anchor link in HTML. It was not intended initially for search engines to discredit the link, but it began being used as such. We saw it first in the blogosphere where owners approved of comments but didn’t want to vouch for the sites of the people who commented. Then, in paid links, it was also used, but there was some backlash because people wanted the rankings. If you are buying links, you may want to make sure that those links are nofollowed if your intention is purely for click traffic. You don’t want to give off the wrong signal, not because you don’t want to get banned, but because it’s an issue of trustworthiness — and someone may get the wrong idea about your approach.
Question: If a website links to you, is it worthwhile to ask them to format it in any specific way, or is it good enough alone?
Answer: If it is an extremely popular site and has a high PageRank (I don’t know how much value PR has but it’s still used as a measure), it has more trust and the link itself can be valued regardless of the content in the clickable anchor text. If it doesn’t have critical keywords, it can still carry tremendous power. Anchor text should be treaded with carefully because it can be measured. If there are 8,000 links for a site and 4,000 links have identical anchor text, this doesn’t appear normal and people might want to take a closer look. In my 14 years of requesting links, I’ve never once asked for a link in a specific manner. I have made suggestions, but it depends on what kind of site I am linking to, and I think it’s rude to ask.
Question: Regarding trustworthiness, how does a site like Forbes become an authority in the first place? Further, if the links are coming from an SEO company, is there trustworthiness?
Answer: If you removed the human judgment factor out of the equation, you will see on the search engines that there are thousands upon thousands of sites that link to Forbes. Algorithmically, Forbes carries authority as it has links from a variety of places: public libraries, universities, etc. You can analyze a complete inbound profile to forbes.com and find out that there are links from, say, 70 different countries, and 22% of the links are from .gov and .edu sites — this is how it becomes an authority and is trusted.
Question: How important is it to monitor inbound links to look for faulty links? Is it worth it?
Answer: I think you should look at it but not obsess over it. Google recently released a Webmaster Tools link profile last week which shows significant analysis of inbound links. There are other tools out there that also help you with it. If you have faulty links to you, you can serve either a 301 (redirect) or a 404 (not found). There are a number of different ways to recapture the link popularity and it all depends on what happened to the content.
Thanks Eric, Third Door Media, and SearchMarketingNow — this was a very detailed and incredibly helpful webcast!
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The Emerging Political Strategy into the Blogosphere and Social Networks
Feb 14, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Blogging, NewsAs presidential hopefuls are looking to strategize their political campaign, new media outlets are being explored as novel ways for these candidates to reach out to a different demographic. Candidates are looking at blogs, search engines, and other popular social networks to reach out to the tech-savvy and the youth that embraces the online social sphere.
Last month, John Edwards announced his candidacy on YouTube. When Barack Obama announced that he was joining the race this weekend, his website was launched with a social network, My.BarackObama.com, which is displayed prominently on his website. Hillary Clinton has a MySpace page, and as of this writing, has 22,310 friends.
According to the Wall Street Journal, campaigns are practicing a relatively new phenomenon known as “blog outreach.” In some cases, ads are being purchased on political blogs. 
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is utilizing this strategy. Others are blogging in support of the candidates. John Edwards has used this extensively, as Robert Scoble acknowledges. John Edwards understands the role of social media in his campaign. In my experience within the blogs I read (that are not necessarily political in nature), this certainly appears to give Edwards an edge. Essentially, Edwards’s name in these apolitical social outlets can be likened to “brand awareness.” Visibility is important. Whereas traditional media is not as prominent for some, the online visibility could be a determining factor for a vote, giving off the awareness to heavy online users that the presidential hopefuls understand this new way of life.
The Internet is a great medium for these “future presidents” to advertise. However, there certainly will be a learning curve as individuals working on the campaigns resolve issues relating to campaign video software compatibility, hiring the wrong bloggers, and ignoring blogs that could be suitable advertising mediums.
Even despite these hurdles, candidates are understanding that an online presence is essential for the success of their campaigns. The 2008 campaign will definitely be an exciting ride.
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Yahoo Goes Mobile: 19 Nations to Embrace Cell Phone Advertising
Feb 13, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Yahoo!
Even though Yahoo is still in the “Big 2″ for search, not being #1 has got to be disturbing. It’s like looking for your desired keyword term in the SERPs and finding that someone else is in the #1 position with you not far behind — but you’ve apparently done everything you could possibly think of to make it to the top. What can you do next? Well, in Yahoo’s case, they are looking to be better in another area. (Likewise, you can focus your SEO tactics on other keywords or go long-tail.) If you can’t beat them somewhere, beat them somewhere else. Find an area where you can excel in and go with it.
Over the weekend, Yahoo announced that it is focusing its advertising efforts in the mobile world. Yes, that’s right, cellular telephones in 19 countries will begin featuring Yahoo brand advertising for a number of major service providers and products, including Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Intel, Nissan, and Hilton’s Embassy Suites.
This is a very interesting step to expand advertising beyond the Internet and into the hands of people who may not necessarily be sitting in front of a PC. And it’s entirely possible. In the past few days, gadget blogs have been showcasing a tremendous amount of newly announced cell phone models, and Yahoo is acknowledging the financial opportunity for them — and for their advertisers — on these cutting-edge mobile phones. According to Steve Boom, Yahoo’s senior VP for mobile and broadband, high-resolution color screens and Web browsers makes this decision particularly desirable, and the “mobile advertising market is [consequently] poised to explode.”
Yahoo’s initiative combines the Yahoo! Go 2.0 software platform that they plan to roll out to major mobile phone manufacturers in addition to forging the required relationships with advertisers to display the ads. The audience — end users like you and me — are in the estimated three billion users throughout the world expected to own a cell phone by the end of 2007.
So far, this looks to be incredibly promising for Yahoo. With what appears to be a well-thought-out mobile strategy, the company is poised to move ahead of Google in the mobile world, and for Yahoo’s sake, I truly look forward to this being a very big success for the company.
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Looks like it.
I just saw a pretty humorous article: Florida Restaurant Holds Benefit for Astronaut Lisa Nowak and I was going to submit it to Digg (in the Offbeat News not the Space section) mainly because I couldn’t believe that this restaurant couldn’t find a better person or cause to hold a benefit for.
So I went to submit it:
Then I got the infamous banned message:
This was quite surprising because Space.com would definitely be considered a trusted, authority site. They have certainly had a lot of exposure on Digg and many homepage stories with one as recent as two days ago. We covered other sites that have been banned back in December but I would venture to say that Space.com would be at the top of that list in regards to a trusted news source.
So what happened to lead to this banning? Could it be that Digg buttons lead to abuse and possible bannings?
Or is this a temporary glitch? Or did they just not want this stupid story on Digg ?
Update: Someone submitted this story to Digg and Digg founder Kevin Rose actually replied in the comments there that it was a technical glitch and he would get it fixed:
something is screwed up – I’ll check out the reports and have the team take a look in the AM. For now, the www.space.com works (taking the www. out causes it to error)
http://digg.com/world_news/Florida_restaurant_holds_benefit_dinner_for_accused_astronaut
Very nice response there Kevin!
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The New Wave of Personalization and Who is Joining in the Game
Feb 9, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | Google, Social NetworksIt’s what you want. The very popular StumbleUpon concept is simple: when you sign up, you provide the service with some of your interests, and you install the neat little toolbar. Once you’ve got the application installed, you can simply begin stumbling and you can tell the system how you feel about the page that was served to you. By clicking on the thumbs up “I like it” button or by clicking on the thumbs-down button, you teach the SU system what content you truly enjoy. By stumbling and sharing your finds to other users, you’re personalizing your own experience and the experience of your peers as well.
The personalization concept — where content is being provided based on your own desires — has proven to be quite successful. Since it was introduced two years ago, StumbleUpon now boasts over 1.8 million users, and is continually expanding. Version 2.90 of the toolbar, which came out earlier this week, is incorporating the relatively new video social search engine that it unveiled in December. StumbleUpon is truly growing…
And so is Digg.
At half the amount of subscribers that StumbleUpon has, Digg is aiming to emulate the SU concept, a recent BusinessWeek article has reported. Hot on the heels of StumbleUpon, Digg (which launched its own video extension five days after StumbleUpon did) is aiming even higher to SU’s core success model: a recommendation tool.
According to Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder who is quoted in the article, “Digg will be smart enough to know what interests you” and it will serve content that fits within the tastes of its users. For current subscribers, this means that Digg will serve content based on the stories users have dugg or buried. If you used the service to promote pages that you truly liked, the Digg system appears to not be much different from StumbleUpon.
More and more companies are involving themselves in what can be an imminent threat (well, perhaps not just yet — and it still depends on who you ask): personalization. Google’s personalized search is being promoted more heavily. As more and more people realize that there are only a few items that may be of interest to them when they search, systems are learning to adapt to user preferences through their own algorithms. As Google explains it, if you’re searching for “dolphin” because you want to learn more about the football team from Miami, you’re not overly concerned with results pertaining to marine life. Depending on the types of pages you visit and the domains upon which these sites are located, Google’s personalized search will rank these pages higher than the undesirable results, thus providing you with a searching experience that like that of no other user. To Google, this is a move provide quality results and reduce the unnecessary clutter.
To make our websites shine through these results and be obvious to the viewer, there will likely be obstacles that we’ll need to overcome. Good content is a necessity. Telling your friends is a good way to get the word out. Promoting these pertinent sites through social search is still going to be very useful.
We’re bordering on a new era, one with incredible challenge and obstacles, but one that does have the end user — you — in mind, and hopefully everyone in all communities will be happy with the results.
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Today, Digg announced that it is offering improved functionality over plugins that you see on other blogs. Those who have been confused by the installation of such third-party tools should be happy to know that Digg has announced “smart” buttons, buttons that don’t only afford you the opportunity to Digg a blog post, but can be extended to any website page (it’s a simple Javascript code snippet), and will even check against current content on Digg to see if you’re submitting a duplicate story. The color of the button also can be modified to match with your site’s color scheme and a smaller version is available as well.
In the included screenshot, you can see the compact Digg button in action on a red background.
Check it out and see how you can configure these buttons to work best with your site.
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