Technology, Web Design, SEM, SMM, & Conversion……Ramblings
Be patient with this flash video. It’s big b/c I wanted everyone to be able to read the text on the screen. This is pretty cut/dry – we found a couple of cloaked redirects on Trulia’s site. It looks like they’re doing it simply to pump the PR of specific pages, and to get some good sitewide one-way links.
Sorry for the slow load & lack of narrative on the last one. The video can still be found here (but be patient with it.) Here’s a pictorial of what’s going on:
#1 – Go to www.seattleweekly.com
#2 – Click on Classifieds > Real Estate For Sale
#3 – It takes you to Trulia’s Seattle Weekly Partner Page http://seattleweekly.trulia.com/WA/Seattle
#4 – Using the user agent switcher for FF, change your user agent to Googlebot
#5 – Refresh the page. It now reloads as the page Trulia optimizes for (currently #3 for “Seattle Real Estate) www.trulia.com/WA/Seattle
What are the implications of this? Basically that Trulia isn’t playing it as clean as their PR guys would tell you. They’re intentionally screwing their partners (they’re doing this to Parade, as well) out of links back, and they’re picking up some nice one-way sitewides as a result. The results they’re getting probably aren’t worth the risk of a cloaked 301, but they’re sure doing it. Oh…they’re also doing a pretty stupid, easily detectable cloak.
First they throw up the “technical difficulties” page, and now they’re showing a 404. With how much money/minute those guys make, somebody’s getting fired!
I swear, I’m not just using this blog to brag. I don’t have that much stuff to brag about. Nevertheless, I was really happy to check for and see that my buddy hit #1 for Austin welder. He’s getting business out of it, and there’s not a better Austin welder, or a nicer guy that deserves the biz. Regardless, it’s not that competitive of a term, but it’s definitely helping my boy stack the cheddar!
We pushed the “Oklahoma Celebrities” piece on wintrest.com on March 10. It went ridonculous viral. The April 29th PR update shows this page at a PR6. Wintrest.com itself is under 6 months old, and the index now shows a PR4.
Good SMM pushes is powerful stuff, meng!
So I spent some time upgrading all of my plug-ins last week. I don’t know why. I was bored, it seemed like I should do this periodically, and…I don’t know. Upgrading WP & the plug-ins is really my only beef with WordPress. You upgrade, and then a week later, it’s time to upgrade something (that works perfectly fine) again.
But anyways…Subscribe-to-Comments is one of my favorite plug-ins. There’s nothing like it to help keep the conversation flowing. I love to enable the “leave subscribe button checked by default” option – they place the subscribe checkbox below the comment box, and it’s easy to miss. So pretty much all of your commentators end up subscribing, and if it pisses them off, it’s easy to unsubscribe.
Until the latest upgrade!!! They just removed that option so that now you can’t enable the “leave subscribe button checked by default.” It’s not there anymore. And that really grinds my gears.
When I’m chumming for links w/ SMM, I typically like to say “shoot for digg, settle for stumble, pick up the scraps w/ mixx.” Well…I’m spending a LOT of time this week working on my propeller account. I’ve never picked up any significant traffic from mixx, but I still think it’s solid tool to use to cross promote.
So…I’ve been trying to figure out other sites to use to promote material. Disco emailed me yesterday to let me know that a particular piece would do well on reddit & propeller. From my experience, reddit can definitely drive traffic -a couple of pieces got 30k+ visitors when they went hot naturally.
However, I don’t like reddit. IMO, the branding is too poor to ever gain a wide audience, and it lacks the tools necessary to promote a piece – namely, sharing with friends. So, reddit traffic = good. Reddit functionality = bad.
I do like propeller, but I haven’t promoted there much. The audience seems to be more mature than digg, and there are proper categories for a lot of pieces that I wouldn’t be able to submit on digg. The functionality is good – you can add friends & shout to them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can “select all” so shouting will become a chore with a massive friends list (edit – you can shout to 5 friends at a time…huge pain in the ass – will probably code a solution.) Also, I couldn’t find a way to integrate the vote count with your site (someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) But it looks like the biggest plus will be the traffic. I checked out the alexa results for reddit, mixx, & propeller, and it looks like prop comes in a close second to reddit (which I know can drive 30k+ visitors.)
So…I’m signing off to start working on my prop account. I’ll push a couple of stories, and report back w/ some traffic counts!
We’ve been running a ton of digg campaigns, and using the Ajaxonomy Bury Recorder on all of them. In theory, it’s great. Using the digg spy feed, it watches for buries, and tells you how many buries a particular post has. Great in theory. We’ve been using it to watch different submissions and were shocked to find that many of our submissions were yanked from upcoming w/ zero buries according to ajaxonomy.
So…Ken Smith & I have been pretty pissed about the whole “digg nazi” deal. Then Ken decided we needed to run a test on the credibility of ajaxonomy. Bottom line – it doesn’t work.
We picked 5 random stories that had gone hot (not popular) so that we knew they had some exposure. We put them all on the bury recorder, and then we both buried them for specific reasons (spam, duplicate, general.) Between the 2 of us, we had 10 total buries to watch for. One was recorded by ajaxonomy – one. So, according to this test, ajaxonomy is sitting at ~10% accuracy.
So I’ve been really enjoying the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest. I’ve met some new people online, and there have been some fantastic analyses of different link building techniques.
Greg Boser took the controversial approach, and is sitting pretty at #3. He did this in the (much more competitive) Dave Pasternack contest last year, and the technique worked really well for him. Greg says he’s not competing, but I think he can’t keep himself from making sure the on-site is right for his GREAITW page, and the people he’s friends with definitely know how to make sure the anchor text linking back to him is on point. I’m sure that, if he really wanted to win, he’d hit up some 301′s right before the contest ends, and take home the gold. If he does that, I wonder what he’ll do with the REW prize?
Matt Cutts wrote a great post about linkbaiting a couple of years ago that still rings true today. He talks about the controversial angle a couple of times. At the beginning, he states:
“You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it though).”
The contestant from Seattle is sitting @ number 2 right now, using a technique I’d like to call “trolling with stinkbait.” Ardell commands a decent sized audience, and they love to say, “me too!” She started off with a post bashing the contest for offering up what she considered to be a “bogus prize.” This got her more than few links…she found a perceived weakness, and it got people talking.
The contest sponsor (Morgan) saw Ardell’s take, and remedied the perceived problem she highlighted. So Ardell threw a few more lines into the water. Blog commenting, she blasted SEOs as people who “game the system” with one hand, and had friends encourage others to link to her with specific anchor text with the other. She talked more smack in blog comments & blogs, and went 100% negative while failing to offer any constructive criticism.
“You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it though).”