Biznology

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For content marketers, the rules for what you can and cannot share are pretty murky, but there are some guidelines that should keep you out of trouble. SEO Book’s recent piece, How To Prevent Content Value Gouging, isn’t strictly about content marketing – the focus is, not surprisingly, more on SEO – but there are a lot of analogies to content marketing, particularly when we talk about some of the low-hanging fruit of content marketing – aggregating content, reposting content, and commenting on other people’s content. (Like I’m doing now …) I’ll begin, though, by saying that I’m not a lawyer – I don’t even play one on TV – so any discussion of copyright is in lay terms, not meant as legal advise and is more of an observation about common online custom than the actual legal implications of any particular practice.

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Photo credit: Wikipedia

I am old enough to remember the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. At the end of his life, there were endless reports of his courageous fight to remain alive. When, inevitably  he did pass away, Saturday Night Live aired a news story about Francisco Franco’s'”valiant fight to remain dead.” I am getting to the point where I think we need to do the story on SEO’s valiant fight to remain dead.  I’ve been doing SEO for a long time, and I have grown weary of the “SEO is dead” stories. We’re experiencing another round now and it is still wrong. SEO is not dead. What’s dead is dumb SEO. And you could have seen it coming. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Last week, I wrote Maximize your SEO benefit on Google+ in 8 simple steps before Google opened up G+ Brand Pages, so first go read what I wrote in the previous post  (because all of the advice still applies). Not everyone thinks G+ for Business is all that exciting, including other folks on this blog (I’m looking at you Mike and Frank!), but even they agree that staking out your claim to your business or brand page is a good thing. Read the remainder of this entry »

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I know that every month you bounce between the “SEO is dead” posts and the “SEO is changing forever” posts. But I don’t write many of those. This time, SEO really is changing in a fundamental way, because the Panda update has changed, and is continuing to change the search ranking algorithm in the biggest way since PageRank. If you want to see how machine learning is turning SEO on its ear, check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “Google’s Panda ranking algorithm changes SEO forever.”

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Coincidentally or not, after I covered the topic of Q & A services in my last Biznology post, I’ve heard complaints from three different acquaintances about the low quality of knowledge in Yahoo! Answers, one of them mockingly calling this world where everybody is an expert “the age of disinformation.” Another friend of mine has recently complained about getting mostly useless content–with zero editorial and zero user reviews–from reputable sites whenever he Googles “<non-mainstream product> review”. Has filter failure become so prevalent that, despite all the information available to us, we are no better off than we were 20 years ago, when content was scarce, difficult to produce and difficult to access? Read the remainder of this entry »