Grip Your Adsense!

Will BlogRush Replace MyBlogLog?

2008-10-16T05:00:01Z

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this, but it seems that BlogRush has replaced MyBlogLog as the defacto blog widget. Sure, I still see MyBlogLog widgets on various sites, but I think the number is on the decline. Those that remain are probably there because, like me, the site owners just haven't thought about them for a while. A quick check of visits between the two sites via Compete and Alexa show that MyBlogLog's growth has stopped, at best, and is on the decline at worst. BlogRush's visits on the other hand are, according to Compete, have just surpassed MyBlogLog's.

Checking my site's web analytics, I see that I have received all of zero visits via MyBlogLog in the last month. And while BlogRush hasn't sent me a whole lot, I'll take a small number of new eyeballs over none. So off with the MyBlogLog widget. Now if BlogRush can just get their act together and come out of the beta phase we could see just how good this new system will be! Update
In true Marios-fashion, right after I speculate about BlogRush's domination, I come across a post my Christian Mezei where he declares that BlogRush is a scam. Update 2
The BlogRush folks have finally deployed the next version of their system. It looks nice, but that's about it. Nothing substantially different about the service and visits from other blogs haven't increased much to warrant having the widget on a blog where monetization is a goal. So, it looks BlogRush will replace MyBlogLog in being the next widget I chuck

One Less Social Bookmarking Site to Manipulate

2008-10-16T04:59:59Z

Hopefully this is the turning point in the social bookmarking space and we'll begin to see consolidation elsewhere. First reported (to me, anyway) by the good folks at TechCrunch. If we can just get the list down to 3 or 4 that would make life easier, wouldn't it?

Twitter Will Die And I

2008-10-16T04:59:58Z

Proponents of Twitter would have you believe that it is a useful tool. You'd be smart to listen to the opinions of these folks as they've proven time and time again that they know what they're doing in the online space. The message has been so loud and clear that even those that were initially skeptical have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. And yet despite my efforts to convince myself that I should use Twitter, I find myself more and more inclined to shut down Twhirl and move on.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

Much of what gets posted to Twitter is not valuable to the community. I'm not saying that there has to be a money-making idea in ever message, but a message to your network should at least be of value/interest to more than one person. I don't need to know that you'll be calling so and so at 9:00pm tonight. Send an instant message instead or use the direct message feature.

Messages are Transient

E-mail, forums, blogs, and even instant messaging allow for asynchronous conversations. If you're a night owl and I'm an early bird, we can still have a useful conversation by sending messages to each other via e-mail with each of us responding when it is most convenient. Forums and blogs accomplish the same thing with people coming and going as they please and give everyone a chance to speak their mind. With Twitter, if I'm not looking at the screen when you post your message, it's unlikely I'll ever see it. It'll get bumped by the 17 posts (see Blah Blah Blah below) from the next person.

Blah, Blah, Blah

The Twitter creators have imposed a 140 character limit per message. Pretty cool idea when you think about it. People are forced to succinctly describe their thoughts or activites. Oh wait, no one actually pays attention to that limit. Rather than being brief, it's easier to just type 17 messages in a row. Get a blog people!

A Rip in the Spacetime Continuum

Twitter is like TV. You can park yourself in front of it, become really engaged, and hours later wonder what you did during all that time. I had a 1 week period where all I did was check Twitter instead of checking my RSS feeds. I can't rememeber a single thing I learned from Twitter nor did I bookmark anything for reference. Contrast that with the incredibly useful AND entertaining items that come through my feed reader and I'm having a hard time justifying continued use of Twitter.

Too Many Followers

We've all seen the contests that encourage people to become followers, right? The only beneficiary of such activities are those that are being followed. I can guarantee you that after a few hundred followers, it's impossible to remain part of the conversation with everyone. Instead, these popular people are likely to just focus on the people with which they had a pre-Twitter connection. Twitter then just becomes another medium to push one's blog posts or other message i.e. one-way communication.

One Way Conversations Get Old

I follow a bunch of people in the SEO/SEM space. I do so because I've come to respect the content on their blogs. The problem is that many of my messages to these people go unanswered. I'm sure part of the reason has to do with the items described above, but the other part is that these people aren't following me and/or aren't open to receiving messages from me. At least on their blogs I've got a good chance of getting a response when I post a comment. If I want to talk while being ignored, I can accomplish that by setting up a meeting at work Lastly, I want to be fair and acknowlege that Twitter has been useful at least once. After all, I did get this blog post out of it.

Sphinn - Many Voices or Just a Few?

2008-10-16T04:59:56Z

A recent post on statistics I gleaned from looking at 2,500 Sphinns resulted in a request for me to look at one area I had missed. Jeff Quipp of Search Engine People wanted to know which sites had their posts go hot most often. I'm not sure why I didn't look at those counts the first time around so thanks to Jeff for suggesting it. Anyway, I finally got around to pulling the information together. Overall I'm pleased with the variety of content I, as Sphinn reader, am being exposed to. Sure, 25% of what goes hot comes from just 10 sites, but over half of what goes hot represents the thoughts of over 50 blog owners. I think that's pretty good for the relatively small niche of search engine marketers that also blog. Top 5 Sites: 17.12% of hot Sphinns
Top 10 Sites: 25.44% of hot Sphinns
Top 25 Sites: 40.53% of hot Sphinns
Top 50 Sites: 54.66% of hot Sphinns Here are the sites that make up the top 10:

On the other end of the spectrum are the one-hit wonders at 12.3% i.e. sites that have had just one post go hot.

Social Media for Firefox 3.0

2008-10-16T04:59:54Z

I just got through updating the Social Media for Firefox add-on to work properly in Firefox 3.0. This latest version of the add-on is backwards compatible with Firefox 2.x as well. For details and download links, please see my original post about the re-release of the Social Media for Firefox add-on. If you like this add-on and have a Mozilla account, please provide a rating. I'd like to get the add-on out of Mozilla's sandbox and ratings will help me do that. Thanks! UPDATE JUNE 26, 2008: Chris Bennett and I have exchanged a few notes on the 97th Floor blog. The good news is that Chris and his team will be releasing a new version of the Social Media for Firefox add-on. Not only will it work with Firefox 3.0, but it will support additional social networks. Check out Chris' post for details.I highly recommend you wait for this new "official" version rather than download my version. Doing so will save you the trouble of having to uninstall my version and re-install Chris'.

Social Media for Firefox

2008-10-16T04:59:52Z

UPDATE JUNE 26, 2008: Chris Bennett and I have exchanged a few notes on the 97th Floor blog. The good news is that Chris and his team will be releasing a new version of the Social Media for Firefox add-on. Not only will it work with Firefox 3.0, but it will support additional social networks. Check out Chris' post for details.I highly recommend you wait for this new "official" version rather than download my version. Doing so will save you the trouble of having to uninstall my version and re-install Chris'. Back in 2007 the folks from 97th Floor released a promising Firefox add-on to help facilitate cross-submissions between social bookmarking sites. Unfortunately, development on this add-on stopped in October 2007 and it wasn't long before the add-on itself became non-functional. I've taken it upon myself to fix the code and it is now back to being fully functional. By fixing the code and re-releasing this add-on I've probably stepped on some toes, but it was a shame to see a cool add-on lose its support. I've also made the necessary updates so this add-on will work with Firefox 3.0. Once installed, the Social Media for Firefox add-on will show you the vote counts on other social bookmarking networks when you're viewing submissions on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. Why would you want to see this information? Because you might be able to find a popular submission that is also a good candidate for submission elsewhere. The only functionality I removed is some code related to tracking requests. This add-on now doesn't send any information to me or to the 97th Floor guys. However, I'm considering adding additional social bookmarking sites to the list. Mixx seems to be an up and comer. Any suggestions?

Download Option 1 - Mozilla.org
You can download it here if you have a Mozilla account. Note: At the time of this writing, my add-on is in the Mozilla Sandbox and you'll need to be logged into your Mozilla account before downloading it. Once you've downloaded the add-on, please consider rating it at Mozilla. I need just a few ratings to get it out of the sandbox so that a login won't be required. Thanks!

Download Option 2 - My Hosting Company
Or you can download it here from my crappy host which I can't configure correctly. The downside is that you'll need to save the add-on file and then drag-and-drop it into Firefox to trigger the install. Sometimes I hate computers

Download Option 3 - From 97th Floor

The original creators of the Social Media for Firefox plugin have pledged continued to support. Their most recent update includes the necessary fixes to make this plugin compatible with Firefox 3. Since they'll be adding new features, I recommend downloading this plugin from them.

Marios Tziortzis Teaches Me a Lesson

2008-10-16T04:59:31Z

I was reminded this weekend of how procrastination can lead undesirable situations. And this lesson came from someone I didn't know and had never interacted with before — Marios Tziortzis. Who is Marios Tziortzis? As far as I can tell he's a pleasant fellow who, like me, has a blog, an interest in the web, and likes photography. But the most important similarity is that we share the same first name. Normally having the same first name of someone isn't a problem, but when I finally got around to signing up for Twitter this weekend, I was a disappointed to find that an account using just my first name was already taken. You might think it no big deal, but it is for two reasons. First, Twitter doesn't allow enough space for me to use my full name (off by one letter) and second, recognition in the social media space is critical (ones' name being the most recognizable thing with electronic communications). I knew it was a long shot, but I e-mailed Mr. Tziortzis and asked if he would mind giving up his account. I figured that since he hadn't posted in months that he might not actually care about Twitter. I was, wrong. His response included this, "It's true that I'm not using it much but the reason I registered it
was for future implementation on my site. I'm sorry but I'd like to keep it registered to me." I have to tip my hat to him. He recognized the potential of a new service early on and staked a claim to the most important real estate — his name. And it cost him nothing. I, on the other hand, ruminated about the value of tweets. Silly me.

How to Show the Sphinn Button Only AFTER the First Sphinn

2008-10-16T04:59:29Z

One of the things I don't like about Michelle MacPhearson's otherwise great Sphinn plugin for WordPress is that it shows a Sphinn button for all posts on my home page and in category pages. While I understand that the button may encourange people to Sphinn an article by making it easier for them to do so, having a bunch of Sphinn It! (i.e. 0 Sphinns) buttons gives the impression of desperation. Instead, I'd rather have the button show only AFTER the first Sphinn. And looking at the comments on Michelle's blog, I'm not the only one that wants this behavior. This modified code will first ping the Sphinn site and check for the existence of certain text that indicates no Sphinns. If the text isn't found i.e. there is at least one Sphinn, the button is displayed. This code doesn't put any more load on the Sphinn servers than having the button display all of the time so no need to worry about causing Danny Sullivan and his crew any grief. And if the Sphinn folks change the text I'm searching for, this extra code will default to showing the button which is the same out-of-the-box behavior of the plugin. Warning: I'm not a PHP developer (I just play one on TV) so use this hack at your own risk. Wherever you've modified your theme to include the call to the Sphinn plugin, replace it with the block of code I have below. This requires a theme modification and the use of Method C for implementing the Sphinn plugin as described in Michelle's readme.txt file. This code could most certainly be wrapped into the plugin itself, but I'll leave that up to someone else (if you do include this code in a plugin, I'd appreciate a link). You can see this modification in action on my home page and on my SEO category page. The same modification could be use on individual posts if you so desire. BEFORE AFTER




		$ch = curl_init();

		$url = trim('http://sphinn.com/evb/url.php?url='.get_permalink($post->ID));

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

		$output = curl_exec($ch);

		curl_close($ch);

		if(stristr($output, 'Sphinn it!') === FALSE) {

			show_sphinnit();

		}

?>

If this code doesn't work for you, leave me a comment with error details and I'll try to help you out.

How NOT to Reach Out to Bloggers

2008-10-16T04:59:28Z

Earlier this week I poked fun at SEO vendor that posted rankings that weren't particularly impressive and were, in my opinion, downright funny. I'm must be in a sour mood because now I'm going to poke fun at a company that seems to be trying to generate buzz and presumably links, but has made a pathetic attempt at it. Let me start with the e-mail I received from the vendor not too long ago (names have been changed):

Hi Mario, My name is Somebody, and I'm reaching out to you on behalf of Acme Inc., a digital advertising agency in New York City. We are currently in the process of setting up a viral international buzz campaign for our client and are very interested in working with you and your blog. The campaign involves a game between bloggers across 6 countries, including Germany, USA, UK, India, France, and NL. The game is all about guessing which company is behind the buzz campaign. The winner will receive a very nice gift! For more details, I would like to send you a buzz kit which will help clarify everything. If you are interested in participating in this game, please send your street address to somebody@acmeinc.com. Feel free to contact me if you have any other questions. Thanks,
Somebody

So lets start with the nit-picking, shall we?

First off, my first name has an 's' at the end of it. There's no better way to let a web site owner know that you're not really paying attention than by spelling their name incorrectly.
Second, trying to build buzz with a game about guessing who is trying to build buzz is a silly idea. If there are details about the game that would convince me it's not silly, they should be included in the contact e-mail e.g. this is going to be a Leonardo Da Vinci-style solve clues type of game.
Third, a first prize described as a "very nice gift" makes me think the winner is going to get one of those pens with the blue-LED light built in. A cool conference trinket, but hardly worthy of a web site owner's time.

Needless to say I'm not participating in this one. And I'm expecting the campaign to flop so I may never know which company was behind this effort.

Hiding the Sphinn Button When a Post Fails to Go Hot

2008-10-16T04:59:26Z

If you're a famous search engine marketer or social media user, you can ignore this post as I'm sure you don't have this problem. For the rest of you, read on… One of the things I don't like about Sphinn is that if a post fails to go hot within a couple of days of being submitted, it will NEVER go hot. I'm not arguing that the system isn't fair, I'm just saying I don't like it. A side-effect of this behavior is that my site has now become riddled with Sphinn buttons with depressing single digit counts. Do I need to advertise to visitors that a post failed to reach critical mass? Nope. So, I've modified some code I previously wrote to hide the Sphinn button until the first Sphinn to now include additional logic for controlling when to hide the Sphinn button. That is, if a post is older than X days and has received fewer than Y Sphinns, the button won't show. X and Y can be set to your liking. In case that description doesn't make sense, here's a screenshot of this code in action on my home page.
As usual, use this code at your own risk. I'm using it on this site, but that doesn't guarantee it's bug-free. And I acknowledge that this code should be in a plug-in rather than requiring template changes, but I'm just not ready to put the time into that just yet. Maybe when there are more features it'll be worth the effort. To use this Sphinn button functionality, first set up Michelle MacPhearson's Plug-In using Method C as described in her instructions. Then make the following template changes: BEFORE
AFTER
There are two variables in the sphinn-button.php file that you can adjust to suit your needs: days_to_show_sphinn_button: Sets the number of days for which the Sphinn button will display even if the minimum number of Sphinns hasn't been reached. minimum_sphinns_to_show_button: If a post is older than a certain number of days, this will determine how many votes are required for the Sphinn button to display. Download the sphinn-button code here. The file extension is txt so you'll need to rename it to php once you drop it into your current WordPress theme folder. If this code doesn't work for you, leave me a comment with error details and I'll try to help you out.

Ego Spam

2008-10-16T04:59:24Z

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz recently coined a new term: wiki-hacking. I've decided that I too want to create a new term and I've settled on ego spam. The good thing about making up words is that you get to define them too. So here goes! The term spam is generally associated with e-mail sent in bulk without permission from the recipient and most often in an automated fashion. As you would expect, ego spam shares the same attributes and involves preying on the egos of web site owners, particularly search engine marketers. Some examples of ego spam include:

Visiting web sites with the MyBlogLog widget while you're logged in for the sole-purpose of having your image appear in the widget with the hope that the site owner will click through to your site. I'm pretty sure I detected someone doing this when MyBlogLog first became popular i.e. I would visit 10 sites and this user's mugshot would be on 8 of them.
Referral spamming involves faking a browser referrer as you visit web sites so that an entry with your web site's URL shows up in that web site's traffic logs. I'm guilty of experimenting with referral spam. What can I say? Sometimes the pull of the dark side is too strong As you might expect, it upset some people including the likes of John Andrews and IncrediBILL.
Voting on social networks submissions based on who submitted the article rather than its contents. Submitters often like to see who gave them a thumbs up and may follow your vote back to your site.

Is ego spamming effective? I suppose you can move up from a complete no-name to not quite a complete no-name, but I doubt anyone has become famous with just by spamming egos. Update
One other good thing about making up new terms is that it's easy to obtain #1 rankings for them. Sixteen hours after this post went live, I've got the #1 ranking for ego spam. Woohoo!

A Day in the Life of a Digg

2008-10-16T04:59:22Z

If you haven't heard of social bookmarking sites, you're missing out on a new web phenomenon. In a nutshell, social bookmarking sites allow you to store links to web pages you like on a publicly accessible web site where others can see them. The benefit of this sharing is that you expose others to content that they may not have encountered. Similarly, you may see content from others that you wouldn't normally have come across. There's an added benefit to web site owners too. If a link to their page becomes popular i.e. is bookmarked many times or receives many votes, then there usually follows an explosion of traffic. It's this second benefit that I wanted to explore and which is the basis of the following post.

Experiment Setup

After a little research I found an article (from a major publisher who's web logs I have access to) that I thought would be appropriate for Digg. I chose the Deals category for the article because that seemed like one area that didn't get as much attention as other areas. I figured my submission had a better chance of standing out in this category. The following describes my observations.

Just before 2:00pm

Article submitted to the deals category. I provide my own description and pull a quote from the article that I found interesting. Within a minute or two the submission is receiving diggs i.e. votes by other users.

Around 2:30pm

My submission is averaging about 1 digg every 2 minutes. I have no idea if that's really good or just mediocre. But at least I'm getting confirmation that the article is indeed of interest to over 30 people. I was a bit worried about this as I didn't want to appear is if I was spamming the service. On the web page traffic side, I notice an almost immediate increase in page views. Not a whole lot mind you, but since the article in question had received 0 page views the previous 7 days, it was clear that the new traffic was due to people coming from Digg. Also, the 30 or so diggs has translated in to about 175 page views. Clearly, not everyone that visits the article is digging it. That's not surprising, but I had no idea what the ratio would be. Only one comment has been submitted so far. This is probably in large part because the article isn't controversial i.e. it doesn't prompt readers to express an opinion. Those that liked it probably "commented" with a digg. It would be redundant to say you liked it after digging it.

Around 3:00pm

Looking at the users that dugg the article, I noticed that only a handful have ever submitted a bookmark themselves. Interesting. I wonder if getting a "superstar" would have a snowball effect on diggs. Probably not something I'm going to get an answer to this time around. I also now have a second comment. Someone has now indicated their favorite quote from the article. At around 45 diggs the article I submitted has been bumped in to the Deals homepage. Not the site's homepage mind you, just out of the review queue that all submissions must go through. No way to tell if it is the number of diggs or the rate of the diggs that resulted in this status change. Surprisingly, traffic has decreased. Rate of diggs also decreasing. What's going on?

Around 4:00pm

No more diggs and traffic now down to a trickle. This seems a little strange to me. It's almost as if getting promoted to the Deals homepage actually resulted in lower visibility. The only new thing I noticed is that the article is now marked as a "buried story". I initially have no idea what this means, but it does seem to explain why the activity stopped in such an unnatural way. After some more research I discover that stories will be buried if they receive enough negative reports from users. The number of negative reports required depends on the number of diggs. There's a longer explanation by the Digg moderators if you're interested. There are others that believe that moderators will actually step in an bury a story regardless of its popularity. An alternative explanation is that while the submission was receiving diggs from users, it was also being reported by users as being "lame" or "inappropriate". Apparently enough of these reports and a submission will get buried.

Shortly before 5:00pm

No more diggs, but traffic seems to be increasing again. How strange. And then it occurs to me to look at the referrer logs. Sure enough, it appears that someone has submitted the same article to reddit, another social bookmarking site. That's a pleasant side-effect I hadn't counted on. The submission by this other user has made it to the position 32 of the reddit "hot" listings.

Just after 6:00pm

Traffic from reddit looks like it will soon surpass traffic from Digg. Fascinating. I'm closing shop now. That's it for day 1.

7:30am the Second Day

No change with Digg. Traffic from reddit continues to stream in. On an hourly basis, there is more non-Digg traffic now than there was from Digg in total. It also seems that someone has bookmarked the article on Del.icio.us prompting many others to also bookmark it. As a result, there is a lot of traffic coming in from Del.icio.us. In addition, there is traffic coming in from PopUrls which is a site I hadn't heard of before. Its purpose seems to be to aggregate popular items from the various social bookmark services.

2:00pm on the Second Day

Traffic continued to grow all morning and peaked around 11:00am. Since then, page views per hour have been decreasing. I'm guessing that the submission has rolled off the most visible lists. One new site picked up the article, LifeHack.org (not to be confused with the more popular LifeHacker.com), but traffic from that site was negligible.

Around 6:00pm on the Second Day

Definite downtrend in traffic. It'll probably hit 0 later tonight. I think that just about wraps up this experiment. It was a good learning experience for me and I hope it was for you to. If you happen to have reported on similar activities, let me know. I'd love to see if what I've described is typical or not.

Day 3 and Day 4

Even though I figured my experiment was over on Day 2, I couldn't resist checking the logs again on Day 3 and Day 4. As expected, there was next to now traffic on Day 3. However, on Day 4, traffic jumped again. It seems another site (I Am Bored) has picked up the submission. No complaints here.

Traffic Graph

And for those of you that like graphs, here's a snapshot of the traffic over the course of the first two days of this experiment.

2,500 Hot Sphinns Reveal Patterns and Trends

2008-10-16T04:59:21Z

Ever ask yourself what day of the week generates the most front-page Sphinns? Or after how many days a Sphinn submission has a next to zero chance of going hot? How about the question of just how much influence an elite few have on Sphinn content? I'm going to answer such questions using data on over 2,500 front-page Sphinns dating back to Sphinn.com's launch back in July 2007. First up, some time-based Sphinn data. These two charts show which days of the week and which hours of the day have the most items going hot. Thursday is the winner with a slight lead over Tuesday and Wednesday. Between 11am and 2pm are the most popular hours for submissions to go hot with 5pm also being a popular time. All times are EST. Although not evident in the graphs, note that 56% of the submissions went hot on the same day and another 28% went hot the next day. That's a whopping 85% of submissions so if your article doesn't go hot fairly quickly, you might as well stop with the constant browser refreshing and move on. What do you mean I'm the only one that does the browser refresh thing!?
Connected to the two time-based graphs is the following overall trend of hot submission growth since July 2007. Despite a dip late in December, growth looks to be trending up. This means more items are making it to the front-page, but, on average, each item is there for a shorter period of time.
Next up is a graph that shows the distribution of the number of Sphinns for hot items. Of course, once something goes hot you might argue that it really doesn't matter how many Sphinns that item gets unless you're hoping to break into the greatest hits listing. By the way, I'll save you a click and tell you that an article by John Andrews holds the top spot with 204 Sphinns (note that John has an active campaign to increase the Sphinns for his post so the number is probably higher by now). In addition, 6 out of the top 7 greatest hits were submitted by the article authors (John Andrews, Matt McGee, Rand Fishkin, Lee Odden, Vanessa Fox, and Danny Sullivan). Nothing wrong there, just an observation that you don't necessarily need to wait for a friendly Sphinner to get the ball rolling.
In terms of top 10 users, we've got the usual suspects. Even before looking at my data or the network page on Sphinn.com, a co-worker guessed that doshdosh (Maki) and aimclear (Marty Weintraub) would be in the top 3 and he wasn't surprised when I told him that Andy Beard was also part of the trio. Rounding out the top 5 are Jeff Quipp and Lyndon Antcliff. The top 5, 10, and 25 submitters account for 22%, 34%, and 52% of the hot submissions.
If you're a Sphinn power user you probably have an intuitive feel for the above data already, but those of you that are relatively new to Sphinn, I hope you found something of value here. And for those interested in past attempts at quantifying Sphinn activity, check out these two posts from theGypsy (How to Dominate Sphinn in 4 Easy Steps) and Jeff Quipp (13 Interesting Stats About Sphinn).

Updating Links: An SEO Red Flag?

2008-10-16T04:59:20Z

Following on the heels of Eric Lander's NoFollow: An SEO Red Flag?, I thought I'd pose the question of whether updating inbound links may also be a red flag. Google uses inbound links to assess the value of content, but it wants those links created naturally. Don't get me wrong. Naturally doesn't necessarily preclude a marketing effort, but it does mean that the person that created the link was free to choose what URL and anchor text to use. Overtly manipulating those two items is entirely unnatural and I would think Google would want to devalue the impact of such behavior.

Deciding What Is Unnatural

So what might this mean? Well, if Google detects that the anchor text of a link is updated 30 days after the link first went live, I'd say that's pretty unnatural. But that's not good enough because, despite being rare, some people do go back and edit old content. So lets add another layer that includes checking the number of links on different sites that all point to the same site that within a short period have their anchor text updated. That combination of variables seems like a pretty good indicator that there's an active SEO effort in the works. The trick here is determining the threshold where updated links reveals a concerted effort rather than just the natural edits people make. I don't think figuring out such a threshold would be too difficult. I'm sure the Google spam team could come up with that measure along with a few refinements during their lunch break. And I suspect Google already has the storage capacity to store previous link data to compare to current link data. OK. The tinfoil hat is coming off now, but I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about this theory.

The History of Latent Semantic Indexing

2008-10-16T04:59:18Z

It's sometimes fun (well, if you're involved with SEO) to look at how optimization theories sometimes form and seem to be truthful, but even years afterwards are still being discussed. Such is the case with Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. On February 3, 2005, Aaron Wall wrote this about LSI: "Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. By placing additional weight on related words in content LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms." At that time, Orion of Search Engine Watch wasn't convinced and wrote, "
No thanks. This time I prefer that others demystify LSA/LSI in connection with search engines ranking/indexing." Fast forward almost two years later and we have Dr. Garcia reminding everyone of, "all those LSI-based myths promoted by snake oil marketers, like that there is such thing as LSI-friendly documents, LSI and link popularity and the dumb notion that displaying a tag cloud of terms is evidence that a company has any LSI-like technology. I have a debunked collections of these and similar SEO tales." Less than two months later on February 7, 2007 Bruce Clay posted about recent ranking changes that have been dubbed the minus-950 penalty. In his post he writes that some have speculated that this penalty is a result of a recent Google patent that describes what seems to be a, "low-scale version of latent semantic indexing." This certainly fits since the patent abstract includes this high-level description, "Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are then indexed according to their included phrases. A spam document is identified based on the number of related phrases included in a document." So what's the verdict on LSI? I don't know. It's certainly something worth watching. The good news is that all of the recommendations from pro-LSI folks seems to boil down to using different keywords with similar meanings when writing content which is something that would happen anyway if you write with your users in mind. In addition, link development that keeps an eye towards "looking natural" will probably survive any algorithm changes that include LSI factors.