Google May Discount Infographic Links in Future ! Ridiculous

Last week in an interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts mentioned that Google might discount Infographic links in future. To quote Matt, “if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.”

As a justification for this probable move he cited a few reasons :

“What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it’s based on is simply wrong, then it’s misleading people.”

He also mentioned, “people don’t always realize what they are linking to when they reprint these infographics. Often the link goes to a completely unrelated site, and one that they don’t mean to endorse.”

So to summarize, three reasons why Google might be discounting infographics links in future are :
Infographics could be far off topic in relation to what the business is dealing with
The fact represented in the infographics is really poor - resulting in misleading info
People don’t realize what they are linking to when they republish an inforgraphics

And for these Google might discount all infographic links. Really ?? Are you kidding me? It is completely ridiculous and it seems Google is increasingly getting the God complex.
Google has always mentioned about creating extraordinary content that people would love to link to and now when people have identified a definitve form of such content they want to discount those links.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the points mentioned above..

1. Off topic Infographics : Yes, this could definitely be  a valid reason to discount the links. If we are dealing with SEO and publish an infographics on the most influential political leaders of the world, there is every reason and justification for Google to devalue any link that the site gets through it and they also have the capability to judge this contextual relevancy of the graphics to the overall theme of the website.
2. Poor Research Data : How is Google going to determine the quality of the research data ? In an infographics all research data are graphically represented and while Google might have really advanced their capability to read and understand image, I don’t believe it is anywhere close to interpreting graphically represented research data. The only option is manual verification - that is not a scalable and feasible process given the volume of infographics published and also, two different reputable sources could have two different value for same data point, what if Google looks at a source other than the one you used for infographics ? Does that make your depreciate the data quality of your infographics ?
   
   
3. People don’t realize what they are linking to why republishing infographics :  Really ? Webmaster’s and content editors are that foolish ? Someone who maintains a good quality website ( because that is already a prerequisite for the link to be valuable) would definitely be wise enough to know and check what they are linking to. For a second, let’s accept that webmasters are foolish enough to link to a website without checking it. In such case whose responsibility is that ? When I am linking to a website from my site in whatever form, it is my responsibility to check what I am linking to, if I am linking to something wrong / irrelevant / unethical that should go against me and not the site I am linking to. So in this case, if at all Google has to take any action they should take it against the re-publishing website and not the site that created the infographics.

I have worked on several infographics for different projects and website and know for sure an infographics with this data or poor graphics would never succeed ( yes, we tried that too and learnt from the mistake).

How infographics get links ?

Let’s look at how infographics get their links. Once you create an infographic, the first thing that you do it is publish on the social media channels and as it starts getting shared, it catches the attention of bloggers who start republishing. Now the prerequisite here is the infographic getting “shared” and that only happens when it is of certain quality and actually provides some interesting/ useful information for the readers. So if the content isn’t of good quality it wont get shared, neither would it get substantial number of links. And when people have endorsed the infographics through social sharing ( and consequentially by linking) - why does Google have a problem with it  ?

Of course there are other ways to get links for infographics, like mailing to bloggers directly, doing press release etc but even there anyone who republishes an infographics would definitely spend a couple of moments to evaluate the quality of it and when Google’s discounting these links seems like a sheer disrespect towards people’s judgement. This is an unbelievable arrogance resulting from Google’s monopoly in the search space.

Is Google Socially Blind ?

Search engines today are increasingly relying on social data and in this case social data could be one of the key indicators of the quality of the infographics. Should we / Do we have to believe that Google doesn’t have access or capability to judge the social response to a page ? and when they see a major positive reaction, isn’t that enough to tell them about the quality of the content ?

The Embed Code Issue 

Google can definitely have some problem with the embed codes that are provided with infographics, as that proactively suggests the link and poses an opportunity for the publishing site to get the same anchor text link. However, with Penguin in place it should not be a tough job for Google to work out the anchor text bit. But if there is no embed code provided there will be a ton of people copying and republishing infographics without crediting the original source - what happens then ? We have seen Google crediting authority websites when they republish some great content that was originally created by some lesser known sites and while most reputed bloggers do provide necessary citation to source, I have encountered two cases where two extremely reputed authority sites have published our infographics without any credits ( they did add a link to us, only after we requested them to mention us as the source). For one of those infograpics Google still ranks that authority site above our site even though the original site has received enough links and social mentions. In this situation, can a business investing in creating a good infographics really afford not to use an embed code ?

I look at providing embed code as an initiative to make the content more linkable. If you are creating a good content that you know people are going to love and link to, what is wrong with making it a little easier for them ?

I can understand if they decide to discount links coming from infographics directories as any one can get a link from those but saying that they might discount links that an infographic receives sounds ridiculous. This is as good as saying that we may devalue the organic links that you have earned by creating some awesome content that loads of people loved, linked to and shared.

This is one of those frustrating moments when I really wish that we had a strong competitor from Google that would make them think twice before contemplating such ridiculous steps.

Seo Latest Update 9th of Nov (Friday )

A few weeks ago, Rand spoke on the death of Link Building. While the idea of content marketing is a powerful idea, it's not the only way to win at inbound marketing.

Rand spoke briefly at Distilled's SearchLove conference on content marketing and ways to earn your customers. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, he elaborates on his talk with some tips for staying competitive without needing to invest in content.

Video Transcription

"Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to our first ever beardless version of Whiteboard Friday. I know it feels like I'm naked. I'm very embarrassed here. I shaved it off for a Halloween costume and also as part of November where we will be growing some moustaches in the SEOmoz offices. So I hope you don't mind my plain face, but that being said, I do want to address something that we talked about a few weeks back in Whiteboard Friday.

So we did a Whiteboard Friday about the future of link building and how link earning was going to replace link building. I think that was actually a very important concept, something I definitely believe in. But one of the things that I saw, especially heavily in the comments, in the tweets, in the email replies to me was this idea from SEO folks and from folks who practice web marketing of all kinds that this seems almost a little unfair that the only way to do SEO in the modern era is to be a great content marketer, that I have to create great content, put it in front of people who will link to it and share it, and that's my only path for SEO?

No, that's not the only path. It's a very powerful path, a very popular path. I expect to see a ton of it, and it's going to be hard to compete against the folks who are good at it. But it's not the only path.

So I've got my Luke Skywalker up here. I want to be good at web marketing, but I don't want to invest in content. Then I hope you don't mind I drew a little orange Yoda. I probably should have done it in green, but other ways there are. That was a terrible Yoda. That's all right. We'll get over it. We'll get through this Whiteboard Friday together.

So let's talk about what some of these are, and there's not a ton of different paths, but there are a few. So number one: Relationships, reputation, and word of mouth.

There is Washington Partners here is Seattle, commercial real estate brokers. They are used by almost all the startups, including SEOmoz. Their web presence is not great. They don't create a lot of content. In fact, they create almost no content. They don't have blogs. They don't really have Twitter accounts. They're not investing in social media marketing. They're not doing any of the things that you might classically associate with being great at SEO.

But they are ranking well, and they get almost everyone's business because they have great word of mouth. Whenever I talk about Clay Nielsen, who is one of the guys there, I rave about him. I've got a recommendation for him on my website. Whenever I talk to startups who are looking for space, I always mention those guys. They are number one and they are great. They'll take us around and drive us places, and they'll show us stuff. Whatever we want, whatever we like, they'll invest the time and energy. They'll give us the straight dope on places. They'll say, "Well, this is a good spot, but the landlord is not great here. We have worked with them before on other properties." Because of that they develop a fantastic reputation, fantastic word of mouth and tons of links.

If you look at their backlink profile, it is all people recommending them authentically. It's not because of content. It's because they do great work and they have great word of mouth.

Number two: Phenomenal advertising. You can see this from a lot of the big sort of offline brands who do great advertising online and offline, and because of that they earn a lot of awareness and attention. Think of a big insurance company, think of big sports brands or consumer brands, even electronic brands. They're not necessarily investing very heavily in content. Some of them are, some of them aren't. But what they've turned into their content is their advertising, and that includes things like banners, it includes video, it includes classic things like billboards.

The ones who are creative and inventive with those ads, the ones who get awareness and attention, the ones who have a million people who watch their advertising video on YouTube, those are the ones who are winning quite well, and they earn things like links and attention, awareness and traffic. Because they can monetize it at a good rate, they're able to have success on the web without necessarily needing to invest in content and SEO kinds of things.

Number three: Inherently viral products and services. Let me give you my favorite example of this is SurveyMonkey, because SurveyMonkey, the first time that you use it is almost always because someone sent you a survey link. They sent you a link to a survey, and it says, "Powered by SurveyMonkey. Want to create your own survey?"

Now they happen to rank very well because they've been around a long time, but they don't do a lot of content marketing. They don't invest in a ton of SEO kinds of things. They have an inherently viral product. Anyone who has been surveyed is likely to say, "Oh, yeah, maybe I want to run a survey. I'll go back to SurveyMonkey."

Think about the growth of things like a Pinterest or an Etsy or anything that's got a platform where repeated use and sharing is part of the platform. Those inherently viral products and services tend to do very well without having to invest in content themselves.

Number four: Community building and engagement. I see multiple brands doing this quite well. They essentially don't produce a ton of content on their own site, but they do one of two things. They either invest in their community on and off their own site. So meaning through social, through Facebook and Twitter, through LinkedIn, through Quora, through forums, through blogs, they participate heavily in those other places, Hacker News all these kinds of places, and/or they actually have an engagement platform on their own site, a community of their own, where they are not really creating the content. They're just a user generated content platform.

So a great example of this might be a Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange, they don't create a lot of stuff themselves. It's all created by their users, and then they occasionally participate. The moderators, the creators will participate in those communities.

Because of this they build up a lot of content that's not self-created, and they get a lot of engagement from their community, which means they're getting lots of links, they rank very well all these kinds of things. GitHub is another great example of a platform where these things happen.

If you're thinking that, hey maybe content is not the path that I can take, or it's the only path that Google has left available, not necessarily. I want you to ask, What are your strengths? What are your strengths from a marketing perspective, from a product perspective from a services perspective? What are you and your business uniquely good at? What do you love to do? Do you love writing blogs? Do you love participating on Twitter? Do you love commenting of forums? No? Choose another path. Do you love getting together with people in person and giving them a great customer service experience? That's a perfectly legitimate way to go.

What are you able and allowed to do? For many folks there are restrictions and requirements around certain industries, or there are restrictions and requirements created by their management, their boss, their team. So you need to account for those and then ask, "What are my competitors failing to execute on? Where are they not investing?"

It could be very well be, that in the world of SEO, in the world of content marketing, there are a lot of people saturating the space in content, but not in these other areas. Maybe those are places where you can invest and you can win, and it might not necessarily be through the classic, "I've got good links with good anchor text pointing to my pages and so I rank number one." It could be in many other ways.

Remember that the picture of marketing on the web is not just search and it's not just social and it's not just content. It's all of these things, and a lot of these can input and provide great, great return on investment if you're willing to invest in them.

All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care."

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/content-is-not-the-only-way-whiteboard-friday

Promote Own Website Like A Brand

Branding at the individual, small or even medium level is a difficult endeavor. However, there are little excuses for inadequacies these days as Google makes it more difficult to rank with content marketing that isn’t “brand friendly” – that is, tactics that are one-off gray or black hat link building techniques.

Today, we must function as brands, and the reality is that although we imagine companies like Kellogg’s and SeaWorld as the behemoths of brand marketing – companies with lackluster websites but still the ability to generate links eight times quicker than us – we are very capable of reflecting a similar identity online due to benefits of miniature scale we can create for ourselves through the proper marketing channels that brands often experience and build on offline.

Link Building with Momentum in Mind

We’ve left behind the term “link building” and must instead focus on identities like “link development” through content marketing. If we build our businesses and link development competencies with the idea that we must build scale, we’ll be a lot more successful with our efforts because we will develop competencies.
What does this mean?

No more one off guest posting for links. Yes I am guest posting here, but I am doing so with the intention of building authority and referrals, and actually, the link matters little to me because I don’t do much SEO for my own blog. Hopefully some of you follow my blog or follow me on Twitter, which will create an audience that will multiply my future efforts online.

If I simply blog for a link, that effort is reduced. If you want to create scale (as you should), you’ll do similar. Yes, the link is valuable, and you should aim for a combinatory effect with your guest posting, but your sole intention should never be the link itself. In the new world of content marketing, it’s no longer a valid excuse.

Creating A Snowball Promotion Strategy

Many brands have the benefit of content that serves itself, and only need to release it into the wild to see the benefits it can create online. Us small peons don’t, right? Well, the reality is that we do. We can’t ever be Kellogg’s or SeaWorld, but we can have the “publish” button that sites like SEOmoz enjoy – when thousands of eyeballs view their content all at once.

This comes from deliberate, long practice of developing audience through mechanisms like guest posting in the target markets our audience operates in. Constantly releasing great content online and then creating introductory “sticky” promotion elements will create the brand mechanisms others enjoy. What are these introductory sticky elements?

• Twitter accounts – getting potential customers to follow us
• Facebook accounts – getting potential customers to like us
• YouTube accounts – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
• RSS feeds – getting potential customers to subscribe to us
• E-mail marketing – getting potential customers to subscribe to us

I say “introductory” because these allow you to remarket to your consumers for free – and are a few steps to the secondary, more powerful sticky element, SEO. If we guest post or do PPC advertising, if we never capture audience intent through one or more of these sticky elements, we lose the potential to scale, because our cost per acquisition continually rises.

This creates a negative brand efficiency if they do not, as customers, follow/like/subscribe to content they enjoy – as such an engagement is an introductory buy-in to your brand identity.

So this means your job, as a marketer, is not to initially think about how you might get thousands of sales, but how you will create the snowball promotion effect every time you release something online. Because if you do not generate that snowball, even if you create a viral sale effect, it will eventually become nothing.

Brands have that snowball effect – which is why every Apple event is covered and talked about once one word is leaked out – and why Six Flags can immediately touch thousands of eyeballs on their brand when a press release is opened up. They built it, but they had it bad compared us – they didn’t have the benefit of online, free promotion mechanisms to do it. They had to do it through high cost per acquisition activities like billboard, display and television advertising.

Build the brand snowball by:

• Leveraging the maximum amount calls to action to social accounts on your sidebar, after blog posts, and occasionally, within blog posts, without appearing spammy
• Most often releasing content to interested markets asymmetrical to your own, such that they might have interest in future relevant content of yours
• Promoting content through all social channels relevant to your own and not to channels where there isn’t much application (such as Pinterest for Daily Blog Tips)
• Creating memorable and brand-identifiable social accounts that are easy to type in, easy to find, and match the company sales mission across all available properties

Creating A Brand Effect in SERP Results

As you build those accounts, you will begin to effect a real change in the search results, depending on your vertical. For example, SEOmoz, a now established “brand” in SEO, has the benefit not just of ranking well that being a brand provides, but also getting a higher clickthrough rate because of it.
It is likely a higher clickthrough rate is a positive signal to Google to actually rank you higher, which then gets you even more clicks – and more links, and so it goes. But that’s not where it stops to create a “snowball effect”. Obviously, hopefully you’ve now established some search result rankings, and some sales. From here, build on that efficiency and “snowball effect” by multiplying effort.
Do this by:

• Signing up customers immediately for e-mail newsletters such that they can serve as content promoters even if they can no longer be upsold
• Immediately leverage a secondary call to action such as “follow us on Twitter/like us on Facebook!” after they’ve completed a conversion event
• Creating content that is good enough to be talked about through word of mouth, bringing new customers back to your website to then be pulled into future promotion efforts through social and email campaigns
• Using rel=author where applicable to create brand identity/quick identification when potential customers use your services online

Hopefully posts like this can help push you to start creating your own mini-brand online. SEO isn’t dead, but I believe winning a competitive vertical by sustaining a business on one-off linking strategies truly is.

Best Tools For Link Building

es! Link building activities and reaching out to web masters for driving new links back to your website can be done easily. There are various great tools that can make the process of link building much easier and much faster for you!

so here I am going to present few tools which can help you to take your link building campaigns to the next level :

•  Majestic SEO: This is a website browser that makes you to see the sites which are linking to your competitor’s pages. It helps you in beating your competitors in the SERPs and in identifying new opportunities to build links to your own site. This tool offers a free report for any site which is under your control and this tool can be useful in ensuring link sources which are already linking back to your website. You just need to upgrade to the paid version to access on the full spectrum of data.

• Open Site Explorer: This tool offers similar features as majestic SEO. Through this tool you would be able to get slightly more information with this program’s free version. You just have to enter your competitors’ websites and then you have to pay attention on their linking domains, anchor test and inbound links. These all will help you informing about your own link building strategy and by updating to the paid version you can even include data on your social shares across twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

 

• Raven Tools: This tool is not cheap as it starts at $99/month but you will definitely get the worth of your expense. This tool allows you to research on the accessible link partners and this will automatically help you in grabbing the webmaster contact information and sending a standard link request message. It is quite easy to navigate.

•  Ahrefs: This tool provides an unprecedented amount of information about a site’s inbound links which consist of each link’s ALR ratings. This tool helps you to easily manage link prospects and it ensures that partners with whom you’re contacting will be beneficial for your site.

•  Link Research Tool: This plan starts at $199/month which is not cheap but yes this tool’s unique programming makes you certain about whether you should concentrate more on branding links or on SEOs. This tool is quite helpful in competing with competitors and analyzing why he has lost rank with in the SERPs.

• SEOMOz PRO : Its not just about link building but it’s a complete SEO management program that facilitates in many activates like on- site optimization practices, social media marketing and link building techniques which you can buy only in $99/month.

• MozBar: This is free tool. It runs on Firefox and chrome extension that displays loads of valuable link prospecting information with in your browser window, like it highlights internal and external links and no-follow v/s follow links that allows you to see which links and keywords are targeting by your competitors.

• Ontolo: It offers comprehensive suite of link research tools for a monthly fee of $97/month like raven and link research tools. This program offers few innovative features like automated link prospecting and enhanced competitors link profiling. It’s a great option for saving your time.

• Market Samurai: This tool is more useful in keyword research but it contains few modules that can be useful for link building activities. Its ‘find content’ module  helps you in tracking down article directories, blogs and other web resources which provides potential link building opportunities and it comes in $149 that is one time investment.

• Tout: This tool helps you in email management which allows automatically extracting contact information from websites and creating new emails and then copy in template message texts with just a single click.

• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: It’s actually a micro – hiring program completes a number of tasks. Through this tool it becomes possible to automate the process of link building.

• Buzz Stream: This tool offers a comprehensive link management system which includes prospect relationship management, back link tracking and focus on link research. It comes in $30/month. This is a great option for the beginners.