Selling domain names, black hat SEO vs. white hat SEO, and Sphinn itself were the topics that drew the most comments over the past week on our sister site, Sphinn.com. YouTube embedding, e-mail marketing, and Yelp were among the most popular stories among Twitter users.
With a lot more content being published on Sphinn’s home page, we’re going to try a few new ideas for these weekly recaps. The stories below are broken down by most comments and most tweets so you can see which stories attracted the most reactions from users. The rest of the stories that were published follow those two sections.
Here’s this week’s recap of hot stories on Sphinn.
Most Comments
- New Sphinn, One Week Later: Your Thoughts? – It's been eight days since the new Sphinn launched. Our mission hasn't changed: to publish the best online marketing content possible. When we made the switch, I asked our readers to give us 2-3 weeks to see how we're doing. But we'd love some early feedback now, even if it is a bit premature.
- White Hats: You Can't Win, So Go Black Hat – While I think Search Engine Watch knew this was link-baitish in running it, writer Gary-Adam Shannon seems pretty serious that it's all over for white hats and black hat is the way to go. OK, what do you all think. Is he right?
- How to Sell a Domain Name – Excellent advice from the Domain King.
Most Tweeted
- Everything You Wanted To Know About YouTube Embed Codes – How do you turn off auto-play when embedding a YouTube video? Make it start at a particular point. The answer to this and other controls are covered here.
- How to become an email marketing genius: The Simmer – A simple case study showing what makes a great email marketing newsletter. I love this line from Andy Sernovitz: "Change your goal from get them to buy to get them to read forever."
- Why the Professional Restaurant Critic Will Survive the Age of Yelp – An interesting piece by a professional food critic who says you can't trust Yelp, only 0.5% of Yelp users don't have an agenda, and the reviews are filled with "the gushers, the haters, the incoherent, and endless exclamation points." Those of us in the marketing industry know the power of user reviews and Yelp in general. Here's an opposing viewpoint.
- How is Google Indexing More Search Results? – Nice in depth look at Google's display of more single-domain results in the SERPs from Rhea Drysdale at Outspoken Media – and the factors that may contribute to how and what type of results are shown.
- Google's Most Trusted SEOs Lash Out Over The "May Day Monster" – In their very own webmaster forum, Google has offered clear advice on how to reverse the impact of a site hit by the May Day update. That advice doesn't always seem to work. Those webmasters and SEOs who Google values so much, the forum's "top contributors," are fighting with each other over this topic. Some feel the need to protect Google, while some feel the need to protect the webmasters who have tried everything but are still failing.
- Excellent Analytics Tip: Make Love To Your Direct Traffic – Avinash Kaushik says "Make love? Direct Traffic? Really? I am not kidding. Direct traffic contains visitors that proactively seek you out, everyone else you have to 'beg' to show up on your site!" and provides excellent solutions on handling / tracking direct traffic.
- Twitter To Start Selling Followers – It was bound to happen, they have to make money some how right? "Advertisers will be allowed to purchase placement in lists of "who to follow" recommendations targeted to users with particular interests on Twitter"……
- Google URI Shortener Opened To The Public; Comparing To Bit.ly & Twitter – Everything you need/want to know about Goo.gl. Whether you like URI shorteners or not, they're reality. Now that Google chimes in, watch out for movements.
- Google's Seven Display Ad Predictions – "What will display advertising look like by 2015? At the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX Conference…advertising execs got a taste this week of the future of display advertising from Neal Mohan, vice president of product management at Google, and Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms at Google"
- Social Networking Users are Creating Less Content – A new study from Forrester Research has found a decline in the number of content creators across social networking sites, even while general use and participation on these sites has risen. The group of users classified as "Creators" – those who record videos, post blog entries, write reviews and post comments to articles online – are less active this year than they were in 2009, with shrinking percentages of users in the majority of markets studied. In the U.S., for example ,the Creators category dropped from 24% to 23%.
- How To Trigger Geotargeted Ads in the Google Ad Preview Tool When Using a Custom Shape – Google’s Ad Preview Tool has a hard time understanding when to show your ads when you utilize custom shapes (when you use the default state and city options in the Ad Preview Tool). Subsequently, search marketers (or clients) might think that their ads simply aren’t showing. But they actually are…
Hot On Sphinn: September 27 to October 3, 2010
- The curious case of a Facebook fake: How sham online profiles fooled American spies and British soldiers alike – A security researcher has infiltrated the highest levels of America's intelligence agencies using nothing more than Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and a picture of a pretty woman.
- Christine Churchill shares Keyword Research and PPC Best Practices – In this interview, Christine Churchill of Keyrelevance shares some of keyword research best practices on how to use different keyword tools to compile your keyword list. Also, some great tips on structuring PPC account for increasing you quality score.
- How You Can Build Your Own Mini Demand Media – This article by Joel Ohman outlines how you can build your own "mini Demand Media system" and become "more efficient when publishing high quality content".
- Rumor? Facebook and Skype Readying Deep Integration Partnership – Kara Swisher from AllThingsDigital reports: According to sources close to the situation, Facebook and Skype are poised to announce a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect. The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.
- 36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore – Google alerts have been the reputation monitoring rage for years now….However, Google alerts alone are far from a complete picture of what’s going on out there. This post offers a guerrilla list of RSS feeds, perfect for reputation monitoring, can be used to mine alerts from major sites including YouTube, Google, Facebook & Twitter.
- Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers – The results of a study conducted by researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have revealed that a significant number of popular Android applications transmit private user data to advertising networks without explicitly asking or informing the user.
- How to Tailor Your Ads to a Consumer’s Mindset – Interesting research from Yahoo's advertising group surfaces what types of messages ads should be delivering during specific phases of user actions and behaviors on web sites.
- 9 Ways To Build A Twitter Community With Substance – Finally! This is the article I'll be sharing with clients to make sure they grow a Twitter following the right way, without focusing on useless milestones and wondering if they should beg, borrow, and steal to gain followers.
- Why and when Google might be showing just four results – At first I thought it was an idiotic test. Then I decided it was genius. Google worked out from the multiple similar searches I had performed that I was struggling to find the right search term. In response, it showed me a shorter version of the results page – so that it would load faster. This, in turn, means I would eventually find the right search term more quickly.
- New Study Shows Online Product Research Up 15% – Pew Research published a new study showing 58% of Americans perform online research of products and services before buying, up from 49% in 2004. Demographic report included as well as statistics on who's leaving reviews and comments.
- We Need Better Filters for a "Tsunami of News" and the "Information Bubble" – The news media has changed, people no longer rely on the 6:00 news to bring them up to date, we live in a 24/7 news cycle where things change and are shared via social media channels instantly. However this leads to two new problems the Tsunami of News and living in an Information Bubble
- Will EverCookie kill the affiliate market? – Do you know what an “EverCookie” is? If you are in the affiliate market, as affiliate or merchant or network, you should really know about EverCookie! An EverCookie is simply put a cookie that can’t be deleted – a true permanent cookie. I am sure you can see the problem.
- The Short Lifespan of A Tweet – Some really good charts & info here about tweeting. From the page: After analyzing over 1.2 billion tweets, the Sysomos team found that only 29% of tweets actually produce a reaction – that is, a reply or a retweet.
- Will Foursquare Survive? – Is the buzz around Foursquare starting to die? Interesting point of view on how Foursquare was the rage but now seems to be dying off. Is the cost of losing your anonymity worth the half price day old muffin you receive by becoming Mayor?
- Why Google Shouldn't Clean Up Search – "An open, nasty but honest web is better than Google sanitising search, argues article author Nicole Kobie, It’s clearly a fine balance, but is it really up to Google to manage the web for us? Amit Singhal responds: "Blocking sites isn't always as clear cut as racis"….
- Multiple Domains vs Subdomains vs Folders in SEO – Usually the most important decisions in SEO are the ones that affect the structure of the website. A popular SEO debate is if we should use multiple domains, sub-domains or folders when we have multilanguage websites or various main categories/activities. In this article, we’ll discuss when it is advisable to use the aforementioned methods and we’ll analyze how each method affects the SEO campaign.
- Link Building The Philanthropic Way – Are there ways to use charitable campaigns to build links? Annabel Hodges writes an amusing and factual piece at ways a company can use it's philanthropic endeavors to build awareness and links.
- Advanced Delicious.com Search Operators – This is a really great list/explanation of how to get the most out of delicious.com's search engine. I think you'll want to bookmark it for future reference.
- Why and How to Hide a WordPress Blog's Affiliate Links from Search Engines – Google will always say they won't penalize you for affiliate links per se, but for thin content around it. I can make this into a long story, but let's make it short: there's very good reasons for me and several other highly respected SEO's and affiliates around the world to think otherwise. Let me show you how to hide them.
- A scalable approach to track mentions at Twitter – This article titled "BBC – Research and Development: What makes Zeitgeist tick" describes how the BBC tracks mentions at Twitter. It's a pretty technical in-depth description of a scalable system architecture, that could be used for way more analytics than just counting links to pages on BBC servers.
- Link-Dealer: My Interview With Jay Young – One of the most vocal advocates of "paid links" from the beginning offers his perspective on the state of link acquisition today.
- So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 2: Analysis Redefined – Joanna Lord offers some advanced Google Analytics tips and she focuses not just on the tools but the perception needed to see statistical anomalies and act upon them.
- Ad Sense, The Book From 1901 – Barry found a book named "Ad sense: devoted to the interests of buyers of advertising". The book was published in 1901 and it was digitized by the New York Public Library in January of this year.
- Advertiser Confusion Led to Shutdown of Facebook Conversion Tracking Tool – When FB closed a private beta of a conversion tracking tool earlier this month that would have allowed advertisers to see whether users actually visited their website or made purchases later on, it raised questions about the effectiveness of FB's ads.
- Link Brokers Can Rule the Internet – Food for thoughts: How can SEO Agencies scale? Seemingly, the act is impossible – you have one of two plights that mean your eventual downfall when broaching a certain point of growth. Until the SEO agencies overtake link broking.
- End of the Road for Xmarks (and a telling look at their search challenges) – It is sad to see Xmarks go – they are sending out a 3 month notice to users.However what is relevant to a Sphinn audience in this in-depth article are all the experiements they did with search queries for different types of data, and what worked with bookmarking data.You could extrapolate that to suggest that similar data would be useful to Google in a similar way from their own bookmarking features, and likewise Delicious for Yahoo.
- 23 Ways To Slam-Dunk Your Mobile Conversions For The Holidays – People already start feeling having a Mobile Version of their Website, Brian Klais General Manager and Vice President of Product Management at Covario nailed some important issues on Mobile Conversions.
- How to Pitch A Tech Blogger – Mark McLeod Hendrickson's experience as both a tech writer (for TechCrunch, ~1.5 years) and internet startup entrepreneur has enabled to see things from both sides of the table, particularly when it comes to PR for newly founded startups. In this article he provides info on pitching to tech bloggers that he's learned through the years.
- Silos, Architecture, and Linking…Oh My! – Stoney deGeyter describes how to create the perfect site architecture for a large site that works well for users and search engines alike.
- The 10 Painfully Honest Reasons I Visited Your Blog And Refused To Comment! – Ever wonder why your articles receive so few comments? In this article, a professional blogger finally explains why he does not comment on YOUR blog. Read it at your own risk: It is brutally honest!
- Domain Parks Hijacking Previously Hacked Sites? – Domain Parks using frame busting scripts are now hijacking domains they were previously hacked with iframe injector scripts.
- Hey Google, I've Blogged a Little Since 2005! – Bill Slawski highlights a bug in Google Snippets, and offers some advice on why it potentially is happening.
- Google's Chrome Browser Inflated Google Analytics Data & Who Knows What Else – Google has announced having fixed a bug in Google Chrome which at a minimum inflated Google Analytics traffic data. What isn't clear is why the news was relased on a Friday evening, 2 days after the fix. Nor is it clear if the problem was limited to JavaScript used by Google Analytics.. this seems unlikly. More questions have been raised than answered.
- How To Become Famous on YouTube – It is not quite clear as to when it became possible to have a legitimate career as a “YouTuber”, but it is a fact. Understanding that the “YouTuber” is the Brand is the very first step! Learning how to shoot and edit video is the second.
This is the latest in a weekly look at the stories that were “hot” on Sphinn in the past week. We’ll post these recaps every week.
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