In perusing SEO literature (by gumbo, there’s a lot of you pecking away out there!), we like to stop and ponder a meme, phrase, or bit of jargon we encounter within the context of the SEO world. Search Engine Optimization has actually started to gain a culture now, and this is going to be the part where everybody looks back on “the golden age” fondly in 20 years.

• astroturfing – Pretending to be a regular member of the audience while secretly being paid to push an agenda for a commercial or political group. Astroturf (TM) is fake, plastic grass, and regular people supporting a group is a “grassroots” movement.
• bread crumbs – The little trail of links in a horizontal navigation setup, so uses can find their way back to the home page.
• cloaking – Showing one version of content to search engines, and a different version to visitors. Instant black death when Google finds out!
• Google bowling – An attempt to lower a website’s ranking by linking to it from dirty sites. May be an SEO urban legend.
• keyword cannibalization – What happens when a webmaster goes keyword-happy and lets the keywords eat the content, so that no one page is any more of an authority that any other.
• link condom – A measure used to prevent endorsing a bad site, such as putting ‘no follow’ tags on links submitted in the comments section.
• regional long tail – The whole “long tail” theory applied to phrases with city names or other local names in them. What, after all, has a longer tail than a place name? Even 100 years from now, somebody is going to be Googling that place for some reason.
• sandbox – Where Google supposedly puts a new website on probation until it sorts out how to rank it. Some say it’s a myth, but have you noticed your Adsense units showing public service announcements for the first 48 hours?
• sock puppet – A fake account created to ‘agree’ with the main account.
• walled garden – A self-contained website, difficult to leave once you’re in. Often a portal destination such as Yahoo.

Peter Brittain

We have to admit, we flinched a little when we read, 10 Questions for Social Media Measurement Success. We know that a lot of ecommerce marketing right now is more enthusiasm than follow-through. Most web marketers still think in terms of “just push that message out to the public and they’ll click the link – something good is bound to happen, right?”

Well, actually, no. Even big companies are discovering that social media saturation only takes you so far. For instance, in 2010, Proctor & Gamble knocked themselves out on the biggest viral marketing campaign ever with actor Isaiah Mustafa making videos in a bathroom set and posting them on YouTube. The web audience laughed, sighed, applauded… and didn’t buy a single bottle of Old Spice. Thanks for the free entertainment, P&G!

Another example is more recent, clothing retailer GAP’s logo stunt… they changed their official logo to some bland plain text, and released the announcement to the media. Then retracted it in about 48 hours. Good thing, they generated some murmurs in the web for a weekend, they didn’t have to spend a lot of money, and it was out of our faces before we knew it. But most people’s reaction was “Who cares?” Well, that’s not what you want your customer to say about your products.

Peter Brittain

Tech news sites seem a little too gleeful in reporting the media war between Facebook and Google. CNET reports that that fight got a lot dirtier when Facebook hired a PR company to spread naughty rumors about Google.

In the trade, we call this “astroturfing.” Astroturf is a fake plastic grass, from which this practice gets its name. A swelling tide of public opinion is called a grassroots movement. So astroturf, then, is a fake grassroots campaign, made to look like genuine opinion but actually it’s a paid advertisement. You have to start wondering about that comment on Slashdot, that story submitted to Digg, or that tweet from a follower recommending some product – are they really who they say they are?

In a three-part series, tech blogger Penguin Pete explains just how much of what we read online is astroturf. It’s a shocking revelation when you consider just how much business is going on out there. The next time you’re on Facebook and you have a friend there complaining about Google, consider that they just might be part of a “whisper campaign.” And don’t be naive enough to think that Google doesn’t probably do the same thing back!

Peter Brittain

Controversial as always, TechCrunch gets our attention this month by questioning the “Google-it” mentality. And we’d like to not only refute things like this, but go all the way back to Socrates and lay out our direct, irrefutable line of logical statements which leads us to this path.

Proposition One: Nobody owes you an answer.
When you have a question, you are imposing on another person to do you a favor. There is no law, nor moral obligation, for anyone else to answer your question. That’s at all, whether Google exists or not, whether you can find the answer on Google or not. Both Google and people are going out of their way to help you for free.

Proposition two: The only motivation people have to answer your question is to do something kind.
That’s it. Invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace or not, every time a human answers another human’s question for free, they are practicing altruism. It might have the secondary assumption that you’ll “pay it forward” and help other people, or the feeling of obligation that the answerer is paying it forward, or because helping the questioner helps the answerer indirectly, and so on. But all answers start with a desire to help.

Proposition three: Brain power is a scarce resource.
Try answering a series of questions from a crowd as fast as you can, such as at a press conference. And not walk away after awhile with “no comment.” You ran out of brain power, see? People who know the answers to the hardest questions are rare, and they are becoming rarer. Their time is more valuable than the time of the people asking questions.

Proposition four: Search engines were created for a reason.
And that is to fill the gap between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers. Instead of having to answer the same question twice (no question should ever have to be answered twice), you can put it online and other people can find it.

Our conclusion is “All questions should be Googled first.” Regardless. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Google it first anyway. You’d be surprised. The video called “Google fail” is a troll. “Suggest” is not the answer. And, to follow Alexia Tsotsis’ flawed logic, if “How do you think Google got all that information in the first place?” is reason to bother a human instead of Google, then it’s also a reason to call Google’s failures human failures, since Google-suggest is based on what people type in!

Sometimes you have to wonder if we should re-think this whole software design thing. A reminder of just how over-their-heads some people are occurred recently with the story that Microsoft won’t be providing IE 9 for Windows XP. That’s right, if you’re not using

Windows 7 by now, you are simply off the radar for browser upgrades.

The trouble, as all web developers know, is getting users to upgrade those browsers. Why is this always such a struggle? Older browsers are buggy, insecure, troublesome, and the hardest of all to develop for. We’ve gone for years like this, with a few hardy users getting the newest edition of everything, most of the crowd shuffling along within a year, and then there’s the die-hard long tail, bringing up the rear. They use IE7, IE6, even IE5.5, and you’ll get that old browser away from them when you pry it from their cold dead fingers. They make web designers pull out their hair.

Perhaps we have to make updates less frequent. Users of all software, be it Windows, Apple, or Linux, are familiar with software that has to be updated and patched at least a couple of times per year. But to the average user, they just don’t see the need. They buy a microwave or a DVD player, after all, which is good to use for ten years or more. What’s wrong with a web browser that they have to build a new one every six months?

We know that, but there’s a vast user wasteland out there that will never understand why.

An interesting quote at 37Signals leads to a blog post over at an investment firm answering Why We Prefer Founding CEOs. The names of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ev Williams (Twitter), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are bandied about.

If you do any kind of work in the eCommerce sector, you prick up your ears whenever you hear the names of the most successful web entrepreneurs. They’re the examples to follow. Hitch your wagon to their star and they’ll lead you to riches. But the trouble is spotting them early enough. Wouldn’t it have been great, for instance, to get in on the ground floor on Twitter? The first person on the scene can scoop up treasure with both hands that the rest of us have to hustle just to get a scrap of.

The reasons given for favoring founding CEOs boil down to the fact that they were the people with the original vision and passion, and know their company and their business in the most comprehensive way. But the fact is that all the good ideas are not at all taken – you probably have ten or so sitting around waiting their turn. It’s just that the time has to be right for each idea to reach its maximum potential. And knowing that time, and being there right when it happens, is the stuff that ecommerce legends are made of.

The World Wide Web is absolutely riddled with forgotten, abandoned search engines that seemed like great ideas on paper and performed like a dead skunk in reality. But what about an “answer engine?” That’s what Wolfram Alpha claims to be. We’re kind of surprised to see Wolfram Alpha still pulling blog news, like this announcement on Read/Write Web. This is about how you can embed a fun little Wolfram Alpha widget on your site.

Really, an answer engine does sound like it’d be handy. Like talking to the HAL 9000, right? You ask a question and it answers. But reviews around the web at first ran to something like, well, this AskReaMaor guy really put it through its paces. Continue reading →

One of the problems with the web is that people can’t reach right through the monitor and punch each other in the nose. If they could, web fights would be over with in five minutes. Since that’s not the case, flame wars go on and on and on… most of them are still fighting each other right now, posting reply #345,712 to a thread that nobody else has cared about for years.

Naturally while running a web business, you want to try to avoid stirring up a fight. But how do you know what’s going to start a fight? Obvious hot buttons like politics and religion are easy, but here we’re going to present a list of some of the more notorious web wars to give you an idea of just how touchy your audience can be. And if you disagree with any of these, please don’t threaten to drive by our office and throw bricks through the windows, OK? Friends? Continue reading →

It only looks to involve the US and UK/EU at this point, but the broad plans of ACTA, the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, look like they could eventually become a de-facto standard for the whole wide world of e-commerce.

TechDirt is digging up shovels full of information on ACTA. The agreement is set up to protect against the boom in global media piracy, but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to solve this problem without trampling on multiple human rights at the same time.

That’s why the organizations Consumers International, EDRi, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASIC (a French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute have all banded together to protest the agreement and voice their concerns, or at least put on the breaks until cooler heads can have a look at this.

On Australian turf, the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Library and Information Association, Choice (a non-profit consumer advocate), and the Internet Industry Association have formed a coalition stating much the same thing. In a package, reducing counterfeiting is important where it endangers consumer health or safety or constitutes commercial scale infringement is a good thing; but we shouldn’t have to roll heads to do it.