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The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has intimated that the search engine giant is looking into penalising the ranking of sites featuring a huge amount of adverts, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Speaking at the PubCon event held in Las Vegas, Cutts stated that the system would only punish sites that featured ads that made it hard for people to locate quality content on a page.
He said: “What are the things that really matter, how much content is above the fold.”
He added: “If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it.”
This suggests that those sites that make it difficult for a user to locate the desired content may, in future, be flagged by Google as spam – potentially undermining an SEO strategies.
Sites that have been flagged as spam and don’t feel they should have been have been advised by Cutts to report their sites to the Google web spam team.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Once upon a time, a request for an email address was a sure fire way to be able to reach someone. Now, as recent research shows, email usage amongst the next generation has dropped by a staggering 59%, and for the vast majority of the rest of us, email has quite simply become a burden.
So, how do you get in touch and stay in touch?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been solving this problem for the last few years and we need to start learning, fast, from these solutions. But, that simple question: “How would you prefer to be contacted?” no longer has a simple three phase answer: email, snail mail or telephone.
What we need to consider now is far more complex. As social networks expand and people become more au fait with their smart phones, tablets, and alternative ways of communicating, you need to find the communication medium of choice for your customers and contacts. And you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that for the vast majority of people – email is not IT.
Spam is not the only problem. The sheer deluge of emails into your average inbox each day means that many people are just ignoring email as a means for communication. And for instant communication, as the #blackberrycrumble showed this last week or so, even your smart phone cannot save you if something more major goes amiss with email servers.
People are relying on a variety of mechanisms to stay in contact and as a company, it is now down to you to learn and adapt to the chosen communication channels of choice for your users. Whether that is Twitter, Facebook, SMS, email, a phone call, or a visit. And then within each of those channels, you may need to understand more comprehensively how your user uses that channel to stay informed.
So, for instance, post something on Twitter as a reply to a tweet I have sent or as part of a conversation I was involved with, and I will only know if it includes @myhandle. I simply do not have time to constantly monitor Twitter so the only way you can reach me is a DM or a replytome. Start a conversation on Twitter with 3 or 4 other people and you will see how Twitter handles start to fall off quite quickly in 140 characters.
Post something on a Facebook page for a client and how will I know unless you tell me?
Understanding how each of those you contact uses social networking and communication channels is becoming a must. Look at those in your office and close family. Do you know the best method for contacting each of them, according to their preferences, which will raise an instant response? If so, then you need to start applying similar knowledge to your wider address book.
For instance, don’t leave me a voice message or expect me to spot an email in the several thousand which arrive each day. Instead, a DM on any of the social networks will arrive as an SMS to my mobile phone. However, you will never know how I set up my personal devices to receive my personal communications, so you need to guess until you know. And then when you know, you need to target me in the most effective manner possible.
Here are some examples:
x: will only answer emails. Thinks SMS are the spawn of satan and will not answer. Ever. The smartphone lives in a box waiting to be sold as a heritage item, like an Atari.
y: loves Twitter. Always picks them up within moments, even at the dead of night. Other than that….
z: checks email weekly. Chooses 10-20 emails to answer only. Facebook, LinkedIn, and social bookmark sites such as delicious and Digg are monitored constantly.
Worrying? It should be if you are relying on email to reach your target audience. It is time to get personal and understand how your audience wishes to communicate. A good CRM mechanism is essential and a full appreciation of the cost of NOT reaching your audience with your messages will force you to look into these solutions.
What does your company use?
Part 2 of the public chat with Empire Avenue’s DUPS on Friday evening (GMT)….To continue…..
As of yesterday the public chats were turned off, with new chats being enabled within the special interest communities – of which there are already hundreds, ranging from geographic regions and cities through to business related forums such as the CEO Club and SEO and Social media communities. And then there are communities of interest such as Tomato Lovers, Daddy Bloggers, Harry Potter and gaming communities.
DUPS and his team are determined to increase the value of the network within Eav, and there will be a strong focus on making the communities increasingly more useful as an integral part of Eav over the coming months. Mention was made of “trending communities” so that people could see which were most active, as well as much more functionality within the chat, such as Thumbs Up, links and photos showing as previews and thumbnails, etc.
There was some discussion of integrating Disqus into the site, which seemed to meet with approval.
The question of spam was covered because obviously a website such as Eav has managed to already attract people for whom ‘netiquette’ is an unknown word. Until the last few days, there was one chat called “Buy Me” in which all shameless promotion and spam was permitted. The general feeling is that there should be at the least a similar ‘overflow’ system to keep these people from harrassing genuine Eavers with their constant “Buy Me” shouts etc. One user has specifically set up a new Buy Me community to try to cater for this problem.
Another question which was asked was when might there be a Blackberry app and this is being looked into by the community now, rather than the developers. Apparently there are some issues to resolve but anyone who wishes to help develop the app should offer help in the communities. Ditto with Android, but this seems to raise less issues.
The user community has already developed a multitude of toolbars and other helpful solutions for shareholders wishing to quickly see ROI, stocks etc and DUPS is encouraging that, as well as the proliferation of Facebook groups such as #TeamZen and #SocialEmpire who help out new users, suggest hot tips, and relieve some of the pressure for support from the developers. There are also an army of volunteer moderators who do a quite superb job at keeping the community in order.
There is an API for anyone wanting to access that so undoubtedly the coming months will see far more exciting new additions from the community itself as well as from the devs.
The chat was fast-paced and it may be that there were other topics discussed which are not mentioned here. If you were one of those in the chat, please do pitch in with any contributions.
The end of the chat was interspersed with some clues about the Secret Awards such as the TOM and the DUPS that can be found if you search hard enough, but for some of us that left it about as clear as mud what we are to do to achieve them! There was also once again mention of a squirrel hunt – some people have been on Eav for a year now and this is obviously an in joke….can anyone clear up what exactly the persecution of squirrels is about, please?!
Out of office autoresponders are a great thing. In some ways. If a client is trying to reach you about a particular aspect of a campaign, a notable development, a question about how to promote a new product etc, then it helps if they know that their account manager is out of the office this week, and who to contact instead.
However, if your out of office autoresponder is not ’smart’, then it will reply to every ezine, newsletter, client enquiry, spam email and so on, ad infinitum. The actuality of that is that you will undoubtedly make enemies with the very people you need to foster relationships with. Any by this, we are not talking about spambots or people who have bought your email address from some dodgy listserv seller.
If you want to know how to ensure that your Out of Office auto reply mechanism is keeping people on side rather than alienating them, the blog post linked to in this sentence is a MUST READ.
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Spamming Twitter is a no-no.
Even though Twitter has only a few days search capacity for previous Tweets (due to the monster amount of tweets that are written every minute, let alone day), there is no need at all to keep posting the same Tweet over and over again. Nor to pick on a trending topic and put those hashtags in if they are not relevant, as Habitat discovered!
Today, some plank who claims to be an SEO pro has spent the entire day spamming certain channels on Twitter. I cannot begin to imagine what that has done to any business opportunities he may have been seeking to gain, but I do know that several people have tracked down the culprit and as he is US-based are now taking matters into their own hands to get his ISP to disconnect him.
Repeatedly tweeting the same message is bound to get people’s backs up. Why do it? Unless you change the text every time, the only people who will see it are your followers (watch them unfollow, fast) and those scanning for/monitoring certain keywords – as I was.
Before you develop a social media strategy, and adopt tools where required to do so, make sure you test them and don’t do anything like automate repeat tweets that will undoubtedly gain you far more enemies than friends.
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For those who use Twitter regularly, you will know how useful the trends feature *can* be for spotting a fast developing topic or viral. However, as with all these things, there is a major downside. Real-time spam.
In order to make a tweet easy to find by those who will be interested in it, you add a hashtag #. This then groups all tweets about that subject into a ‘channel’. When a large number of users are all using the same hashtag, this topic can become a trend on Twitter.
For instance, during the recent Digital Britain summit #digitalbritain started to show on the trends as soon as Stephen Fry took to the platform and his many followers started to tweet with the #digitalbritain tag.
However, in order to disseminate their message to a wide audience, spammers have now taken to adding trending hashtags to their tweets, which is causing havoc as channels get clogged with spam and unrelated marketing messages.
Danny Sullivan’s recent blog post outlines the problems being felt by Search Engine Land, which also highlights how tweets that do not come from the quoted source (eg with a retweet or RT) can begin to affect branding, relationships with your community and so on.
Twitter will need to deal with this problem rapido. Recent live events have been increasingly affected by spam during the course of an event, and Twitter is an ideal medium for such events and conferences as it allows a multitude of virtual delegates to benefit from live streaming, commentary etc and brings an event to a far wider audience than is possible and affordable with a venue.
Whilst showing trending topics on Twitter does have its uses, especially for marketers working on viral campaigns, until the spam problem is resolved, then it would be better for Twitter to remove them.
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Until last week, with the growing popularity of this new blog, we were slowly but surely wasting more minutes of every day dealing with comment spam on the blog.
Spam is pervasive and pointless, as we all know. It can munch its way through hours of your time, whether in your email inbox, your blog comments or through your letter box.
Just a quick comment then and praise for akismet. Nice plug in. And it works. Spam gone in under 2 minutes today, as compared to a daily grind before that was increasingly irritating. Well done, guys!
I have just read a piece in our local business newspaper, written by a so-called online marketing expert, all about e-mail marketing.
It reminded me that as we approach Christmas, many companies will be looking to promote their products and services. Many will opt for an e-mail campaign, especially in times of recession where cuts must be made everywhere possible, and postage is one easy choice.
And these companies probably have little experience in e-mail marketing, so here is the first DONT! that this particular article missed out!
Before you send ANY emails to anyone, make sure that they have given you their email address for that purpose. Do not go out and buy an email list, because you are heading straight into the trap of sending out Unsolicited Commercial Email (aka spam).
Do not go searching through your inbox for email addresses for everyone and anyone who has ever contacted you with a view to sending them an email promoting your hot Xmas product. That is spamming.
The full Privacy and Communications Directive laying out what can and cannot be done is here, and everyone who uses email, or many other forms of communications, should have read it.
Although it is rare that we hear of a UK company being ‘policed’ over spam, it is not necessarily the legal effect that will be felt most soundly by your company, but the PR ripple effect, that is often unseen, and you may be unaware of.
Every individual who has to delete an unwanted email will, at the very least, take in the name of the company who sent it, even if very briefly as they hit the delete button. This means you have just had your name or brand associated with the Trash Box!
Probably not quite the effect you intended with your carefully crafted, beautifully laid out email. But it is the effect achieved, and you should avoid it at all costs.
Today’s lesson is: send your emails to those who have opted in to receive them. They are your willing target audience.
