The Metaverse will evolve from distraction to (virtual) reality for brands
While many believe Facebook’s rebrand as Meta and focus on the metaverse is a strategic distraction from bad press fueled by the Facebook Papers, we believe at Anvil that its horsepower, deep investment in the metaverse, along with additional investment by other major players like Microsoft, will inspire many brands to dabble in the virtual world in 2022. While consumers maybe a few years from caring about the metaverse, early adopters will embrace the novelty and utility. We’re hoping that the 2022 iteration of the metaverse is more than just a glorified Second Life.

Web 3.0 will become ubiquitous
Consumers’ concern over data security and creating a safer online environment to share personal data will be driving forces that fuel the growth of Web 3.0 technology in 2022. The evolution of blockchain technology in particular will provide a safer user experience (UX) for consumers, where they will feel safe sharing first-party data and know exactly how third-party platforms are using personal data. Combined with improved AI functionality, semantic metadata and 3D graphics – Web 3.0 will deliver an improved and better UX for all users. As full data transparency is on the horizon, this will accelerate the transition and put control of data back to where it belongs – the user.

Video marketing will become a vital part of any online marketing strategy
Consumers rely increasingly on the video to make decisions about the products they are buying. Video platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok feature live streams, unboxing, and testimonial product videos, which are going to gain popularity in 2022. As a result, video optimization and advertising on TikTok and YouTube will be increasingly necessary. Google has also rolled out structured markup features like clip markup which help users find important individual parts of videos, increasing the need and value of optimization for commerce. Using new and emerging markups on a brand’s most popular videos will help to improve user experience and Google’s ability to digest and index the video content.

MUM will strengthen Google’s ability to understand more complex searches
Google is always working to get users quicker, more seamless access to information. MUM, or Multitask Unified Model, uses AI to formulate an understanding of the context behind searches and will have a greater influence on search results in 2022 and beyond. Google recently demonstrated how MUM works, showing that search results would attempt to fully answer a search query with text, imagery, maps, and more. With MUM, content strategies will need to provide unprecedented depth, in order to provide searchers with all the information in a single result. The days of providing only topical information on a given webs page in order to gain organic visibility in target searches are numbered.

OTT will gain traction as ad targeting options decrease
Security and privacy demands are creating problematic limitations with third-party cookies and data tracking. Facebook, Apple, and Google Chrome are limiting data collection capabilities. Social media and search engine platforms will become much more generalized, with decreased targeting capabilities. Ad platforms will eliminate audience targeting, limiting advertisers to first-party data collection. These changes will encourage more brands to explore connected TV, podcasts, and platforms like Spotify that have their own internal marketing platform where the user controls what content they want to see. Products like Google’s smart TV and the new Roku TV are allowing viewers to stream content and enjoy gaming, utilizing click-to-buy on-screen ad placements. Smart TVs will be getting smarter with shopping from your own home with enhanced OTT streaming advertising options.

More businesses will move to DTC eCommerce
Due to the pandemic, businesses ranging from psychiatrists to car dealerships have begun marketing and selling products and services direct-to-consumers (DTC) on their websites. Companies are tired of losing profit by selling wholesale to distributors and evolving technologies have made eCommerce approachable to even the smallest business. Even larger retail chains are starting to focus more on DTC eCommerce, limiting physical store locations, retail footprints, and headcount. Brands like Nike are limiting distribution of its footwear and apparel so they can sell more direct and other brands will follow suit in 2022. The additional margins gained by DTC eCommerce sales can be reinvested in digital marketing to further increase profitable revenue. We predict brands will sell on select marketplaces (like Amazon, Walmart.com, and Target.com) to augment reach and revenues, but will still rely primarily on DTC.

More companies will offer retail media networks leveraging first-party data
With the impending loss of third-party tracking cookies in 2023, companies and marketers alike will be exploring new opportunities to reach prospective customers. Companies such as Target, Walmart. Recently, Lowe’s launched its own media network, allowing advertisers to utilize its company’s first-party data and reach customers as they shop online. As the pandemic accelerated the adoption of online shopping, we expect retailers will offer additional advertising opportunities on digital storefronts in the coming year.

Third-party cookie data will begin to sunset itself
With the anticipation of platforms eliminating third-party cookie data, marketers are forced to produce workarounds. Even though Google has pushed out its third-party data sunset date to the end of 2023, users and businesses have been preparing for the loss of critical targeting data with various workarounds, including the increasing use of first-party data. With Google failing to find a viable solution that meets everyone’s needs thus far, we predict there will be some sort of industry compromise by mid-2022, resulting in third-party data naturally sunsetting by year’s end on most popular platforms.

Influencer marketing will fuel sCommerce
Influencer marketing has gained notoriety within the digital marketing ecosystem as an essential strategy in the past few years. At Anvil, we believe the next evolution for influencers is to become the foundation for successful social media eCommerce (aka sCommerce) in 2022. In addition to important metrics such as engagement rates, influencers will be commonly compensated based on a commission structure related to conversion rates (leads or sales). With a greater focus on performance metrics, influencers will achieve a higher level of credibility with brands. Micro-influencers will rise significantly in popularity due to their accessibility to small businesses and the appeal of being able to target nuanced audiences. Retail eCommerce brands invest in direct shopping formats on popular social platforms, including TikTok.

Multicultural representation in marketing will continue to increase in importance
The digital age, accelerated by COVID-19, has created a world that is more interconnected than ever before. The term “global village” carries increased weight as even extremely remote areas see mobile device use continuing to reach saturation point. The success of international content breaking into the US mainstream has also led to an acceleration in engagement and demand for global representation. South Korea’s Squid Game on Netflix is the latest example, following the Spanish global hit Casa de Papel (Money Heist). With content publishers leading the way, brand advertisers will follow suit, developing new strategies to maximize the relevance of multicultural inclusion within marketing messaging, including messaging from the US’s own backyard.

The post 2022 Digital Marketing Predictions: The Multicultural Web 3.0 OTT DTC sCommerce First-Party Data Metaverse is MUM appeared first on SEMpdx.

When Larry & Sergey launched Google in 1998, they had no idea their fledgling company would become a global sensation and even become a verb found in the dictionary. Today, it’s difficult to avoid the behemoth’s extensive reach in your daily life, from checking email or talking on the phone to getting driving directions or even searching for holiday gift ideas. Despite a long history and high public profile, there are still many unusual facts about Google that escape daily dialogue and can provide lessons for marketers.
1. Humble Beginnings (to build upon). The earliest iteration of Google’s search engine algorithm was stored on ten 4 gigabyte hard drives (basically about the same storage as a low-end smartphone today). Larry and Sergey were both cost-conscious and practical. As a result, they built the storage tower for the hard drives out of Legos to make expansion easier. You can see the original tower on display at Stanford University today. Since then, Google has built one of the largest computers in the world. Google reminds us marketers to think in terms of low-cost initial investment, yet provide a foundation that allows for scalability across marketing campaigns and strategies.
2. Search and Destroy (the competition). Understand Google’s history to inform your marketing. John Battelle’s The Search provided more insights into how and why Google works than any other technical book I read in the early years. A key insight from the book: the underlying concept behind Google’s BackRub algorithm was inspired by the graduate students’ need to secure citations for senior dissertations from noted professors. Larry and Sergey determined search results would be more relevant based on ‘citations’ or inbound links, which are equivalent to votes. From there, Google has evolved the algorithm significantly to better address the impact of social media, advertising, spam, mobile and user experience. That said, inbound links and citations remain a significant component of the algorithm.
3. Common Goals (for common good). When I first started my career in search engine optimization (SEO) in 1996, there was a good deal of contention between designers (who liked to control the user experience graphically (instead of using HTML text), developers (who either wanted to cut corners or over-build websites with bloated code) and copywriters (who preferred to write flowery prose (instead of keyword-infused copy). In those early years, my SEO initiatives always took a back seat in discussions about user experience (think frames and Flash) vs. ensuring the website was visible to search engines (via keyword-infused code and copy). My job was made more difficult by far too many SEO consultants choosing to cheat their way into top rankings. Much has changed since then. While Google is still trying to display the most relevant search results possible, its algorithm is much more sophisticated, and puts higher weighting on exceptional user experiences. As a result, Google now rewards websites that are well-designed with clean code and unique copy (where context carries more weight). SEO professionals are now an integral member of the website development team and are treated as peers instead of crazy cousins. As such, Marketers that understand SEO needs to be part of the discussion early and often, when it comes to website development, are ahead of the game.
4. Deal or No Deal (flow). Google is multi-billion-dollar business today, but in the early years, even the founders couldn’t have guessed Google’s trajectory. In fact, in the early years, Larry and Sergey were interested in selling the company. In 1997, Yahoo! turned down a $2 million offer to purchase Google’s search platform. Deeply ironic considering Yahoo! then offered $3 billion dollars a few years later, only to turn around and sell themselves at a bargain price this year. In 1999, Google approached Excite to sell for a mere $1 million, but the CEO rejected the offer. Excite cratered a few years after that. Google is now valued at over $400 billion. Marketers must remember that timing is everything. Buy low, sell high, whether it be your business or gutter repair services.
5. Build AND Buy (technology). Since 2010, Google has averaged one company acquisition per week. That is nearly six years of weekly acquisitions of technology to enhance and improve Google’s ability to deliver quality content and experiences. Some of the most notable acquisitions during that time period include: Picasa, Urchin Software Corporation (Google Analytics), Android (OS), YouTube, DoubleClick, Zagat, Quickoffice (Google Docs), Waze (real-time traffic for Maps). As marketers, we are smart to stay on top of deal flow to anticipate which technologies or features we can expect to see incorporated into the Google suite in the coming months.
6. Ups and Downs (service). Google is such a core component of the Internet experience that the Web is literally crippled without it. On August 16, 2013, Google’s website went down for five minutes. During that brief time period, global Internet usage decreased by 40 percent. This is a good reminder to protect your website from internal and external threats and broaden your marketing efforts beyond the Google suite to mitigate risk and maximize performance.
7. Not Feeling So Lucky (in search). For many years, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button took Google searchers directly to the most relevant page, as determined by the algorithm. That feature was finally phased out with the advent of Google Instant Search. Perhaps a bigger incentive than evolving technology to remove the button was the fact that “I’m Feeling Lucky” cost Google $110 million each year, as it bypassed the ads entirely. Sometimes, business decisions are based on revenue and can take some of the fun and mystery away from a brand. The challenge we face as marketers is to balance the need for a brand to maintain its uniqueness without compromising financial health.
8. Don’t Worry, Be Happy (with your visibility). As mentioned previously, Google’s number one goal is to keep its users happy by providing the best possible search results. This applies to paid search results (aka AdWords) as much as organic search results. As a result, there are times when your text ads do not show up in targeted search results (regardless of how high your bid is set). This is because Google has determined your ad (or messaging) is not the best match and they are willing to forgo the incremental revenue in order to prioritize a more relevant ad. This is especially true for informational-based queries. Marketers need to practice both patience and persistence in optimizing ad campaigns, from keywords and ad copy to offer and landing page design. In the end, you may end up paying less for a click with a more relevant ad than your competitor.
9. Take Care of Business (school). Larry and Sergey developed the BackRub algorithm while attending Stanford, which made it property of the University. As a result, Google negotiated a long-term license for BackRub with Stanford in exchange for $1.8 million worth of shares in Google. That license has since generated more than $300 million in income for Stanford. As marketers, we benefit from taking care of those that take care of us, whether that be employees, partners, vendors, investors or in Google’s case, educational institutions. Whether it be cash, equity or a simple hand-written thank you card, don’t forget your people.
10. Cover All Your Bases (make lemonade). From the very beginning, Google adapted quickly. In fact, one of the early investors misspelled the original name of the company, Googol, but instead of correcting the name on the check, they adopted it. Nowadays, Google is such a commonly-typed word in search bars that the company has purchased common misspellings of the name, including www.gooogle.com, www.gogle.com and www.googlr.com. Similarly, Google has figured out a clever way to circumvent firewalls in unfriendly countries like China by creating a mirror site: http://elgoog.im/. The site is a mirrored/reversed version of the old Google website, and as a result, the text doesn’t register in most firewalls and can be used just like a regular search engine where the normal Google site is blocked. Google reminds marketers to ensure you’ve protected your brand by buying and redirecting common misspellings. This is also a reminder to think globally with your marketing efforts, including traditionally challenging countries and markets.

My hope is that the above facts about Google and the associated lessons for marketers are of value and inspire new digital marketing strategies and tactics for 2021. Feel free to add your fun Google facts or lessons in the comments section below.

The post Ten things every marketer should know about Google appeared first on SEMpdx.

Advertising: Amazon Will Eat Google and Facebook’s Lunch
You may be aware that many product searches start on Amazon. Amazon, smart agencies and brands are already well-aware (that includes Anvil of course). What we see changing most in 2020 is Amazon’s ability to improve its advertising options for brands and sellers alike, especially in the voice search realm (we’ve been wrong about this in the past, but we really feel it this year!). Amazon Advertising is one of the few high growth areas of its business lines and will make greater strides in 2020, taking more market share from Google and even Facebook. Make sure you have an Amazon marketing strategy for your product business in 2020 or get left in the dust.

Display Ads: Animated GIFs, Video and Interactivity will Replace Image Ads
Static image ads on social platforms will start to fall away and videos, animated GIFs and interactive ads will supplant the 25-year-old ad format on popular platforms like Google and Facebook. This trend is already starting to occur, with video becoming increasingly prevalent. The reason is obvious: interactive and motion-oriented ad formats are more engaging, memorable and tend to convert better. While static imagery is still a majority of ad format inventory, that will change by the end of 2020. Brands and agencies designing ads in animated, interactive and video formats will take a leadership role and stand out in a crowded marketplace.

SEO: Structured Data Strategy will be More Important than Ever Before
In 2019, “0” or ‘no-click’ searches surpassed regular clicks on organic and paid links in search results. As a result, brands will need to become intimate with structured data, most commonly powered by schema markup. As more searches move to mobile devices, users are not scrolling down the page, as they expect the first result they see to answer their query. Similarly, with voice search, users expect the first search result to be the best answer to their query. Marking up content with multiple types of structured data to secure the featured snippet real estate will be more important than ever. Sites who do not take advantage of structured data will see their site slip down the results page and will ultimately lose traffic to competitors with strong structured markup strategies. Google wants to be able to provide an answer to a user query as fast as possible, and with structured data on a page Google can more easily understand and compartmentalize the information on you site. With that better understanding, Google will be able and more likely to serve your content as a result when it is applicable to a query. Routinely making sure the structured data implemented on your site is error-free and up-to-date should be a required part of every ongoing SEO strategy.

SEO: Google Will Mandate That All Websites Be Voice Search Compliant
Anticipating the continued proliferation of smart speakers and digital voice assistants through 2020, Google will proactively mandate that all websites be voice search compliant by the end of 2020. Currently, over 40 percent of searches are voice-activated and that will continue to increase, likely becoming most searches by 2021. Website copy and content will have to be voice search friendly to rank well in Google searches. Brands will need to utilize structured data (aka schema markup or rich snippets) to power the ‘best answer’ on smart speakers or position 0 on screens. Site structure and content will also need to be altered to better answer questions commonly asked via voice assistants and smart speakers. Websites that lack structured data will be penalized by Google. This prediction expands on the previous structured data trend.

SEO: Augmented Reality Will Play a Bigger Role
Imagine virtually trying out clothes from your favorite brands without leaving your home. Augmented Reality (AR) can make this a reality. AR provides brands an opportunity to overlay information in video, text, or image format onto everyday surroundings, objects and real-world locations. Nearly 80 percent of the information the brain takes in is visual. By providing information in a visual medium, that also has the spatial nature of augmented reality, brands are giving the brain a very intuitive way of accessing and understanding information. ECommerce will benefit the most from AR implementation, as will destinations, automotive and other complex sales. Brands like adidas and Converse have already implemented AR, earning higher conversion rates with fewer product returns.

Email Marketing: The Flywheel Will Displace the Traditional Sales Funnel
More companies will be moving away from the traditional sales/marketing ‘funnel’ to the Flywheel model in 2020 in order to focus on creating experiences that engage and empower customers. Originally created in 1898, the AIDA (Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action) funnel model is a linear approach that focuses on attracting new customers and engaging them in a business or service to turn them into a quantifiable lead. The flywheel approach takes an innovative view of the buyer journey and uses all client-facing roles such as customer service, marketing, and sales to interact with customers at every stage. Attracting, engaging, and delighting customers even past the point of purchase – so companies continue to interact with customers instead of treating them as one-time-only prospects. The customer is the lynchpin, with the flywheel itself divided into three equal segments, each representing stages along the customer journey: attract, engage, and delight. Each area creates energy and passes it along to the next, with the delight phase feeding back into attract. Note: Anvil was not paid by HubSpot to endorse its model, we just agree with the methodology and hope for greater awareness and adoption.

Email Marketing: Push Notifications Will Replace Email
Email is going the way of the dinosaur, maybe not next year, but in the coming years. Starting in 2020, however, there will be a notable shift to push notifications and chatbots as viable replacements, especially for brands targeting Gen Y/Z, consumers and retail environments. Push notifications are alert style messages that can be sent to a user via desktop or mobile web, depending on context. At least twice as many people today sign up for web push notifications, compared to newsletter registrations. Only the top 10 percent of the email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of push notifications. The average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter is 6.4 hours. With push notifications, the recipient will see the message immediately. The updates to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter filters have dented the potency of email marketing, which will be further compromised by the CCPA legislation. As alluded to earlier, younger, digital-native audiences favor fewer touchpoints and other methods of communication than email, when engaging brands.

Social Media: Performance Metrics Will Replace ‘Likes’
Those following social media closely are likely familiar with Instagram’s recent decision to hide “Likes” from followers. With the proposed change, only account owners and select third-party platforms will have access to that data. While influencers and marketers alike have voiced concerns about the change, it does provide an opportunity for everyone to be smarter about social media strategies, especially evaluating influencer marketing programs. For example, influencers will need to up their game to become more professional about how they represent their potential impact, focusing on reach and engagement rates over Likes. This trend will also push brands to adopt performance models based on transactional goals. The social platforms, especially Instagram and Pinterest, are making buying product easier than ever, so the timing is ripe for change.

Social Media: Consumers will Drive Alignment and Transparency in Influencer Marketing
Moving forward, look for brands and influencers to create better alignment and transparency. According to research, 84 percent of consumers believe authenticity is important when choosing influencers to follow. More compelling: only 11 percent of influencers are CMA and FTC-compliant when disclosing relationships with sponsoring brands. Millennials are increasingly skeptical of businesses’ motives and impact on society, according to Deloitte. As a result, brands looking to target Gens X, Y and Z will need to be more intentional about how they select and engage influencers based on core values and fit vs reach. Another trend that will go together with transparency and alignment is a shift to “always-on” instead of project-based influencer campaigns. The writing is on the wall for brands and agencies, especially for brands targeting younger consumers, to plan accordingly.

Social Media: TikTok Will Lose Momentum – Relegating It to a Snapchat Knockoff
While we’ve seen a good deal of hype and momentum built around TikTok this year, marketers are still trying to figure out how they can use it to their advantage. It is true that TikTok saw incredible growth this year (over 500 million active users in Fall 2019), which earned it the title “social platform of 2019.” But’s also true that signups are coming to a near grinding halt. As a result, parallels can be made with Snapchat’s adoption history – incredible growth, everyone joins, signups slow, users leave/become less engaged. We believe TikTok will figure out how to utilize ads more effectively in 2020, but we don’t think user engagement will sustain and the platform will end up in the same purgatory as Snapchat. It will become an afterthought as brands evaluate platforms on which to target and invest. The one exception to this prediction, is if you’re looking to reach a very, very broad audience within a certain *cough* young demographic (and China as a growth marketplace).

We hope to get good grades when we review our 2020 digital marketing predictions at the end of the year. Let us know what you think of our 2020 digital marketing trends in the comments section or add your own predictions. May your 2020 be full of fulfilled predictions!

The post 2020 Digital Marketing Predictions from Anvil Media appeared first on SEMpdx.

Even though I took copious notes, rather than recap all the sessions, which has already been done so well by many others, I thought I would blog about only the newest information I learned.

Not all of the information below came from the sessions, and in a few cases, they came from conversations in the hallways, or even after hours. Not everything here might be useful for you to know, but I found it all to be pretty interesting.

Here then, (in no particular order) are my own top 10 SMX Advanced nuggets of knowledge:

1. Google news
When Google news displays results on the same line, more often than not, it pulls images from one source, and the story snippet from another. I was surprised to hear that, but I’ve verified this to be true.

This makes a great case for making sure that you optimize your images for search, including using an alt tag, surrounding the image by relevant text, naming the image with the word photo, pic, or JPEG etc. in the filename, and ensuring that your images directory is crawlable, and not blocked with your robots.txt file.

2. Where you search from, matters
To hear that he originating location of the search plays a part in the results even for non-geographic search terms was a surprise to me, but besides hearing it from Rand Fishkin during his presentation, a couple of other people confirmed it as well.

I had always assumed that the difference in search results that people might see came only from the fact that Google has multiple data centers, and this is still partially the case.

The apparent truth of the matter though, is that if three people search for “plumber” from different parts of the country, they are all going to be served different results, even if they are on the same Google datacenter.

When I first heard this I was skeptical, but I’ve since been able to verify it (occasionally) by picking just one Google datacenter, and then using different proxy servers to search for the same non-geographic key phrases.

I did this for a few phrases, and sometimes the top 10 were a little different, and sometimes they were identical, so it appears that the variance kicks in only when certain search terms are used.

How does knowing this help you? Well, I guess it doesn’t. Throw in Personal Search, (where Google users can get completely different results when they are logged in), and you quickly realize that SERP reports are becoming even more useless as time goes on (but clients still want ’em, don’t they?).

3. “Who you link to” matters more than ever
Okay I admit that this isn’t really something I learned here, but it seems to have gained more importance than I was aware of over the past few months. More than one speaker referred to “co-citation”, and checking out your link partners websites to ensure that they’re linkworthy.

We all know that linking to a bad neighborhood will closely associate you with that site, so logically, linking to the most authoritative sites in the world can’t hurt, can it? As Google cracks down even further on link sellers and other garbage websites, you want to be sure that you are not recommending them from your own site.

Conversely, linking to authoritative informational websites that are valued highly by the search engines actually does help establish you as a trusted authority of of information. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t give you a huge boost in trust, but these days, every bit helps.

So, might displaying the RSS feeds of the highest authority industry relevant sites help you? I’ll bet it might…

4. Yahoo offers dynamic URL rewriting
Most search marketing professionals know that long ugly URLs strings used to be problematic for the search engines. While they have all gotten much better at crawling strings with multiple variables,
it’s still better to make sure that you have search engine friendly URLs throughout your website.

Sometimes though, technical issues make that unacheivable, so Yahoo site explorer has apparently been offering on-the-fly dynamic URL rewriting since last August, which I think would be a pretty big deal, if they had more market share.

I asked a Google engineer if Webmaster Tools was going to be offering this, and pretty much got told that they didn’t have a problem crawling dynamic URLs, so no, because they don’t have to. For complete details on the why and how Yahoo is doing this, see this

5. Changing registration info can harm a site
Wow, really? During the session titled, “Buying Sites for SEO” more than one speaker talked about not changing the who is information after purchasing an old domain name.

I think it was both Gab Goldberg and Todd Malicoat that suggested using a legal agreement and an escrow service to ensure protection for you, the new owner, but if you could avoid changing the actual registration information, it would be preferable.

The reality is, due to expense and inconvenience, (not to mention the risk of the old owner coming back at you), most of us will not take this step. Whenever I get a chance to grab an old domain, the last thing I would ever have thought of would have been to keep the old registrants information.

I suspect that it’s more due to the combination of factors, like changing hosts, changing registrars, changing Whois information, and changing the content all at once that can trigger a filter causing the search engines to take a closer look at the website.

Still, if you buy an old site, and can manage to retain the content, it appears as if the experts agree that you’ll do yourself a favor if you take the extra steps necessary to work out a way to keep the registrant information intact.

6. Downloadable file from Google Webmaster tools is not totally worthless
When you are logged into Google Webmaster tools, and you go to statistics – top search queries, you get to see two rows of phrases, but only the top 20 on each side. Below the left column there are two links, one to “download data”, and one to “download all query stats” for your website.

It’s probably been six months since I last bothered downloading the “all query stats” file because I found it to be pretty much useless. Although it comes in a CSV format, and importing it into a spreadsheet leave you with your columns of key phrases mashed together and separated by brackets like this –
etc.

I can remember wasting over an hour trying to make something out of this data, and I just scratched my head (okay, maybe I beat my fist on the desk) wondering what I might have done wrong, and finally just moved on. To this day, I still don’t understand why Google doesn’t fix it.

However, a top affiliate marketer named Carsten Cumbrowski has apparently created a tool he calls the
Google stats converter, and it’s really quite useful. Simply visit his site, upload your file, and get it converted for instant download.

Unfortunately, Googles has seen fit to remove the one critical piece of information that you may really want, and that makes no sense to me. I want to see the same information they show me on that top 20 screen before I download the file in the first place, which is to see my ranking for each phrase.

Sure they show you a thousand phrases, along with the location of the search, the search type, whether images, mobile etc., and they even show you the number of clicks, but they won’t show you
where you rank! That seems to defeat the whole purpose in providing the file anyway, doesn’t it?

Why should you care where you rank? Well, if you knew what good phrases you are already already on page 2 and 3 for, then you could optimize some pages and shoot a few links their way to bounce to page 1.

I can’t understand why Google would remove this information other than to make our lives more difficult, so that’s why I’ll continue to use SEODigger. Although the information they provide is up to 90 days old, at least it’s quite helpful for helping a site realize it’s untapped potential.

7. Links from Meetup.com are not nofollowed
Not exactly earth shattering news, but hey, just like Flicker, having access to any well established
and frequently crawled site where you can send some link juice where you like is always nice. Besides, I’m trying to make a top 10 list here

8. Google penalties officially cleared up
Most of us have heard about the supposed Google -5 penalty, or the -30, -60, -90, or even the -950,
were people claim to have verifiable proof that Google has dropped them these exact numbers of spots. I’ve seen these posts, participated in a few myself, and had no doubt they existed.

During the “You & A with Matt Cutts session, Matt verified that yes, there ARE varying degrees of Google penalty, ranging from lowered PageRank, to lowered ranking of varying degrees. Of course we all know it’s even possible to be completely removed from the index, but he said that the penalties are not “specific numbered penalties” that get assigned to different situations.

So now it’s completely cleared up, right? Google does penalize sites as they see fit ranging anywhere from one to a thousand dropped spots, and the exact reasons why are clearly defined right here in the
Google Webmaster guidelines.

9. Age of your inbound link matters
This is another one that I guess I knew, but unfortunately there’s really not a lot we can do about it. What I didn’t know was that it appears to have become increasingly important, and most people I talked with about it seemed to agree.

A brand-new link is not going to do you as much good as a well-established link that’s been around for a long time. This is good news for well-established sites with lots of links, but bad news for competitors trying to break in to new markets with new domains.

This opens up a couple of other questions that I was unable to get answered – namely…

1. Does the age of the anchor text matter? – It’s long been established practice to review your own inbound link profile, and go back to some of your old partners, and try to get the anchor text changed, but might that be “resetting the clock” somehow? Bad idea?
2. Does changing the URL of an inbound link matter? – If you can somehow actually get a link partner to change the inbound link text, then it’s probably no more difficult to get them to change the target. Anyone that’s tried it has seen that help in the past. However, does changing the target URL to a deeper link but would that “reset the clock” somehow?
3. What about changing the domain entirely for that old link? Does that reset the clock too?

Maybe Matt from Google can answer these questions but maybe it’s too specific and would give away some details they’d rather not share?

So, just remember that building trusted links is more important than ever, but in the grand scheme of things, the Internet is still very young. Someday, that link you obtained way back in June of 2008 is going to be old, crusty, and quite valuable, so get to work.

10. I still have a lot to learn
I heard a lot of people saying that for a supposedly “Advanced” conference, there sure was a lot of basic information, and I suppose that to some degree that was true, but only if you stayed in sessions where you are already an expert.

The Give it up session notwithstanding, (where for the first time, I heard “dark side” suggestions and comments at a mainstream conference), I find it very hard to believe that anyone could have a problem finding things to learn here, and saying it wasn’t “advanced” enough. What did they expect? I talked to a lot of newbies there, and trust me, plenty of them were pretty overwhelmed!

As we all get smarter in our chosen niches, we’re always going to find less in our usual session choices, but by branching out of my own comfort zone and attending sessions in a wider variety of subjects, I’m going to be able to continue my quest for knowledge in the Internet marketing world.

I met lots of people and heard several amazing speakers that were far more knowledgeable than I am in their areas of expertise. At a small conference like this, you get to rub elbows with some of the brightest minds on the planet, and pick their brains.

Just a few that come to mind immediately were Jonah Stein of ItstheROI, Jay Young of Str0ud, and Christoph Cemper of Cemper.com. I’d never met any of them before, and it was a nice “advanced” treat.

I also want to extend a special thanks to Jonathan Hochman of Hochman Consultants for picking up a large dinner tab at the Edgewater, and Stephan Spencer of Net Concepts for patiently answering every stupid question i could think of to ask him.

The post SMX Advanced 2008 – Top 10 Nuggets of Knowledge appeared first on SEMpdx.

When I first started offering search marketing services, I would guarantee a certain number of links per month to clients, because it seemed to me that it was all about volume.

The websites that were at the top of Google for any given phrase typically had the most links, and as you worked your way down the page, the number of inbound links going to each site dropped.

The logical assumption was “he with the most links wins”, and that’s what led to all of the reciprocal linking, link farms, and our ridiculous (but necessary) obsession with buying and obtaining links.

Today, you’ll find that is no longer always true, in fact more often than not, the number one search result will NOT have the most inbound links on the page, yet some people still don’t get it.

A couple of years ago, and perhaps even longer, Google started changing their algorithm to weight the value of some links much more heavily than others. I have no doubt that there is always been some variance, but it became much more apparent, as most of the older methods of link building stopped improving rankings.

It became less important to have thousands of inbound links, and instead more important to have authoritative inbound links, from websites in similar and related industries that also, in turn, had authoritative inbound links themselves.

This has led to a newer philosophy, and although I still believe that diversity is the key to link building, throwing a bunch of links against the wall to see what sticks is not as effective as it used to be.

Diversity is still necessary to a point, and I believe that the low quality links STILL have to come, otherwise things will appear unnatural. However, researching your competitors that are at the top of the rankings and obtaining backlinks from their most important partners became much more important.

Finding authoritative related websites and letting them know that you could offer their visitors something of value became critical for getting the higher profile websites to link to you.What reason can you possibly give me to send one of my readers your way?

Do you have something educational that my audience would be fascinated by, and would appreciate the referral? Then by all means let me know about it. If not, then stop sending those stupid link requests.

As late as mid 2007, we were still building many links the old-fashioned way with both reciprocal methods, and outsourcing our share of crappy links in volume, with the hopes of improving client rankings, and admittedly, it continued to work. If it’s not broke, why fix it?

In August of 2007, I was fortunate enough to attend the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference, and I had a front row seat to what I still consider to be the single best session I’ve ever seen at a major search marketing conference.

The session featured Matt Cutts from Google. along with Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen, Greg Boser and Andy Baio, and the majority of panelists relentlessly pounded Google and pounded Matt Cutts, for trying to tell us all that it was not okay to buy and sell links.

What right do they have to tell us what we can and cannot do on our own websites? Who are they to determine our actual motive behind buying or selling a link, and what gives them the authority to “punish” us?

The reason Google MUST control this selling of links, is because, as Michael Gray pointed out, this is their Achilles’ heel. The majority of their ranking algorithm is based on authoritative inbound links, and they have to take steps to prevent it’s exploitation.

If websites were permitted to sell text links, and Google permitted those links to continue to affect the ranking of websites, then the search engine rankings are effectively “for sale” and the integrity and quality of the search results would change.

The reason Google became the best search engine was because they returned the most relevant results. If top ranking sites for any given phrase were comprised only of sites that could afford to buy the best inks, then loyal users of the Google search engine would no longer find their results to be the best, and they would simply leave.

In the fall of 2007, Google began to penalize sites that it believed were selling links. The penalty came in the form of drops in visible PageRank, and thousands of websites were affected.

This penalty came along with the threat of dropping rankings too, and although there have been few instances of that actually happening, the warning shot was fired, and I expect it to begin happening more regularly.

After Google’s penalty, a domino effect took place, and sites that had been purchasing links from high page rank sites suddenly found their most expensive inbound links to no longer have the same ranking impact that they once did.

Amid cries of “foul” from the search marketing community, Google stuck to their guns, and the purchasing of links for the purpose of gaining search rankings has now been driven largely underground.

In fact, unless you know a lot of people in a close-knit community, some might say it’s more work to buy links than to create something of value that will attract links naturally.

Private deals can of course still be made with webmasters and businesses, but the networks of text link brokers have been rendered largely irrelevant. Businesses spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually purchasing links suddenly found themselves with the daunting task of retaining their rankings legitimately.

Today, in mid-2008, it’s more important than ever to have what I call a “linkworthy” website. Business owners have to get much more creative in order to attract attention of other authoritative sites in the hopes of gaining inbound link.

Last week I attended the Elite Retreat, and nearly every speaker continued to drive home the point of creativity, originality, quality, and engaging your audience at their level as becoming more important than ever. Writing content that THESE communities will eat up and vote for is the key.

Social networking master Neil Patel has a lightning quick imagination, and I used my one-on-one time with him to get some ideas for a few industries.

One example he came up with that I’ll share was when I told him I needed an idea for a dull and boring website that dealt with identity theft. Yawn…

Other than the horror stories and preventative measures, which we’ve beaten to death already, how can something compelling be created that will generate buzz?

Neil’s answer came in a heartbeat – Create a step by step document about “How to Steal Someone’s Identity”. Simple, yet brilliant, and dead on point.

By thinking completely out of the box, you should be able to find something you can do creatively that will not only benefit your readers, but will in turn generate buzz, and ultimately some inbound links.

Back in 2006, I wrote an article called “Link building tips – What will do the trick?” and it’s now even more relevant than ever. The goal of that article was to stimulate creativity in the minds of site owners and advertising executives to create something truly linkworthy on their websites or elsewhere.

Now however, with dozens hundreds of social networking and bookmarking sites that can also host content, your ideas can spread faster than ever, and be seen by an even wider audience.

There’s an opportunity to create something ever so loosely related to your main website, and by hosting that content elsewhere, you have much more more freedom to be imaginative.

An identity theft protection service certainly cannot put “How to Steal Someone’s Identity” on their own website, but they can write that article and put it elsewhere. Do you think that might get a few Diggs?

At the bottom of the article, you can have an author biography box that talks about being an expert in the field of identity theft, with a link back to your site, and maybe even have a banner ad on the page.

An even better option might be writing that article with a pen name, then leaving the FIRST comment with your real name, adding a counterpoint or argument, putting your backlink there, to your real business, which is PREVENTING identity theft.

You can even show outrage at the author for providing such dangerous and irresponsible information. Then you’ve disassociated your business from writing “How to Steal Someones Identity”, but you’ve still got your link on that page.

Is that ethical? Is it right? Well that’s up to you, and this example is only here for illustrative purposes, and personally, I’d never do that… Nor would I write “10 ways to get Away with Arson” for a fire extinguisher company, or “How to Get Away with Cheating on Your Spouse” for a private detective. –

The high volume of community users can cause your idea or content to spread like wildfire, and your own site is going to benefit in both traffic and backlinks, as your information spreads virally.

Some marketers got this concept as far back as 2005, and many of the rest of us have come to our senses over the past couple of years.

Create something newsworthy, something funny, something valuable, something controversial, something helpful, or something shocking, but above all, create something genuine, and “think outside the link”.

Scott Hendison is a founding board member of SEMpdx, and is the CEO of Search Commander, Inc.

The post Think Outside the Link appeared first on SEMpdx.

There is no debate as to whether or not it’s actually happened, and it’s been preceded over the past two weeks by a manual lowering of TBPR on many of the Web’s most popular websites. Most people (ok, everyone) believ it was done as as a slap on the wrist for selling links.

My initial indicator that something had changed came when I looked at Sphinn this morning, where instead of a PR zero, like they have been since launch, I was greeted by a PR 6. Wow! Nice bump, huh?

This instantly made me jump to my own sites interior pages, which have been sitting at a lowly PR zero since launch in June, and now all but one of them have a little link juice, showing PR 3. (I’ve never obsessed about PageRank before, but I do hate showing a zero!)

I find it comical that the only page not to get any TBPR in my entire site was one where I talk about paid links, and where I have an affiliate link to Patrick Gavin’s Text Link Ads. How funny is that? Coincidence? I think not!

Clearly, Google is concerned about the integrity of its algorithm and the ability of savvy webmasters to manipulate rankings via passing of link juice through text links, and that was demonstrated by the myriad of websites that lost TBPR this past week.

Take a look at this list of penalized sites on Andy Beards site, and check them for yourself. Copyblogger went from a PR6, penalized to a PR4, and is now back up all the way to a PR7! Wow, what’s that all about?

Others have now been slapped again, like one of my favorites Search Engine Roundtable. They went from a PR7 to a PR 6 last week, and this morning they are a PR4. Wow, that really sucks. Total bullsh*t.

In my opinion, this manual lowering of the visible toolbar PageRank was a “shot across the bow” to let website and domain owners know that if they sell links and are caught, then they will have their TBPR get lowered. To me, that’s an unspoken threat that rankings might be next. Fear Uncertainty & Doubt – FUD

I guess Google practically owns the Web, and can do whatever they want to keep advertising dollars going where they want them to. That would be directly into stockholder coffers, and not into the pockets of small webmasters around the world.

The post Todays Google TBPR Update Slaps Some, Helps Others appeared first on SEMpdx.