When you create a new profile on twitter, and the account is banned, twitter’s system does not remove it from the following count of others. So if you were to create thousands of fake profiles, and follow people could artificially inflate their follower counts without having to go through the trouble of finding real friends.

So why would you want to profile the thousands of fake friends … to get real friends that’s why…

When people getting a new follower email alert they look several things, here are some of the most popular:

• Do I know the person or company?
• Does this person talked to people I know or like?
• Does this person talk about information or subject matters that I’m interested in?
• How many other people are following this person?

It’s the last one that you’re hoping to take advantage of. News bots on twitter have huge followings, and the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic. If you are creating a news bot and you wanted people to follow or feel was a trustworthy profile, having a profile with thousands of followers would be a good first step.

Twitter and lots of other social media sites simply aren’t prepared for adversarial usage. Spammers were used to dealing with services like Google have very sophisticated techniques, and grow more sophisticated every year. For new social media sites that aren’t prepared for adversarial users, this is a problem. In fact I’ve written about this before (see Spammers Google’s Defensive Line).

Twitter needs to take a more active role in managing and supervising their community. They need to understand that the social space is going to have all the social problems that plague forums, message boards, and social bookmarking sites. Trolls, spammers and malcontent personalities always go where the traffic is. They need to devote time and resources to these problems, if they hope to keep a vibrant and growing community that isn’t overrun if they hope to survive for the long term.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Blackhat Method for Increasing Your Twitter Followers

The PDF is printed in a serif font (fonts with little thingys hanging off them) at the end. This is a carryover from print days when newspapers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal used them. However they are really bad for usability/readability on the web. For web based material you are much better off using a clean sans-serif font like Arial or Verdana. Think I’m being a baby take a look at the screen shots below and tell me which you find more readable.

#1) serif font in a PDF
#2) sans serif font in a PDF
#3) PDF converted to a web page in instapaper with user selected sans serif font

IMHO #1 is unreadable. Maybe for an email or single page but at 150+ pages, never going to happen. #2 is better and I could power through it. However #3 which removes the content from the context and lets the user choose the font size and style has the highest usability.

I don’t know that the authors ever considered I’d be reading it on a iPhone, but as smart phones become more ubiquitous it’s going to happen. Maybe I want to read a chapter while I’m waiting for my kids in karate class, or maybe other people will take their blackberry into the bathroom to read, or maybe someone will want to read the PDF they bought on a plane to a conference. The takeaway here is make it easy to consume your content, consider things like formatting, and font selection, allow some fexibility or wiggle room when you sell or distribute your product.

epilogue:
for people who want to convert things here’s how, use foxit to save your PDF as a text file, import it into your document editor of choice (I use google docs). Save it as a PDF or export it as an HTML. Upload the file and use Instapaper to pull it in, make sure you pull it in locally on your device then delete it.

Is taking someone’s copyrighted document and publishing it a copyright violation, technically, I’m sure it is. Putting it up temporariliy on a secret URL feeding it to instapaper and then pulling it down, IMHO follows the spirit of the law, but not the letter. I didn’t give it to anyone I just converted the it to a preferred format. Giving it away to other people IS breaking the law, and just bad mojo.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Why Font Selection and Usability Matter on Your Product

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Danny Sullivan Naughty or Nice for Christmas

“How To Be Creative In 4 Steps”

Ever pay attention to the affiliate network ads that pervade the blogs-on-blogging-and-marketing blogosphere? If you have, then you know that they’re all interchangeable. Every network promises you “better payouts and unique offers.”

The web is awash in generics, and so is the economy. Everyone understands the concept of a “unique value proposition” - because generic writing has repeated it ad nauseam - yet only a tiny minority apply it. One of the ironies of this is that a slew of images depicting a single red character amongst acres of grey characters have found their way onto innumerable blogs. A picture representing standing out has become generic.

That’s the problem I’d like to help you solve. How can you be creative amongst a ruckusof people trying to stand out? How can you sing in the din of the falling raindrops?

Source: Archaeoastronomy Ancient Science

First, you’ll need to do research to get inspired. You’re looking to discover and identify problems.

As it concerns blogging, your research begins by finding out what others in your field are writing about.

Start by identifying who the thought leaders are in your niche and go catalog their categories. Excel will probably come in handy if you want to do this thoroughly, though an informal approach is just fine too.

What you’re looking for mostly is overlap in topics. The more others have covered it, the less you should consider it as a viable topic to address, because you’ll have to work harder to say something new/original, and even then you’ll only stand out marginally.

Next, go through these leaders’ category archives and read as much as you can. This will both teach you a lot in a very short amount of time, as well as give you an idea of what particular subjects within a broad category have been covered.

If you’re pressed for time, you can copy-paste the titles in the archives into an excel file. Then, make note of what keywords or ideas repeat the most often and you’ll have a fair idea of where their focus is.

As a kid in grade school, I recall asking the other kids what topic they were going to write about amongst the list our teacher had given us. It wasn’t that their choices were particularly fascinating for the insights they gave on the neurochemical functioning of their brains (we’d already done neurochemistry in grade 3), but rather just a way of making sure I picked one of those options that few others were doing.

As it concerns businesspeople outside of blogging, you need to start by looking at your competitor’s products and catalog their features and benefits. This information should be readily available from their website and other marketing materials like brochures.

If you create a product-comparison chart, this will help you visualize things and better understand what you’re up against. Similarly to blogging, look for the overlap in features.

In the soda world, Jones Soda came along and changed the game. They saw competitors whose marketing style was “Big Ad Agency Generic” and decided to incorporate their customers’ pictures on their labels. They saw flavours that could not be differentiated (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnzJQ6ZsZSQ) and came up with flavours that fit better in a pack of Jelly Bellies than in a soda vending machine. Which is fortunate for them, since they didn’t go the usual route in distributing their soda but rather started by bringing it to skater parks, tattoo parlours and other non-mainstream places.

This brings me to the next aspect of research: finding pockets of customer dissatisfaction.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but the one I’d like to highlight is searching. If you know what keywords to use, search engines can share a wealth of consumer complaints. In effect, these sites are business plans waiting to happen.

That previous paragraph has a few keywords you can try out, like “dissatisfaction.” Better yet, use variants that people are more likely to use in describing their own experiences, like “I’m dissatisfied with my bank.”

More commonly used synonyms and expressions of frustration are likely to work even better. Searching for “I hate AOL” returned this result : http://forums.techguy.org/reviews/251607-why-you-hate-aol.html
“XYZ sucks” is another popular format, speaking from personal experience as someone who’s ranked #1 for “Google sucks.” Some other keywords of interest are complaint, rip-off, frustration and anything you can think of that expresses these ideas.

A tip to make this very current for the blogosphere and help you discover memes as they develop is to follow Twitter’s hot keywords, in the footer of its search.twitter.com subdomain.

For example, as I was writing this post, Motrin released some ads that offended some mothers by suggesting they were fashion victims – literally. The ads said that they were hurting themselves to carry their babies in stylish slings. If you wanted, you could run ads for your own brand of pain-relief as the mom-respectful brand. This is what my friend Susan Gunelius of Key Splash Creative would refer to as oppositional branding or differentiation.

What I’m describing here is the practice of footprinting. In short, it describes the practice of analyzing similar websites to identify common phrases they use, which don’t necessarily describe their content.

Have a look at My 3 Cents for an example of one such review site that could be helpful. Looking it over, the phrase “write a review” stands out as something that they’re likely trying to rank for, and which other review sites would also feature information on. Rating sites are going after the same game…

Analyzing The Data To Identify The Problem

Finding and understanding problems is step 1, researching the principles to solve the problem is step 2. That’s a good start.

Now, you need to analyze the data. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

a) What assumption underlies the competition’s way of doing things?

A complaint I read about some bank’s crummy customer service had a life-long customer asking them to let him off for his first ever late fee, an accident.

That bank assumed a number of things. First, the customer should call customer service to clarify problems. That’s a pretty reactive attitude. Perhaps calling customers to see if things are OK when they’re late on a payment would be a non-abrasive way of getting money repaid quickly while maintaining friendly relations.

Second, the Bank assumed that the customer acted irresponsibly. In a court of law, they could make the point that he should have checked the online bill he’d opted into. In the court of free-market economics, the customer is always right and that bank just lost a client.

Third, the bank assumed that punishing late payment was more effective than rewarding timely payment. Over the years this customer had paid promptly, was he ever rewarded for it?

Fourth, the bank assumed that such a late fee would not encourage the customer to leave for another bank. Oops.

b) Why does the current market have the features it has? If the reason is “that’s how it’s been since the 1920s,” then you’re onto an opportunity. If the reason is that the barriers to entry require a 10-person corporate legal team, move on. Another way to phrase this is: What has changed in the market since our competitors’ products first developed?

And from UC Davis’ critical thinking page:

1. What is the purpose, goal, or point?
2. What is the problem or issue being solved or described?
3. On what data or evidence is the decision / definition / problem based?
4. What inferences are being made from what kind of data, and are these inferences legitimate?
5. What is the solution, outcome, or resolution of the problem or issue?
6. What are the short-term and long-term implications of the solution / consquences of the outcome?
7. What are the biases or assumptions behind the inferences, selection or collection of data, or framing of the problem / experiment?
8. What are the basic concepts or terms being used? How do these definitions affect the framing / understanding of the problem?
9. What point of view is being expressed? What political / ideological / paradigmatic considerations inform or govern or limit point of view?
10. How would someone from a related but different discipline look at the problem / solution / issue, and could an interdisciplinary approach improve the analysis / discussion / evaluation?

What Are The Rules In This Area?

Source: George Bannister

Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to figure out what rule to apply to the problem. Generally speaking, this means you’ll have to learn about what others have done and the lessons – the core principles – they’ve derived from their experience. I’m talking about studying using case studies.

You’ve addressed this in part by finding out how others in your niche have answered the problem you’re considering. Now it’s time to go beyond that and look for more obviously formatted case studies or self-help business books. The following resources (plus your favourite library and bookstore) can get you started:

Business ethics case studies
Many categories of case studies
Free business case studies
Case studies at Case Place
Acadia Case studies
Case studies hub with links to several resources
Asian Case Studies
http://blogsearch.google.ca/blogsearch?q=business+case+studies.

Personally, I also recommend the following books for helping you think better and become a better problem solver:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (adaptation of 7 Habits of Highly Effective Adults – it’s easier to read and shares the same lessons).
The 4 Hour Workweek

Let’s make up an example to illustrate. Competitive research on dissatisfaction reveals that in the niche you’re considering, the potential competition often pay suppliers late. Your reading on business helps you identify the problem as a cash-flow issue. At that point, you can either rely on cash-flow management principles you’ve learnt from past reading, or research the area now.

How The Rules Apply

It’s up to you, really, so long as it solves the problems you found and thus differentiates you from the competition.

I’d love to hear your reactions and thoughts on this in the comments!

Gab Goldenberg writes a search marketing blog and has plenty of good reasons for you to add his SEO blog’s RSS feed to your reader. He’s hoping to launch Original Monetization, a platform for offering webmasters new tools to make money, soon.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Singing In The Rain

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

New Ad Format For Image Search

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

James Surowiecki on How Social Media Became the News

Allow me to make an analogy to prove my point … imagine all of your friends told you about this great restaurant in town, where they serve the most amazing steak dinner … eventually you decide to visit for dinner one night …

YOU: Yes I’d like the steak dinner special … cooked medium well please
Waiter: Excellent choice … and can I tell you we’ve made it better … it now comes with a side order of live cobra heart!
YOU: excuse me what did you say was the side dish?
Waiter: A live cobra heart sir … you know it’s a rare delicacy in many countries.
YOU: … umm you know I’m not sure I’d like that … can I have some mashed potatoes or green beans instead?
Waiter: No sir I’m afraid not our chefs are very well trained and they’ve decided this is what makes the meal better, so no substitutions.
YOU: … aaaa ok then … you know what lets just skip the side dish, I’ll just have the steak by itself, all of my friends tell me it’s really the best in town.
Waiter: I’m sorry sir if you want the steak you HAVE to have the cobra heart on your dish, there are simply no exceptions …

So now you have the choice do you want the steak dish so much that you are willing to go through having a live cobra heart on the same plate. Sure you can try and remove it and put it in your napkin, or relocate it to your bread plate, but there’s no avoiding that there will be a live beating cobra heart when the waiter brings your plate to the table.

What does this have to do with Google’s search wiki? Well much like the unaccommodating waiter, Google forgot to give you a way to opt out of the search wiki project. Log into any of the google account services like Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, Google reader, Google Calender, Webmaster Central or Google Analytics and there is the search wiki, just like that still pulsating purplish cobra heart. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it or don’t want it Google engineers and executives have decided they know what’s best for you.

Am I exaggerating for dramatic effect, maybe slightly … but how about something without a flair for the sensational, how about something that is truly offensive, like porn URL’s shown where children could see them …

Ok most kids under 10 won’t be looking for Techcrunch, but that’s just an example of what could go wrong, once the spammers turn the botnets loose, how long do you think it will be before they start invading Hannah Montana or Jonas Brothers listings?

Why would children be logged into google services in the first place? I’m teaching my kids how to use online calenders to enter family events so they are shared. So the very real possibility now exists that google’s bad idea will introduce porn onto the family computer, and since there is no opt out, my options are limited, get rid of google services or pray they don’t ever click anything. Dear google please excuse me if I’m not thrilled or thankful that you introduced this problem into my life.

To be honest there are other options, for one I could install a greasemonkey Stylish script that will hide all of search wiki. For me that’s kind of like walking around with sunglasses indoors because the maintenance guy put extra bright light bulbs in your office, it’s a band-aid solution that masks the real problem.

Google has a dominant lead in the search market, in some sectors it approaches near monopolistic levels. The fact that google is unchallenged by its closest rivals gives them some breathing room to have the bad combination of ego and recklessness, and have no fear of repercussions.

Google has history of forcing UI changes on people and not giving them a way to opt out. Previously personalized search was only available to logged in users who hadn’t opted out of the service. Then Google made the decision to serve personalized search to everyone logged in or not. Now the only way out is to use the &PWS=0 parameter on all of your searches. If you use firefox you can use the mycroft unpersonalized SERP plugin. This is all well and good for SEO’s and computer geeks but man on the street … sorry pal you’re SOL, google is giving you the shaft like it or not.

Is this just another example of typical graywolf google bashing … nope Danny Sullivan noted the omission of an off switch, as did Michael Arrington of techcrunch. Of course most techno blogging fan boys fell in line, like the sheep they are praising it as cool or innovative. Except when it mysteriously went AWOL for a few hours Saturday night, then people were a little more honest.

So what’s the right thing to do here? Figure out how long it will take to get an opt out solution in place, if it’s more than a few days, pull the project till they can get their ducks in row. It’s better to admit you made a mistake and have a little egg on your face while you fix it, than to walk around like an arrogant pompous ass in denial that you did anything wrong. People know the difference …

Next Google can stop pushing out changes that don’t have an off switch. If they want everyone else to follow the “do what’s best for users” mantra they should follow their own advice, instead of just paying it lip service. Lead by setting an example, not by preaching from the pulpit.

Post Script:

So what’s with the beating cobra heart reference, where did it come from, and did I make it up just to be sensational? No actually it is a rare and prized delicacy in some parts of the world. I learned about it watching the quintessential New Yorker Tony Bourdain, on the Travel Channel program No Reservations. Tony visits India Vietnam and orders a cobra heart. The wait staff kills the cobra right in front of him cuts out the heart and serves it still beating in a dish for him to eat. Watch if you dare.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Google Search Wiki - Like Forcing You To Eat The Heart of a Live Cobra

Is this a product you should use, ultimately that depends on your end goals and risk tolerance. The program is in direct conflict with Google’s policy on buying/selling links in a way that allow pagerank to pass. So there is some risk if on both ends of that transaction. However for competitive phrases and unpaletable subjects getting links is an extremely difficult task. So if you want to rank getting links that pass juice is the quickest and easiest way to do it, and buying advertising links shortens that time frame.

IMHO the key to buying links is using them over the short term 6-9 months, to jump start your rankings while you swing your PR machine into full gear, shaking hands  and kissing babies. Google has a top down preference for brands and the more you work normal PR and advertising tactics to reach that goal the better you are. Use viral marketing and linkbait to start securing links over time. As you start to acquire natural links, revisit your links buys and slowly start phasing them out (ultra competitive and non mainstream topics have different rules).

My position on paid link advertising well known and at this point I don’t have anything to add that hasn’t already been said. The most important thing I learned from Pubcon this year was stop wasting time on drama, so comments on this post will be closed. No it’s not some crazy backwards logic technique or reverse psychology .. really … if you want to participate in the paid links debate here are a few places you can go …

InLinks - TextLinkAds 2.0
Insidious New SEO Ad Product Will Be Hard For Google To Detect
InLinks.com - TLA Launches In Links, an Inline Link Buying Program
Does Google REALLY Want To Go Down This FTC Route

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

New Link Advertising Program InLinks.com from Text Link Ads

While everyone is fawning over Google for releasing a useful app (yahoo and microsoft should take notice), the part that everyone is missing is, this is all part of larger strategy to get people more comfortable with mobile and voice searches. Once google has achieved that goal, be prepared for more mobile advertising.

Here’s an interesting test observation, this a search for the term [weddings] a result I knew would have adwords ads:

Here’s the exact same search done using the iPhone google voice search

Two differences stick out, first the mobile search got universal search results (wedding thriller dance videos) and is completely missing the ads that were in the desktop/laptop search. Wait didn’t I say that voice search was all about showing MORE ads? Google is taking a long term approach here (something many webmasters could learn from), when you introduce a new service, you want to get the highest adoption rate possible, that usually means leaving off the ads. Use the history function to go back and repeat your search or type your search term, and viola’ the ads return. You can tell a voice search from the little green box at the top, which is present in the above screen shot but not the following one

The voice search application is very cool and very useful, and google has done a really good job with it. However people need to understand it’s part of a larger strategy to increase the amount of ads being shown and the revenue google will generate from it. With the number of smart phones in use across the United States this represent a very lucrative step for google.

Lastly if you’re looking for ways to get more out of your iPhone voice app check out 9 tips for the Google Mobile App for iPhone, it’s pretty helpful, and a nice example of linkbait.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Google iPhone Voice Search - It’s All About the Ads

As someone whose been to more than few conferences, the obvious question is, is there still value in going to a conference, and for me the answer is absolutely yes. Shawn Rorick the Director of Search Marketing for Cirque du Soleil, gave the opening keynote and spoke about the convergance of new media and old media, and how a website is part of an overall marketing strategy. It’s a concept he called Halo Media

taking a holistic marketing approach is something I’ve been trying to teach my clients, but halo media does a better job of simplifying the concept in a name. You can see all of Shawn’s presentation here

Something that was hard to miss at this years Pubcon was social media. I like that social media is now considered part of SEO (or maybe seo’s annoying little brother), but I dont think it’s going away even after the “shiny new toy” aspect wears off. I didn’t get to go to as many sessions as I wanted but I did read most of the recaps from SEORountable, We Build Pages, and Bruce Clay blog. As a sidenote I find the debate about live blogging kind of interesting. As a conference promoter I could see how you might view live blogging as a bad thing, but as a conference attendee or non conference atendee, if you think live blogging is any substitution for attending a conference you’re kidding yourself. Live blogging is good for sessions you couldn’t attend because of scheduling conflicts, but not for missing a show entirely. Being able to pull up a chair and talk with Greg about some ideas I have is a good thing. Getting to sit down and talk with Cesar Serna and talk about some plugin development is a good thing. Getting suckered by Vanessa into fixing her wordpress theme is good thing (at least that’s what she told me ).

Going to Pubcon and going to conferences in general isn’t just about what you get in the sessions. It may seem like it’s fun getting to go to great parties like the search bash thrown by Webmaster Radio and Microsoft. But what it’s really about is connecting with friends, building relationships and trust.

The two most important things that I  get out of every conference are new ideas and inspiration. When Lee Odden asked me to speak at Blog World, I found the inspiration to get off my butt and make the ViralConversations.com go from idea to reality. Meeting Sugarrae at 6:30 in the morning (because we were both still on east coast time) to play Pai Gow and then go to breakfast was the kick in the butt needed to get a neglected project back on track.

Going to a conference isn’t about what you learn, it’s about what you do with the knowledge and experiences when you get back.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant.

Las Vegas Pubcon 2008 Wrap Up