Essentially Sphinn serves as a central hub where search engine marketers can come together to post and discuss the stories, images, links, and other bits that are related to the search industry. In many ways, Sphinn is a clone of sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and others but with an overall topical focus. While any one can submit to Sphinn, some submissions are so topically out of touch, that you wonder what people were thinking.

In the Sphinn post above, the submitter “MitraMyers”, submits a link to http://www.lexansystems.com/ with the description: “Enterprise Information Security & Data Security Products and Solutions”. When you go to the link provided, this has nothing to do with search engine marketing, optimization, etc. This is obviously spam either from Lexan Systems, their SEO company, a competitor trying to put a black eye on Lexan’s marketing efforts, or just some clueless person. Either way some one (honestly, not me) reported this and an admin has taken the post down while I write this.

Here is another example, a Women’s news/info/donation site called Bringr that is being spammed to death. Go back a few pages and you see that some of the info is actually pretty good but every once in a while some spammer starts submitting their pages over and over again…

While Sphinn has been pretty good about quickly removing spammy posts to their service, not all such services act as quickly. Some places use a “bury” system where it takes a critical mass of users to root out and either remove spammy submissions or at least get them out of the front page or “new” section which is in the public eye. In the meantime, it makes the submitter and/or target of the link look bad. And of course, for our industry… people tend to lump us as all together. Many equate spamming social sites, blogs, and the like as “SEO” even if it is not. As Patrick Altoft mentions in a post at Blogstorm, spamming with out thinking should not even be considered “black hat” seo.

Before submitting to a social site two things to consider:

1) Read some of the posts. Is there even a nominal theme to the social site?
Not really. Yes, internet marketing. Sharing women’s information/resources. Celebrity news and gossip.

2) If your submission is actually related to the site’s topics, will it be found interesting?
Even on Digg, which is generally about anything… a link to your home page, about page, pricing section, contact page, etc. is, quite honestly, lame. Submitting a link where you’ve posted interesting photos, a novel way to use CSS rather than a graphic, etc. is not a bad idea. The point is to gain links and references from people who appreciate what you’ve submitted. These people will go on and link to either your page or the social network page that promotes your submission.

I know that for some this is marketing 101 discussion. For some this is new information. For others, this is information that may help you to explain to your boss, CEO, etc. why some search marketing efforts remain fruitless despite the labor or cost expended by a PR team or consultant. The idea behind marketing and submitting links to sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Sphinn, and others is valid but what you actually submit makes all of the different in the world.

Good luck in your in your search marketing efforts!

ITwo of the most common questions that people ask about online marketing is, ’should I put a blog on my site?’ and ‘how do I get my site indexed quickly?’. The answer, in many cases, is yes and perhaps with your blog. If you want to be indexed by Google and other engines quickly, the answer is often “get a blog”. While I won’t get into all of the pitfalls of having a blog, I did want to show you one small indexing benefit that is related to having a blog…

f you go into Google right now and search on: market position, you will see that our blog’s domain is indexed. If you click on the “cached” option, you will also see that Google states that they last indexed this page on April 27, 2008.

Yet, I wrote a post earlier today. Today is the 29th. Yet, Google has already been to MarketPosition and they have indexed my earlier post.

As you will undoubtedly hear in many places, blogs get indexed pretty quickly. It’s true. The example above, proves this. But, does this mean that your normal web site updates are indexed as quickly, if you have a blog? Not necessarily. But it doesn’t hurt.

Can I Drop Links From My Web Site Into My Blog?
My take is that you can drop links from your blog, to important pages on your site. If the link and content is appropriate, even your blog’s visitors might appreciate knowing that there is something new on your site. They may link to the new pages as well, which can be a plus in other ways.

Provided that your blog is not a splog (spamblog) – with just links to your product pages or other non-interesting content, you should be OK. These links on topical pages can help get non-blog pages in the queue for being indexed rather than just waiting for Googlebot to randomly find them and index those pages at some point in the future.

If you had a large web site, similar to say Amazon.com, you might add dozens of pages and still not have them indexed unless they are linked to from a visitor, from the home page of your site, a good site map, etc. While some engines may ping existing pages in order to see if they’ve changed (search on “If Modified Since”), they are checking old pages that they already know about.

If you need an example of a positive way to drop links, forget that that Movable Type is a blog software company for a second. Here is a post where they point to an open source version of their software and link drop to various areas of their site. This post is not spammy and generally fits into the same topical themes that their official movable type blog normally covers.

Observation About The Google WebMaster Tools Area
As an aside, I’m a fan of the Google WebMaster Tools area. By submitting to Google, waiting for their bot to come by, having them index your blog, etc. that doesn’t mean that all of the areas of Google are up to date with one another. I know, it is a little confusing. They have many data centers and various ways in which they might categorize dates, copies of indexes, etc.

As you can see above, despite indexing my blog post today, their Webmaster tools area says that they last indexed Market Position back on the 27th.

Summary
A blog can be helpful. They are often indexed quicker than a normal site. A blog can be used to point search engine robots to new, non-blog content on your site. If you check various areas in Google, in order to see how their indexing of your site is coming along, don’t get disheartened, not all of Google’s tools, dates, and other data always match up.

As I’ve said in the past, no one controls search engine rankings. There are no guaranteed rankings.

Even Google says this on their own site:
“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google…”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

Yet you will still see advertising like this:

(Screen capture from an advert seen on Search Engine Land.)

While the debate rages that we need or do not need standards, there are others that are trying to trademark the term SEO in order to perhaps force the issue.

Check this page out. This might be link bait, but it might be a response from the person trying to trademark the term “SEO”. Either way, you may want to get a few SEO friends together and file a notice of opposition in order to keep this generic word for our industry from becoming a trademark. If it becomes a trademark, this guy has the potential to be the only consulting firm performing the process of “SEO”. Imagine trying to advertise or do business if words like “plumbing”, “electrician”, “accounting”, or other terms were trademarked.

A Few Innocent and Not So Innocent Name Squatters

Before I get to the legitimacy of the WebTrends account, think about names from other large companies like Xerox and Apple. Pretty big companies. Yet when you head to some of the Web 2.0 sites out there, these are not official blogs/pages:
http://twitter.com/apple
http://apple.blogspot.com/
http://pownce.com/xerox/
http://www.myspace.com/xerox

While I am sure that Xerox or Apple could make a case that these accounts violate some trademark, it probably isn’t worth the effort and cost to pursue the issue in court. While some social sites discourage name squatting, harassment, etc. and may work with you to clear out accounts that violate their terms of service, not all squatters are harmful or intend to squat on your brand. If this HP account, in it’s current form, is any example, you might give some squatters the benefit of the doubt for the terms/names that they’ve registered like: “HP” which normally stands for “Hewlit Packard”.

But what would happen if some of these accounts positioned themselves as an official or real sources of information? One obviously fake blog, called “fake Steve Jobs” (Apple’s CEO) is an example where the tone of the blog is funny at times, but not too positive overall. If it didn’t say “fake”, and you weren’t paying attention too closely, could this be confused for a real blog? What about other fake blogs and fake web 2.0 accounts on micro blogging services like Twitter?

Above, an obviously fake Condoleezza Rice Twitter account.

And The Point Is?

So what’s the point in this post? There are domain squatters who pose as real sites in order to benefit from the popularity of real sites and typos. There is often a minimal cost for a domain name, web hosting costs, some small skill needed in setting up a web site, and other detractors that can serve as a small deterrent to those that would undermine your brand.

On the other hand, many of the Web 2.0 social networking sites are made for ease of use and this makes name squatting 2.0 pretty easy.

Action May Be Needed…

You may want to register names, brands, and trademarks that you own on services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Pownce, Blogger, and others to help to preemptively curb some of these potential issues. Many of these registrations are free, so there is little to no risk in registering. You might even find that it is useful to connect to your customers through these non-traditional channels in order to improve customer service.

And if you need to sell your company on using some of these services in the first place, here is a good take on some of the objections and misunderstandings that can come up: A CEO’s Perspective On SEO, SEM, SMM, PPC, and ROI. Should you find that you are using some of these services, do be obvious about it. Put links to your official memberships on prominent pages, this too will help your site’s visitors (and even your own employees) in knowing which accounts are legitimate vs. name squatting fakers. Yes, the the WebTrends account was real . Now to see where it ends up on WebTrends.com… I’m pulling for either one or both of the WebTrends Resources or contact us pages.