Wired 15.03: Herding the Mob

This is a pretty good article that gives an overview of a lot of things SEOs need to keep an eye on, and in ways appropriate to doing business, be active in. It casts the idea of online social engineering in a pretty negative light overall, but despite being biased like that it helps illuminate some of what we SEOs need to teach both ourselves and our clients how to play in.

Nowhere in it is the phrase "Black Hat SEO" used verbatim but it does make of some forms of it, and they roll those in with a larger meme, of their own origination I think: "Crowdhacking," a larger idea that encompasses various black ops including all-out fraud on sites like eBay etc.

Also interesting is how in their "Four Ways" table, their inclusion of "Geek Baiting" which we could just call clever spam because of the irrelevancy and misrepresentation components. The idea here very similar to link baiting, just that what's being sought are Diggs which like links count toward natural ranking as "votes." I point this detail out because

  • The principle can actually apply to just about any [demand / content] niche. They focused in on geekery here as Digg is originally rooted therein, and it's a leading hotspot for viral marketing and SEO. Whenever one of those is identified, people will try something nasty. Nasty stuff is always attempted wherever there's an audience, actually. It's good to keep in mind as crowd-made sites continue to evolve, and considerations like which ones lead, how and why continue to be topics of some debate along the way.
  • Whether it's fair game vs. spam comes down to matters of relevancy, readability, originality, authority, authenticity, and logical representation. If a content item lacks all of those, it's spam. If it lacks most, then it still might be.
  • They also neglected to mention one other big one, the fourth and final of the leading set, in their list of which social bookmarking / tagging sites hold the action: Netscape.

The bottom line:

Great link bait via blog posts = great vote bait on social networks. In terms of influence on organic search positioning, social bookmarks, tags, diggs and trackbacks are all valuable just like standard hyperlinks, and all work similarly in that it's all about quantity (the more the better) and quality (who's linking to / voting for the content). Provided they play by their rules therefore, marketers should absolutely be publishing content with the aim of submitting to and hopefully getting traction in them (a.k.a. "blog and ping").

P.S. - Apologies for having been away from the blog for a while.

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Mama Mia!!!

Jason Calacanis is seemingly stirring up all of SEO yet again.

Here's why many of the straight-up White Hats among us in particular are so pissed off about this: It's hard enough being one of the "good" guys. It's especially testing for those of us with families to feed, who know deep down that though we'd take no pleasure in it and it would be nothing personal against anyone, if it comes down to it we can and will spam - aggressively if need be.

If I need $2000 right now to keep my house, I'll spam.

- Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

High profile people calling all SEOs spammers tests the patience of those on the fence. Distorting reality here might only worsen what they're complaining about for them, i.e. it increases the chances that SEOs who aren't already spamming will start doing so either now or later. Many of us WHs note our Black Hat brethren poke fun at us, and the really committed and successful ones make more money than some of us... Like many people some of us lost a lot of money to the post-Bust funk, moreover within that group some are still losing. Such individuals are making every effort to keep both their noses and resumes clean nonetheless, as are the rest of us. So we don't need this kind of crap, nor do we deserve it.

Just to be clear on my position: I'm no WHW (White Hat Whiner) nor a defender thereof normally, but I do feel compelled to call out ignorant name-calling from whatever source when I see it. The core issue here is not the Black Hats. It doesn't take a rocket scientist - or a BH apologist - to recognize they are a natural part of the SEO food chain no matter how plagued some people might feel by them. So my respect goes out to those who suck it up and speak as much with their actions as their words, if not more. Webmasters can choose to work to defend their sites against BH as they can, or not.

One more thing on that note: It's almost like he's asking for someone to mess with him. If at some point calacanis.com ends up uber-spammed, vandalized, otherwise hacked, hijacked or overloaded...

Trivia: Bart is voiced by a woman... Power to voiceover!
I didn't do it.

Anyway, most of the SEOs capable of some of those things I expect will stick to their usual spamming, figuring they have better things to do. But one never knows. As I've indicated before there are a few distractible players out there with itchy trigger fingers. Some claim to have made themselves wads of ca$h filling engines and sites with stuff, and also that they enjoy it when something comes along to help liven up their days (hey, who doesn't?).

Don't mess with the family.

It's wise to avoid giving such peeps an excuse for a little target practice. There's a point where buzz goes too far, and there is such a thing as bad publicity. With few exceptions I find SEOs overall are smart, talented, basically good people who aren't really out to hurt anyone. True jerks are very, very rare and the scene has its ways of filtering them out anyway, which significantly limits whatever damage they can do. Within their chosen camps SEOs mostly stick to their own publicly, and take care of their own privately. Perhaps more us in the marketing blogosphere might do well to do the same.

Fortunately the Godfather of all us Search Marketers (on all sides) has spoken. When Danny Sullivan says you should apologize, you really should.

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Google KidSense

Google KidSense

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Based out of Northern California, bl.asphemo.us is a bl.og dedicated to the advocacy and study of high-impact, data driven marketing disciplines and related concerns: Analytics and Data Mining, Marketing Automation, Integrated Advertising (targeting, retargeting), Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing, Social Media / Social Engineering (Crowd-hacking) and the new PR, Privacy, Security, CRM, SEO / SEM, CRO, ROI... more TLAs (three letter acronyms) than any sane person's daily lexicon should include.

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