Meaning the huge habitat hashtag twitter fiasco. The basics of this “huge story” that “rocked the nation” was that those commercially-minded folks down at Habitat UK (which automatically makes them evil according to some reports I have read) fooled Twitter followers into viewing their tweets by inserting hashtags (keywords) so that the tweets would feature highly in the “trending topics” (a list of current hot topics).
Now Habitat clearly went about it in the wrong way and the tweets were just sales promotions about “20% off summer range” with “ipod” or “Iran elections” inserted randomly which has angered some, well a lot of, Twitter users. No doubt we will be hearing about this faux pas in social media talks and conferences until the cows come home but it did make me think two things immediately which were:
1. They went about it all wrong, that is not in dispute, but what if they were making an actual comment on the current affairs issue? Would their comments or tweets be less valuable to other users because they are an organisation rather than an individual? Would the public like to know the opinions of organisations where they spend their cash? And if so could this be used to the benefit of the organisation (like Benetton, crap clothes but they stood for something = enough money to run a F1 team).
3. Apparently the offending employee at Habitat who came up with the idea was an intern. No, my final idea was not actually why were they letting an intern loose on the company Twitter account, but what advert did they use to get the intern. Was it Twit wanted? Summer twit positions available? Want to be twit? How about a twit internship??
Friday, 26 June 2009
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Nofollow links, Matt Cutts, Google, content, evolution, Adfero and a long rant by me.
Apologies for a disjointed title but it sums up very well what this post is about. Whilst this post may sound like a shameless plug for one of Adfero’s products, DirectNews, it is not. Yes, it is more proof that in online marketing content is king (which Adfero has known for many years) but I’m going to talk about how this relates to evolution because, well it has been bothering me for years and i think even OM can learn from mother nature!
Ever since learning about search engines, SEO agencies and how they work, I am constantly reminded about my undergrad developmental biology course. The course was based around the constant battle between predator (or parasite) and prey and how it drives the evolution of both species (through selection pressures to eat and not be eaten). For example, amphibians were the first land-inhabiting creatures who evolved from sea creatures and flourished because they could escape the predators of the sea. This process is called a co-evolutionary arms race, with each species evolving to better catch prey and in turn the prey evolving to evade the predator.
Effectively it has always seemed that Google wants to direct users to relevant information available on the web. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (whilst picking up some advertising cash along the way). Information is expensive as it is difficult to find and report and more costly to create (especially legally if you get it wrong). This means many organisations who want to rank highly try to fiddle Google. Google then works out how this is happening and changes its algorithm to pick up on these cheats. Can you now start to see the basis for a co-evolutionary arms race?
Following a recent appearance at SMX advance in the US, Matt Cutts (Google associate in Search Quality) brought up this issue of nofollow links and how they affect page ranks. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the title of the post is PageRank sculpting.
Over the years SEO agencies have been trying to sculpt page rank through their site. The basic premise behind this stems from the idea that the page rank “carried over” in the page rank flow is the page rank value of the page/number of outgoing links. At basic face value it then seems to increase page rank flow to another page of “your choosing”; you limit the amount of outbound links from that page to boost the flow of page rank to the desired page. This does not always fit with user experiences so people have created nofollow links that allow a user to navigate, but not the Google spiders.
Matt has now revealed in his blog that this changed (or evolved) some time ago to recognise nofollow links and still counts them in the above equation.
He poses and answers the following question: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.
Now in biology, evolution is blind. If a predator could predict the evolution of its prey and change to take advantage of it then it would be a very happy predator (for a few generations, but that’s another rant). But here in this online co-evolutionary arms race, the prey i.e. Google is actually telling the agencies how to get their traffic - with content.
So why aren’t the agencies jumping all over this?
Ever since learning about search engines, SEO agencies and how they work, I am constantly reminded about my undergrad developmental biology course. The course was based around the constant battle between predator (or parasite) and prey and how it drives the evolution of both species (through selection pressures to eat and not be eaten). For example, amphibians were the first land-inhabiting creatures who evolved from sea creatures and flourished because they could escape the predators of the sea. This process is called a co-evolutionary arms race, with each species evolving to better catch prey and in turn the prey evolving to evade the predator.
Effectively it has always seemed that Google wants to direct users to relevant information available on the web. Google’s mission is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (whilst picking up some advertising cash along the way). Information is expensive as it is difficult to find and report and more costly to create (especially legally if you get it wrong). This means many organisations who want to rank highly try to fiddle Google. Google then works out how this is happening and changes its algorithm to pick up on these cheats. Can you now start to see the basis for a co-evolutionary arms race?
Following a recent appearance at SMX advance in the US, Matt Cutts (Google associate in Search Quality) brought up this issue of nofollow links and how they affect page ranks. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the title of the post is PageRank sculpting.
Over the years SEO agencies have been trying to sculpt page rank through their site. The basic premise behind this stems from the idea that the page rank “carried over” in the page rank flow is the page rank value of the page/number of outgoing links. At basic face value it then seems to increase page rank flow to another page of “your choosing”; you limit the amount of outbound links from that page to boost the flow of page rank to the desired page. This does not always fit with user experiences so people have created nofollow links that allow a user to navigate, but not the Google spiders.
Matt has now revealed in his blog that this changed (or evolved) some time ago to recognise nofollow links and still counts them in the above equation.
He poses and answers the following question: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.
Now in biology, evolution is blind. If a predator could predict the evolution of its prey and change to take advantage of it then it would be a very happy predator (for a few generations, but that’s another rant). But here in this online co-evolutionary arms race, the prey i.e. Google is actually telling the agencies how to get their traffic - with content.
So why aren’t the agencies jumping all over this?
Friday, 5 June 2009
Adfero: Does the UK have the best news?
Well yes. I have often thought this for many reasons (working for Adfero obviously) but now apparently those clever guys down at comScore have proved it.
ComScore describe themselves as "a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence". They recently added the following press release
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/5/U.K._Newspaper_Sites_Aattract_Visitors_from_Around_the_World
As the title suggests, this PR piece shows stats about where online newspaper readers are based. Unexpectedly, the newspaper with the highest percentage of non-UK readers is the Mail Online with 73% of users/readers being based outside Britain.
The piece is excellent and well worth a read. I was trying hard to think of why this would be so high? Does anybody know?
I had a few ideas but nothing conclusive.
Language – obviously English has a wider audience than most other languages.
How people find the pages – Does the Mail have more Google News visitors? If so this will display UK articles to US audiences.
What was happening in the UK – the stats are for March. Was there something very big of international interest happening in March?
ComScore describe themselves as "a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence". They recently added the following press release
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/5/U.K._Newspaper_Sites_Aattract_Visitors_from_Around_the_World
As the title suggests, this PR piece shows stats about where online newspaper readers are based. Unexpectedly, the newspaper with the highest percentage of non-UK readers is the Mail Online with 73% of users/readers being based outside Britain.
The piece is excellent and well worth a read. I was trying hard to think of why this would be so high? Does anybody know?
I had a few ideas but nothing conclusive.
Language – obviously English has a wider audience than most other languages.
How people find the pages – Does the Mail have more Google News visitors? If so this will display UK articles to US audiences.
What was happening in the UK – the stats are for March. Was there something very big of international interest happening in March?
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