AJ Kohn

Thanks Victor. What started as a simple investigation of the connection of Panda (site quality) to rich snippets turned into a whole lot more. 

I think Google's still working on the rich snippets algorithm and we'll likely see more changes soon. But more importantly, the connection to the Knowledge Panel and the long-term opportunities there are really intriguing. 

I'm sure many will be irked that it's a markup to play scenario but ... that's the way it goes and I want my clients to be in the Knowledge Panels of the future.

Tumblr and Pinterest are both excellent places to drive traffic IMO, particularly the latter. But that's a whole different conversation about channel diversification, which is critical to a good marketing effort.

Tumblr is a different animal and you're really talking about links then. We could talk about how search engines might classify those links in another setting. But you can find external links from G+ that are followed these days? 

The two links you reference are linked in my post. So I get it. Those studies show correlation between search and social. My post is explaining why that correlation exists.

There are easier ways to identify topical authority than on a Author, Query, CTR basis. There's another link in my post that covers topical authority identification. I mean, you'd have to track the Author, the Query (which aren't uniform) and match that to a topic and then determine the relative CTR from a benchmark. Google's powerful but ... 

Now are there other social actions that people take that can be used? Sure. There's the sharing, commenting and 'liking' which is a descending scale of engagement of sorts. You can look at the speed of sharing, who's sharing (not so much from an Authorship standpoint but are they the same people each time), how far does that content travel in social, what's the sentiment of comments on that content etc. etc. 

But none of those are used right now either. There's clearly a desire to do so and Google now has a set of data they trust (Google+) but it's simply messy.

I'm not sure what the other side of this argument is exactly as you define it? Are you saying they'd use personalized search CTR to recalibrate non-personalized search? This doesn't seem to scale. 

Authorship? We're still far away from Authorship being used as a signal. Until there's enough coverage (i.e. - Neil deGrasse Tyson would need to be a recognized author) then it can't be used. But as the Knowledge Graph grows and more people are added and Google gets better at extracting them from documents and queries - then we might see the value of Authorship.

Traffic from Facebook? So ... are you saying that Google is monitoring analytics to determine channel share and using that to change rank? Again, there's a coverage issue as well as a scaling issue that makes this a non-starter in my view.

What task do you dislike the most but continue to do because it works? (None is an appropriate answer but I'm hoping there's something that is distasteful or uncomfortable but ... delivers results.)

How do you manage your growing number of employees? I don't enjoy people management myself so I always find it interesting to check in with folks who do manage a large number folks to get their perspective on it. 

No doubt that it can be frustrating and sometimes you run into those 'cliques' that seem to be unshakeable. 

So there are a few options here. First is to find those places where that doesn't happen. When I sought to build my brand I did a bunch of that. I didn't target a lot of massive community sites but specific individual blogs for people I thought were smart. So, sometimes you just have to pick your spots.

The other one is to know that while the creator and their cronies might be ignoring you there are other creators who hang out in those comments. And one of those people might wind up interacting with you or simply using something you said in a comment on their own content. So sometimes it doesn't matter that the creator is a clique-whore.

Finally, sometimes you just need to have a comment, an opinion or an insight that people can't ignore. That's not something you can easily quantify or replicate but when it happens you can bust through that veneer.

But no doubt about it, this is one of the reasons why blog commenting has withered, it's fraught with frustration.

Just an FYI, Russ Jones jumped in on the comments with another excellent example.

Jokes aside, it is worth pointing out that I was first mentioned in Moz because of a blog comment back in 2006, which Rand noted in his article&

http://moz.com/blog/russ-jones-of-virante-on-search-engines-consent

p.s. id like to point out that Russ went about being found by SEOmoz in a very clever way that illustrates the value of blog comments. I noted that earlier today, he left comments in two posts on the site, where EGOL clicked on his username and found his profile (note to members  update your profiles!) and website. When EGOL found the entry interesting, he pointed it my way. For all you link builders who think commenting on blogs is just spam, think again  a smart comment can mean a clickthrough from your exact target.

It was and still is a great way to get noticed

2006! Great stuff.

Thanks Brady. And I'm a huge fan of Rogers Diffusion of Innovations and have used it several times on Blind Five Year Old.

Are innovators and early adopters creators? Not all of them but if you had a Venn Diagram of those groups the overlap would be substantial. No doubt about it. 

I think it's important to think about the comments you make because attention is a habit. And if the habit others have in seeing your comments is to pass on them based on their lack of 'meat' then you have less of a chance of connecting with them in the future - even when there is 'meat' there. 

As in most things, it's quality over quantity. Though having both together doesn't hurt :)

I'd actually guess that a TON more people lurk here at Inbound than comment. And commenting here would be part of the 9%. Still important for sure and many of those are also 1%ers. But it's the content flowing into Inbound that is from creators. 

Yeah, I don't love the debate myself but I wanted to simply show how and why I still sell SEO. 

The post has been in draft form since July of 2013 and it's only after SMX West that I felt the desire to dust it off and publish it. I honestly don't care what term you use. In fact, I'm sure there are smart marketing folks who use other terms to do other things. In fact, I can think of one advantage 'growth hacking' has over the other terms. 

In the end, it's ... marketing (both the internal and external stuff) and that's what the industry is grappling with overall. 

Of course it's not the new SEO. But if you're not doing KGO then you're falling behind as an SEO.

No.

They fixed a product that had been broken for a very long time IMO. The link is, in my mind, attribution. The fact that no one has created a way to easily use photos with attribution was a long-standing product problem.

Because using that image means you found value in it. You're taking a  content asset and using it. You're an evangelizer for Getty. They're just making it easier for you to show that you are with the embed link. 

In the end, it will be Google not the web that has to change their views on how portable content (embeds) are used to determine authority. 

Also, FWIW, remember that Google is DoubleClick and the DoubleClick cookie is pretty ubiquitous. So merging search behavior and website 'behavior' via the DoubleClick cookie gives Google a pretty decent view of click behavior, particularly since everything is passed with a date stamp. This is the reason why Google Analytics data isn't used (among other reasons). They have a far bigger piece of the picture than any one site.

I've had a few pieces that discuss this including http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/time-to-long-click and http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/short-clicks-versus-long-clicks. There are some links to research and other documents in those pieces (if I recall correctly.)

There's no doubt in my mind that there are user satisfaction heuristics that play a part of Google's search algorithm. 

Thanks Brian! Too many just don't do enough. It takes a lot of effort and many are just allergic to work.

Thanks Vinny. And you're right, not many folks are doing both and even when they are they aren't often relying on user centric syntax and intent. 

Done the right way you can get a significant boost during the social life span of a new piece of content that then helps it rank well long-term from a search perspective. Of course, you might need to alter the title and so forth between these two stages to take full advantage and that, frankly, takes a lot of work.

1. White rhymes with Shite.

3. So you get a bunch of people to spread the word about this content and then they don't win and then they're still sort of endorsing the site about the Maldives or travel. They haven't endorsed anything really except self-interest. Been there done that in eCommerce - sign-up to get this coupon. Guess what, the vast majority of that list becomes dead wood and you spend more time chasing low margin customers than optimizing high value ones. 

TL;DR - it might be white but it doesn't make it a good tactic.

1. Black

2. Unlike a paywall, the act of sharing is an endorsement to others not an exchange of value between creator and user. Forced endorsements aren't really endorsements but only signals of engagement of a sort, which may or may not reflect true sentiment. So not only do you get very lame evangelism (Tweet and delete) but you dirty your own ability to measure true evangelism.