This one’s been all over the SEO blogosphere this week, so you might have heard about it already, but I wanted to weigh in on this issue. It’s being reported that Google’s begun policing Googlebombs and deterring their intended results. According to statements by Matt Cutts, this change is being handled completely by an algorithm with no human intervention.

Many of you already know what “Googlebombing” is. It’s also called linkbombing. For those of you that don’t, it’s the practice of propagating links all over the internet that use very specific text in order to rank a certain page for that specific phrase. The most famous example of this is when a whole bunch of bloggers linked to President George W. Bush’s biography page on the White House website with the phrase “miserable failure”. The result of that effort was that if you searched “miserable failure”, G.W.B. came up as the first result. This example is the most visible sign that Google is doing something about bombing, as that particular search no longer works.

Cutts got even more specific saying that Google has differentiated “bombs” from legitimate SEO, defining “bombs” as link building efforts designed to rank a page that the implementers don’t actually own. The “miserable failure” incident is a prime example of this, as the people doing the linking clearly don’t own the White House website.

An article on SEOBlackHat covering the issue puts forth an interesting theory. The only real way Google can be qualifying this is by comparing the text links with the on-page content of the destination. The President’s bio page isn’t optimized at all for “miserable failure” so this could be how Google has made its determination.

However, for instance, my site has a little optimization for “Coolest guy on the planet” (And you all know how I rank for that!) Does it only take that little bit of on-page effort to legitimize these link fests? It would appear so.

It’s like Google now checks for permission from the “bombed” site before it sends that keyword traffic to it!

I have to think this also relates to my previous post about Wikipedia trying to thwart the efforts of SEO vandalism that results from some SEO “contests”. Most publicly known instances of “bombing” are just cute and clever pranks, akin to digital graffiti.

But they’re not always harmless and so I’m glad Google is addressing this now. Because as these techniques become more widespread, “bombing” is a practice that unethical SEOs could use to potentially cause financial damages to e-commerce websites, or even personal damage to individuals.

A lot of the blogs I read on the topic shiver with an alarmist tone, but the fact remains, if you’re practicing ethical, logical, organic SEO anyway, you have nothing to worry about.

Here is the original article I read on WebProBlog:
http://blogs.webpronews.com/2007/01/26/will-googlebomb-algo-affect-seo-contests/

Here is the commentary from SEOBlackHat:
http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/28/google-bomb-update/

Matt Cutts’ comments are referenced in this SearchEngineLand article as well:
http://searchengineland.com/070125-230048.php

Who doesn’t enjoy a good magic show? In the last two weeks, I met two professional magicians turned internet marketers. One of them pointed me to this link with a video that’s a spoof about David Blaine. If you like magic or David Blaine, you’ll find it hilarious. (Warning: adult language.) Click here.

Now, productivity should increase dramatically.

The other day I came across an interview between Danny Sullivan (formerly of SearchEngineWatch.com, now with SearchEngineLand.com) and Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikia. In case you didn’t know, Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia. And if you don’t know what Wikipedia is, you really should come out from under that rock occasionally (it’s really nice out here!)

What the interview is about is an ambitious new project called “Search Wikia,” where Wales and his team will apply what they’ve learned from running the world’s largest and most authoritative collaborative content site. They’ll use those lessons to build a search engine that they hope will shape into a big, bad “Google-Killer”.

The full plan hasn’t been formulated yet, and Wales admits that in already talking to the press that he might have let the cat out of the bag before they were ready to have any real public scrutiny of the project. They hope to muster the same sort of passionate human community around their new search engine as they’ve built up around Wikipedia.

In theory, it seems like a nice enough idea. Right?

Yes and no. What I really loved was that Sullivan pulls no punches when discussing what he feels are the shortcomings in Wales’ ideas. He discusses what he perceives to be Wales’ short-sightedness on the realities involved with running a world-class search site. Especially the nitty-gritty details of what actual physical hardware and funding is required to get the job done.

Sullivan does say that he’s hopeful that — even though he doubts “Search Wikia” actually put Google out of business — the community-participation aspects could certainly make some interesting changes to the search industry.

I know I’ll be watching!

The link to that article is here:
http://searchengineland.com/061229-193718.php

One more note about Wikipedia. As I was writing this up, I came across another article just this week about how Wikipedia will be re-instating the policy of making all outbound links use the “nofollow” attribute in response to widespread abuse by spammers. Normally, vandalizing Wikipedia in order to leech PageRank isn’t worth it, because a human editor will catch you.

But this past holiday season, a ton of sites had SEO Contests with prizes like info-product packages and even cash. In those cases, you have a bunch of unscrupulous SEO practitioners who want high-PR page rank and they want it fast, and they don’t care if it’s temporary. So unethical marketers would then “vandalize” Wikipedia entries with unrelated links in the hopes of catching a spider before a human editor removed the offending link.

And how do I put this….that just SUCKS!

What that means is the ton of people who have built real, informative entries about their businesses and services now have the value of that investment taken away from them. Hopefully, this measure will only be temporary, as it was the last time Wikipedia used “nofollow”. I know it’s a waste to hope that unethical marketers will knock off this kind of activity, because they aren’t likely to stop. I just hope that the people who sponsor these SEO Contests will make it less rewarding to do so and give some thought to the damage such free-for-all contests can cause in the Internet Marketing eco-system.

The link to that article is here:
http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/2007/01/wikipedia-fights-black-hat-seo-with.aspx

This is a couple of months old, but I’m guessing you’ll forgive me. I don’t have much time for video games (I have more fun writing this blog ) so news items like this take a little while to ping my radar.

Some of you may already be familiar with an online game called “Second Life”. It’s been around quite some time, but it has a few unique features that separate it from the other products in its marketplace. The main distinction feature is that the company who maintains the game also provides its users with the programming tools required to further develop and add to the game itself.

Over the course of the game’s life, this has affected the way the game is played in a number of interesting ways, not the least of which is the spontaneous creation of an economy which has a real world impact to player’s wallets!

One of the game’s players is Ailin Graef, who plays a real estate developer in the game. She buys virtual properties, develops them and sells them. She then re-invests her profits into buying and developing even larger properties. And she just finished a million dollar year! Not a million “video game dollars.” REAL dollars. I don’t mean to keep repeating it that way, but it boggles the mind. This is one MILLION actual dollars selling real estate…real estate that only exists on a server and in people’s imaginations!

Graef’s company is called Anshe Chung Studios, and they have an actual physical office in Wuhan, China. They have a workforce of 25 people and soon are expanding to 50. By following the same principles used by real world real-estate developers, she has apparently cracked the old adage about real estate wide open(buy land, because they don’t make it anymore). Apparently they’re making more online every day! With less than a $10 initial investment and less than 3 years of time, Graef has created real wealth from literally nothing but pixels and bits.

I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of things will unfold in this arena as time goes on. I have to assume that at this point, the possibilities are literally endless. Pixels, bits…and profits?!?

Here’s a link to the original article:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6162315.html

I came across a piece in E-Commerce times just before New Year’s referencing a blog post by Nicholas Carr (RoughType.com) and I thought he made a very interesting observation.

He notes the similarity of the business models of large-scale social sites like MySpace and FaceBook and the agricultural production system called “sharecropping”.

From Wikipedia:

“Sharecropping is a system of agricultural production where a landowner allows a sharecropper to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land.”

In other words, these businesses are being built on the donated labor of millions of people. Of course, the donors are happy to be given these platforms on which they can express themselves. The sites in question give free space and bandwidth for blogs, photos, videos, music and more - and add a whole culture and social layer by allowing friend lists and the like. The company that provides all these free services makes advertising revenue by selling the eyeballs of all the users of the service.

In one way, it seems like a symbiotic relationship. The ads support the free service, and the contributions of any ONE given individual have very little economic value. However, Carr points out that the uncompensated labor of millions is being used to increase the wealth of a few, we’re talking about economic exploitation.

Now, I think that’s a bit harsh, but it’s certainly a very interesting discussion. The counterpoint offered by Mike Masnick, CEO of Techdirt.com is that it’s not exploitation, because the users have a clear choice of whether to participate or not. If the users were feeling exploited, not only do they have the option to quit or go elsewhere, that would open an opportunity for another company to open a service that does NOT make its users feel exploited, and gobble up all the users leaving the offending service.

Still, Carr contends that what he coins as “web-cropping” weakens the positions held by traditional, compensated content creators - journalists, publishers, writers, photographers, etc. “Suddenly they’re competing with free labor, which is very hard to compete against,” says Carr. He talks about how having a huge amount of content created for free can create enormous wealth for the small few who capitalize on it, citing YouTube.

This 2 year old, 60-employee company is already valued at $1.65 billion dollars. Was that value based on the work put in by the owners and staff? Or was the value of the company based on the content donated to them by their ever-growing volunteer workforce?

I disagree with Carr as far as the inherent insidiousness of the business model. It’s an interesting intellectual point, but at the end of the day Masnick is right. It’s ultimately the consumer and the content-providing individuals who are in charge. If they don’t like what a website is doing, people can – and will – take their business…or their blog comments…or their videos of their dogs doing tricks, elsewhere.

The article can be found here:
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/54903.html?u=colintheriot&p=ENNSS_52f2f8da3bea7cda6d2ad15acdde1d35