If you tried to visit Wikipedia or Reddit on January 18th, you may have been surprised to find the sites blacked out. Additionally, you may have noticed Google with a broad black censor across its logo. These were acts of protest against the unconstitutional SOPA & PIPA bills.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its senate-based counterpart Protect IP Act (PIPA) were two bills under deliberation on Capitol Hill. The alleged goal of these bills was to prevent the theft of intellectual property (music, movies, TV shows, and other content) from unofficial websites.
However, these bills would usher in several consequences including a breakdown of Internet security and privacy, as well as government censorship. If SOPA and PIPA had gone into effect, it would allow corporations to shut down competitor websites by simply writing a letter. This violates both our first amendment rights to free speech and is on the verge of infringing many anti-trust practices.
Before the protest, SOPA and PIPA had strong support in both the house and senate, and all across the entertainment industry. It was expected these bills would pass without even the slightest hiccup. But in one week, SOPA and PIPA lost a vast majority of it’s support, all because of Internet Marketing.
How was the SOPA/PIPA protest so effective? The campaign was largely spearheaded by Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and a few other Internet giants, who didn’t just explain why we should oppose SOPA, but they asked us to do something about it. Craigslist posted a large banner ad that lead to a fact page. On this fact page there was a link to OpenCongress.org which provided you with a pre-written letter that could be sent with just a simple click of the mouse to your district’s representatives and senators to oppose the bill.
Millions of people got on board with this campaign. Eighteen senators withdrew support for PIPA and the house decided to table SOPA for now. This serves as an inspirational example to us Internet marketers, to help us reach our target audience and get our message out. By using a strong call-to-action within our marketing materials and making it as easy as possible for recipients to perform those actions, you can have an effective campaign to stop a bill in congress, or just promote your business.
Archive for the ‘Google News’ Category
How SEO Stopped SOPA & PIPA
Monday, January 23rd, 2012SEO in the Google Panda Era, Part 2
Saturday, January 7th, 2012In the last post on this subject we went over how Google Panda has changed the game of Search Engine Marketing. In this post, I’d like to provide a few strategies for overcoming the impact of Panda and achieving SEO success.
1. Reduce Your Dependence on Google altogether
If Google is your primary source for search traffic, even a minor rank change could have a huge impact on traffic and conversion. By routing your traffic through other engines and other marketing mediums, you reduce the impact any change in Google’s query results may have. “Avoid it” may seem like an obvious strategy for marketing your way around Panda, but ideally you should already be focused on other mediums anyway.
2. Use Actionable KPIs to Measure Success
A lot of SEO metrics are useless since most webmaster tools are focused on things you have no leverage over, or are only useful when used with other metrics (such as visits, page views, and average time spent on page). Bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty are all actionable metrics that you can manipulate with a little effort.
3. Build Community
Google currently uses Twitter’s feed and some info from public social media pages like Facebook to influence rankings. Rather than trying to build SEO links through your social media pages, start establishing earned press from your social media fans and supporters. Start a dialogue with your visitors and customers through Twitter, Facebook, or your own online community. Getting good media and comments from your social networks can yield great referred traffic.
It’s a great idea to place a “like” and a “re-tweet” button at the beginning and end of every blog post or article. This makes it easy for the visitor to express themselves by sharing your content with their friends.
4. Quality Evergreen Content
Even with Google Panda in force, there’s nothing that will drive traffic to your site like quality evergreen content. Even if you don’t achieve the search rankings you want, you absolutely must continue to provide the best content. Anything less will cause visitors to seek what they want and need elsewhere. Even if you’re not getting much search traffic, you can more than make up for it through social media referrals and word of mouth. Generate quality content, and searchers will find you.
SEO in the Google Panda Era, Part 1
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012Google Panda, which was released this past February, is a search ranking algorithm has changed the game of search engine marketing. Panda was aimed to rank higher-quality sites above lower-quality sites on Google. For instance, after the roll-out of Panda, CNET reported a surge in rankings of news and social networking sites, and a corresponding drop in rankings of sites containing large amounts of ads.
One of the biggest disadvantages of Google Panda over older ranking algorithms is that it weighs search results in favor of web pages with newer publication dates. This has resulted in an adverse effect on sites that rely on “evergreen” content, or content that remains valuable and relevant for a long time.
Evergreen content is crucial for the success of blogs and information-based web businesses. Not only is the content itself more valuable than most recently generated content, the value found in the comments of each post is often extremely informative and completely free to you, the owner. Over time, real experts and seasoned professionals leave evergreen comments that answer questions your traffic may be asking. But, because these comments may be months or years old, fewer searchers are finding them through Google.
Searchers are not being served by this update. When they seek information, Panda delivers newer, yet less valuable content in their search results, so they never see the in-depth evergreen information. I assume Google’s reasoning is that newer is better, and if your only goal is to stay on the cutting edge of current events, that makes sense. However, new content hasn’t had time to build that informative comment dialogue that only passionate subject matter experts can give over an extended period of time.
In the next blog post, I’ll explain some SEO tactics for the current Google Panda Era.
