Articles meant for Digg, or most other social sites for that matter, tend to do well when adhering to a particular time-honoured equation. Actually, the same equation applies to just about all web content, and - y’know what? - just about anything else in the universe. I’m as serious as I am mysterious. Alright, a clue:

How about a more realistic clue? (nothing to do with Wal*Mart)

No help? Alright alright, here’s the deal:

Success

Success is what you want. Digg success. Social success. Life success.

Success is traffic, links, branding, and excitement. This is your goal, which you achieve by messing with the other side of the equation.

Perceived Quality & Enjoyment

- This is the real content marker, defined and evaluated by the thoughts caused. How much did readers think happy thoughts? Happy thoughts (nostalgia, laughter, learning, astonishment) are key. People like thinking, and they like thinking good things. You should be generating at least 8-10 notable happy thoughts per article if you want a realistic shot at something like a Digg homepage.

- How much time and awesomeness do they think you put into it (and I really mean think)? Same basic principle applies in original pictures and videos. If something looks like it was the product of lost blood and limb, it might get more approval. In this regard, a mashup of YouTube videos had better be pretty frickin’ good if it’s going to go anywhere.

- More on the perception front - and this is especially the case with Diggers - they can be swayed by mass opinion. Dissenting voices can be heard, but it’s easy for a democratic majority to stamp out opposition, and even easier for “things to get ugly” with a negative stream of comments. The comments are part of the content, on Digg and on your site.

- Those who have tried to show Diggers their content have faced habitual harsh criticism. On this note, your content had better not smell like it was once touched by grubby marketing fingers.

- Attempts at a little humour can hurt you if you’re not funny. If you’re not pretty darn sure what you’re saying/doing/writing is hilarious, don’t bother. Not laughing is the opposite of laughing, identified earlier as a “happy thought”. On that note, if you’re indeed hilarious, but only to a particular class of folk, don’t bother. Unless the humour style is really attuned to the social media crowd you’re working within, you’re asking for trouble.

- Images. Use them. Images add value to your page as a piece of content. While you can’t easily take advantage of other peoples’ writing to improve your posts, you can take advantage of their skill in photography and illustration. And direction, production, and more, since the same goes for embedded YouTube videos (coming up in just a minute!). Get your favourite video plugin fired up and tapping the greatest untapped content reserve on the planet.

Time Taken to Enjoy

- Essentially, the content length: word count, clip length, number of photos. There are ways to bend this area, though. That’s right: you have to bend time to succeed at social media.

Not really.

What I’m trying to say is, break up your post with heading tagged subdivisions, and let users scan the content. Stay away from clever and witty headings, those attempts to lure a reader in with cryptic subtitles, unless the text that follows is still clearly summarized in the heading. If someone can enjoy your content enough with just the headings and pictures, you’ve effectively shortened your content, increasing your chances for success, without sacrificing the perception of hard work.

- Top ten lists are a great example of this scenario, and a great example of a quick to read yet potentially awesome post. Overuse of top tens by the submitting community reduces awesomeness for everyone. Oh well, can’t stop the herd, that collective behaviour that collapses civilizations and social media strategies. Buy now while supplies last!

- Shorter time is better, but remember that if the short time taken is a result of a lack of effort in the quality, the math ain’t workin’ in your favour. Basically, the equation above is the same as the equation for a good joke. A so-so joke that takes forever can be brutal, while an equally so-so joke that takes a second might result in more thumbs up. Just watch the late Mitch Hedberg, and watch how long it takes him to get to the punchline. Also note, his style lets people think as they fill in what he leaves out, making them feel smart as they laugh. Happy times.

Comedy is subtle, and sometimes delay and time manipulation can have strong effects, but the brevity rule works most of the time.

- Speaking of time taken, your site had better load properly. The site should load quickly anyway, but protecting your server during a traffic spike caused by something like a Digg home page is crucial to actually enjoying the results you worked hard to earn. Fail in this respect and what you lose in traffic and backlinks will be gained in mockery from the comments, and shame as mirrors of your content steal your visits.

- Don’t overdo the ads. No interstitial ads. None. Max 2 or 3 pages per article, and just 1 if you’re talking top ten list. Though this rule is broken and beaten, it is always done for short term pennies at the cost of long term people-with-websites-and-thus-backlinks resentment. Or, short term Digg ban. They don’t like having to click unnecessarily, and are smart enough to know when they’re being taken advantage of.

- You can save them voting time, too. Add a big juicy Digg button to the top and bottom of your post, alongside your favourite platforms if you so choose.

- If you don’t save Diggers time, they will make it for themselves. It’s smart: by trying to reduce their time, they need to enjoy it less to have the visit still worth their time. Especially at the sight of a large article, they scan diagonally across the page, and read less. At this point, any humour with any kind of subtlety risks going completely unnoticed. If your article’s too long, get ready to be criticized for not including stuff you actually included and other unjustified attacks.

- Images. Didn’t I already cover this? Not fully. If there’s any truth to a picture being worth a thousand words, then showing pictures is saving readers time. Images that express a lot of meaning are appreciated. That being said, be careful of videos that are too long, that can kill the pace of your post if you’re not careful. Be sure to deep link whenever appropriate.

Basic Usability Expectations

I’ve already gone on about how the equation is universal, but it’s really worth noting how much the principles above resemble basic usability standards. Get users to the content they want to see, and make it reasonable. Make it what they want to read, without too much text, and make the take-home points and messages clear.

Writing effective social site content isn’t easy, especially when you consider how much of the home page consists of the types of articles I’m trying to help with.

A lot of writing the right content is writing for the right platform, which will be covered later in the series. Another aspect is writing for the right category, which will be covered in the next article on Digg categories. Until then, be creative and willing to put in the time. The idea is to have content that carries itself, after all. If you don’t feel tempted to pass it to your friends, think about why, and re-think your content, getting back to basics.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Each of the first five posts addresses one main Digg success area, with the final post a recap and evaluation, with expectations, metrics, and global suggestions. The first post concerns the domain.

The basic equation is simple:
Digg homepage = tons of traffic = backlinks = more traffic.

Or, Digg homepage = tons of traffic = branding, or ad impressions, or warm feelings.

Regardless of your bottom line, there are few web targets that couldn’t be hit a little easier with a whack of visitors.

But if you’ve been using Digg for some of your social media endeavors, you might have noticed quite a few changes lately. Namely, you haven’t been hitting the homepage as often, if at all. So why is this?

Brief History (Very)

To give you a better perspective I’ll start at the beginning. Digg’s user base in the early part of its history was largely a techie, sciency crowd. A vast majority of the articles hitting the homepage were tech, science and gaming related and were only occasionally punctuated by sports, politics, and comedy articles. This trend reached its peak in 2006. Suddenly articles from categories outside of these categories were popping up on the homepage and getting there with much fewer Diggs. At this point it seemed Digg was attempting to sell out and it’s thought that changes to the algorithm were made to have the site appear to have a broad appeal and thus attract more potential buyers.

This did eventually attract users with interests outside of tech and science but with that it also attracted bloggers. Digg quickly went from being a social news site to becoming a venue for promoting blogs and websites. The homepage was often filled with spammy articles and it became a battle ground littered with negative comments. This went on for close to a year when it finally reached its saturation point in late August to mid-September of 2008. Though Digg may tweak often, it seemed a more significant change was implemented.

This change meant bloggers would find it harder and harder to get on the homepage. Only a few well known domains are having success on Digg since these changes were made.

Number Crunching

I have been taking homepage samples daily and nightly since major changes were made to the Digg algorithm in September. Approximately 1000 different domains have hit the home in the last 30 days. 410 (41%) of those that hit the homepage have done so at least twice in this 30 days period. The total number of homepages was 3861 and the top 41% (domains that have hit the homepage at least twice in the 30 day period) account for 85% of all homepages.

Maybe the scariest stats of all. Domains that have hit the home five times or more account for 90% of homepages. 100-125 stories hit the home of Digg each day, depending on which day of the week it is (less on weekends). This means only 10-15 articles from relatively new (to Digg) domains can hit the home per day. Since 30% of those are images, and 10% more are videos, this leaves just 6-8 text articles per day (for those of you with words you need to use).

What do these numbers mean? Well, they can mean a few things. If I was naive I’d think that maybe the Digg community only likes the content on these specific domains and content from lesser known domains doesn’t appeal to them, or they’re just not familiar with it yet. I mean, it is a social news site. Surely the users decide, right?

That’s a bit of a simplistic way to look at it and it sort of ignores Digg’s history of tampering with the algorithm. My current guess at a best bet involves the idea of “trusted” and “untrusted” domains. Digg might be giving articles on “trusted” domains an easier time and articles on “untrusted” domains a much harder time to get on the home. It’s worth pondering whether, on a very basic level, a more eclectic mix on the homepage would add value to the site.

The samples of the homepage were taken periodically throughout the day at varying times to get a broader selection. I searched every domain sampled in the Digg search bar to see how many times the domains had hit the homepage before. What I quickly started noticing is that a vast majority of domains (+90%) had articles hit the home at least 5 times before with an average of 386 homepages!

An average of 386 homepages per domain is rather high and perhaps not completely representative. Some of the “big boys” have well over 5000 homepages and would skew the results. I decided to take the average again but this time exclude the big name domains like YouTube.com, Wired.com, Break.com, Cracked.com, Reuters.com, NYTimes.com, Gizmodo.com, Flickr.com, Arstechnica.com, BBC.co.uk, cnn.com, Google.com, engadget.com (all of which have over 1000 homepages) and the average leveled off at 132 homepages per domain.

The results are more than a little discouraging for unhomepaged bloggers trying to crack the Digg nut. They say ‘Content is King’ but it appears the King needs a Queen and that Queen is a trusted domain.

Next week will follow with Part 2: Content, naturally. Until then, please comment!

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

As a Canadian, I’m okay with this – it’s very hard to upset me. As an SEO, I’ve always been a little perturbed to know that the American oriented Google index has, as its home, the aggrandized Google.com domain.

Yes, yes I know Al Gore’s dog Tipper invented the Internet, and that it’s as all American as apple pie (which was in fact originally imported by the Spaniards in the late 19th century - source), in fact, I probably still have an ARCnet network running somewhere in my basement, I know this stuff cold – but really, can’t Gooooooogle give America its own index? Actually, at the start of 2008, they did – they just didn’t bother to tell anyone.

Round aboot January ‘08 Google effectively changed their domestic Google.com search results (those produced when searching Google.com from inside the USA), filtering out, or down, sites they had deemed non-US centric. Simultaneously they started pushing out geo-targeted results to people who searched Google.com from other countries, like CanadEH. Almost a year later, it doesn’t look like it was a mistake (much to the chagrin of many a webmaster who lost rankings in the US), and the trend isn’t going anywhere. Google is proudly cloaking its index internationally.

So, effectively:

• Google.ca has its own, very Canadian index
• Google.com searched from within Canada has its own, kinda Canadian index
• Google.com searched from within the USA has its own (anti-Canadian?) index

What’s a boy to do when their site, which faithfully serves an international audience quite well thank you very much, gets labeled by Google as being associated with a country other than the US of A?

There are no hard and fast rules for governing which index your site is most commonly associated with, more likely (as is true with many decisions that Google makes) is the idea that a set of variables contribute to the determination, with mysterious ratings shrouded in algorithmic darkness. This problem plagues a huge number of .com sites with an intended international audience but a Canadian association. In some cases the differences between rankings at the US .com and the Canadian .com are massive.

It’s fairly easy to know if a site is associated with the Canadian Google index – if they rank better at Google.ca than .com, and rank even better for ‘pages in Canada’, you’ve got a Canuck site.

I just wanted to start a dialogue on the controllable variables which may contribute to Google’s country attribution, and what actionable items might exist for helping a Canadian (or any other foreign) company who wants to market their site to a US audience. Let’s take a look at a few of these variables:

Webmaster Central location setting

Websites that have registered with Google Webmaster Central and have verified that they own their site (by uploading a verification file to the webserver for example) have the option of associating their website with a specific location. This is a relatively new option provided by Google, and obviously should be considered a high priority task for any site in their efforts to become associated with the American Google.com index.

But it’s worth asking, is there any risk to current Google Canada rankings by setting USA as the preferred region in Webmaster Central? It’s not unreasonable to think that Google might discredit a site’s prominence in the Canadian index if they have chosen the US as their ‘region’ – since such an action spoils the idea that the company should be more relevant for Canadians than Americans. What should Google do – give a domestic bump to sites which explicitly state that they want to play on a world stage, or not?

Presumed weight: 4/5

I’d love to give this a 5/5, and it may very well be an overriding variable most of the time, but in my experience Google rarely places all of their eggs in one basket.

Location of website Hosting

If a website is hosted in a country outside of the US, Google may take this as an indication that the company holding that domain is based in the same region. This is certainly not an absolute variable, as there are indeed websites hosted in Canada that rank well in the US Google.com index.

In the past this variable seemed to play more of a prominent role – my experience with achieving rankings in a variety of European countries around 2004 was heavily related to local hosting. Once Google realized that companies choose their hosting based on price more than physical convenience, and hosting companies, quite logically, wanted to be able to advertise their offerings as being applicable and usable by companies outside their country borders, the search engineers presumably ratcheted down the weight of this variable. If, however, you do plan to market your site to a defined country, it’s certainly not a bad idea to host within its borders.

Presumed weight: 2/5

Inbound link profile from Canadian vs. American sites

One variable that Google is likely to consider important is the ‘link profile’ of the site – that is, the nature of the websites which link to the domain in question. If a significant portion of the incoming links to a website come from sites which are themselves associated with a specific region (ahh classic Google recursive reasoning), this region association is probably going to be transferred to the domain in question.

Google may indeed place a large portion of weight on this variable as it is formed relatively independent of the site content itself.

The only remedy for this is to build links from sites and pages that are associated with the desired region until a certain ratio is reached significant enough to change Google’s previous association. Google probably likes this variable because it’s all fuzzy and recursive and organic and gooey, or as I call it, FROG. Dang, I was hoping that would come out as a better acronym.

Presumed weight: 4/5

Geo-based language on the site

If a website refers to a specific region numerous times in their content, Google may logically presume that the site is geared towards an audience in that region.

If you’re always talking about Albania this Albania that, maybe your audience is Albanian.

This is way too logical to explain any further.

Presumed weight: 3/5

Canadian vs. USA physical addresses listed on site

In much the same manner as the previous point, a company proclaiming their physical presence in a region by literally listing their address on the site is providing obvious location information.

Google doesn’t really have too many variables to rely on in its efforts with regional association, and so might weight this more than a fair amount.

More than fair that is because every multi-nation oriented website is inevitably going to have an address associated with a single nation.

Presumed weight: 2/5

Google Local listing

Companies can register with Google Local – the presumed intent being to integrate the location data for companies with Google Maps, providing a separate set of results at the top of a Google results page when that company itself is searched for. Even if a company does not have a physical store-front it is possible to register the business and provide specific location information. This is perfectly reasonable, people need to find your offices even if you’re not selling out of them.

Once again this is some solid location information that Google might overvalue as indicating the indented audience of a website, when in fact all it is truly indicating is the physical location of an office. It’s a difficult one to predict the weighting of, but in my experience it appears to play more of a role than it should.

Presumed weight: 3/5

Overall the important point of issue here is Google’s conception of the relationship between a company’s operating country and their intended audience. North America would be a much more accurate description of tens of thousands of businesses in both the US and Canada, but this region setting is not an option in webmaster tools.

The same must be true of loads of countries – do chip manufacturers in Belgium not market beyond their borders? Are running shoes made in Ireland not intended for sale in the UK?

This will always be an issue that plagues Google’s efforts to serve localized results, and webmaster tools’ current offerings are a step in the right direction, but lack the versatility to effectively service a huge portion of the *world-wide* web.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

FLV files are generally much smaller than AVI and MPEG files. You sacrifice sound and video quality for the fast load time and the ability to stream it online. A number of people like to talk about the great difference between CD sound and vinyl or MP3 quality versus CD. FLV video quality compared to AVI format is much like comparing a Harley Davidson to a tricycle in terms of speed. However the fact that FLV is much more compressed it is much easier to store online and much faster to load on your computer.

I noticed something the other day while I was cleaning up my system. Every time we watch a flash movie on our computer it is saved to our temporary internet files. I was in the internet options in Internet Explorer. If you notice in the temporary internet files section there is a settings button. I clicked it and came upon a “view files” button. When I clicked that a window popped up displaying all the content I had viewed that day. It is possible to rip from the internet the flash videos you have streamed directly on to your hard drive. It is also important to note that the video must be loaded in its entirety before you can copy it onto your hard drive. This is of course not a new feature but I was unaware of it and I thought I would share it with those who are still in dark on how to rip a flash file.

step 1.

step 2.

step 3.

step 4.

step 5.

Some Important Notes:

This technique does not work on Mozilla Firefox. In Firefox there is the page info section which allows you to download content. Unfortunately I have never been able to get it to work for a file over 80 kb. Average 5 minute flv file is about 10 mb.

YouTube videos can be ripped but will appear in the flash FLV format, unable to be played by standard media players. The best way to view them would be with FLV player; a video program specifically designed to show highly compressed video files. If you do not want FLV player and would prefer to have the video in AVI or MPEG format then you should use a converter. The Opell FLV converter is the most streamlined non-shareware application for the job. Opell is easy to use and rather quick when it comes to converting files.

Once a file has been converted you can edit in any movie making application you have but remember if you are trying to post copyrighted material, be careful. Doing so is still illegal and YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion, and the others all have content checkers that would block any attempt to post.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Nope.

How many times have you found a link on your favorite social news site only to click it and find the server unresponsive? Too many times, most of you will say. This problem is far from uncommon, and unfortunately, it’s too often neglected by the marketing crowd, ready to just put a link up and wait for the traffic to roll (read: pile, avalanche) in. The reason is simple: the servers cannot deal with the insanely high amount of hits it gets from Digg, Reddit or any other popular UGC/social media site. So how do you fix that bitter-sweet problem? Is there even a solution, or are you doomed to watch your servers get trampled by the onslaught? Worry not, NVI is here.

There are several solutions. None of them actually guarantee that your server will withstand a Digg push and homepage - in war, there are few certainties - but they will all help. In the examples, we will use a traditional popular setup: PHP 5, Apache 2, MySQL 5 running on a Linux (assuming Debian) server. Feel free to ask questions in the comments - we’ll do our best to explain how you can use our methods in your environment. Obviously, one of the best ways to ensure your server will resist incoming traffic spikes is optimize your (already clean) code, but it’s probably the most difficult, too, and the one you have least control over.

• Use static content

A PHP script will be served at least 2-10 times slower than a static HTML page by Apache. Try to use more static HTML pages and fewer scripts. The lower the processing for your server, the longer it will last. It’s a huge plus if you don’t even throw PHP in the equation.

• Use a PHP opcode cache system
  

If you can’t use static content, let your web server cache the dynamic content. That way, if the page hasn’t changed, your web server will grab the cached version and output it to visitors, making queries a lot less demanding to your server. There are several opcode cache systems out there, the most popular being APC, eAccelerator and XCache. We’ve had pretty good results using eAccelerator, which is not just an opcode cacher but also an optimizer. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times. Installation is very straightforward and can be done by anyone who has a little experience with SSH, Linux and Apache configuration editing. They also have precompiled binaries available for Windows systems and most Linux distributions. Usage is as simple as installing and binding it with your web server. It will do the rest on its own. There’s a more thorough list of PHP Opcode caching systems over at Wikipedia. The only problem with this solution is that it requires a somewhat elevated access to the system, most probably superuser, in order to edit Apache’s configuration file and restart it.

• Enable MySQL cache

If your pages use a MySQL database, you will definitely want to activate MySQL cache. The funny thing about it is that it comes enabled by default - but the storage value is set to 0, so it never caches anything. All you need to do is locate your MySQL configuration file (my.cnf) and edit the query_cache_size directive or use the MySQL CLI client to perform this operation:
SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 1000000;
Using this particular optimization will cache the queries you frequently perform, and will therefore speed up MySQL’s response. You will also want to make sure that query_cache_type is set to 1. See the MySQL Reference on Query Cache Configuration for more information. Again, the problem with this solution is that it needs a superuser access: system root to edit my.cnf or mysql admin to edit global variables.

• Enable server-side content compression

People often take this for granted, but content compression is often not enabled. It’s as simple as enabling Apache’s mod_deflate. This will feed your content to a compression engine instantiated by Apache, and output it in a compressed fashion. Most (if not all) of today’s browsers accept compressed content, and can decompress it on-the-fly. This also requires superuser access in order to edit Apache’s configuration.

• Load Balancing

This might be overkill for some of you, but it’s still a great solution for high volume websites. Have your database server separated from your web servers. Even have several database and servers to spread the load. How to achieve such a thing is somewhat out of the technical scope of this article, but your sysadmin should know.

Related article: Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding up your Website

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

I’m a web strategist, so of course every page I open forces a quick evaluation of internet marketing and content best practices. Nice - supremely Google News friendly URL. No keywords, unfortunately, but short and with a clear article 6-digit code. A quick scroll reveals a Top Ten Links box to internal articles. Double nice. Unfortunately, the box is in flash, killing any tab opening hopes I once held. Oh well. At this point, I can deal with small-to-increasingly-medium usability issues like this. What I can’t deal with is lazy misunderstanding and thus misinformation from those who butcher interpretation of total search results.

There is information to be gleaned from the figure at the top right of a search results page, sure, but it’s both less and more than the average person thinks. To understand what it’s not, we should remind ourselves of what search engines do when we search.
Google’s smart, but more in the sense of Deep Blue than of Gary Kasparov - as you would expect. It does not “understand” your query, trying to decide which pages of content would best answer the questions your search query implicitly asks. It plays a massively calculating word match game based on the words you chose and the order in which you put them, paying complete attention to uses of quotes, which of course indicate and exact phrase match search. I try to make this difference clear when giving tips for searching and using search engines effectively.

Keeping what search engines do in mind, you can have a better idea of what the search results total indicates. It shows the number of pages that, in a nutshell, are indexed as using or getting links from that word. For example, a search for a particular word could very well not list a site that only uses its exact synonym, creating a semantic incompleteness. Yes, the page might eventually rank if it receives backlinks flavoured with the missing keyword in or around the anchor text of the linking page, but for the most part, if the word’s not on the site, search engines aren’t necessarily sure the page is about that word, too. This semantic gap highlights one way search engines will be getting smarter in the near future. For now, they’re not quite there. Showing the number of pages that include a particular word does not indicate anything conclusively about the appeal or interest in that word, the most basic example being blatant negation, whereby searches for a particular thing will often bring about results against the keyword in question. A search for PETA brings about not just the organization’s main page, but petakillsanimals.com as well.

But writers in search of an introduction feel a temptation to use the total search result to whatever end they please. I’ll never forget when Unlocked Sports, now known for sports predictions, managed to sneak by a “Top 6 Most Popular Athletes According to Google” blog post, based entirely on Google results totals. Athletes who popped up for relationships with celebrities, crimes committed, and other unrelated results would have been caught under this interpretive umbrella. In the current case with Newsweek, the numbers are equally meaningless.

I’m going to assume the author’s use of quotes was due to a lack of better formatting standards, since including the quotation marks in the search actually reverses the point. Searching in the way the author suggests, quotes included, I only get 149 results. Searching for “fidelity and marriage” (quotes included) yields over 31,000 results - reversing the number comparison. With quotations serving such an important search query role, using them in this way is irresponsible, and probably the worst possible choice of formatting. Try italics next time!

Back to my main beef. People searching marriage and affair will be taken to results that prominently showcase and have backlinks relating to those words. So, pages on “How to Balance Marriage and Affair”, all else being equal, should have a fairly equal shot at showing up as “A Terrible Disaster: Marriage and Affair”. While both are potentially relevant to a searcher, only a detailed analysis of each of these results would qualify the type of interest involved. Even then, this would only indicate web publisher interest. While public demand does shape published media, and while the quantity of published media should correlate with public interest (depending on the topic), observing the quantity and type of searches performed serves as a far better indicator of public interest than that which is published.

This brings up another failing of the article’s search comparison case, which you may have guessed by now: it doesn’t take into account other formulations of the phrase. Why search only “marriage and affair” and not “marriage and cheating”? Failure to do so ignores both searcher and publisher variations, and relies wholly on search engine semantic association ability.

Solving much of these issues is a matter of using the right tools. Google Trends is an easy way for the layperson to get a sense of what is actually searched, which is an acceptable indicator for a public interest metric. Publishers should use that, at a minimum. An even more professional job would include use of the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which addresses many of the concerns brought up so far by not only giving search volumes on keywords on a much more detailed scale than Trends, but also suggesting alternative and related keyword phrases that support the initial request through synonym and relation. In the current case, putting marriage and affair into the keyword tool brings up searched phrases like marriage infidelity and cheating boyfriend. This tool takes advantage of Google’s semantic abilities thus far, and you can gain even more ground by learning how to use the tool fully with exact and phrase search totals. You can search how many people use the quotation marks exact phrase search described above, taking advantage of Google’s recognizing of word order on the flip side of search.

As far as what search results totals do tell you; well, here’s what I tend to take from them:

- If searching for a particular expression between quotation marks, I can get a sense of the extent to which the expression is used in popular culture. For example, I might wonder “do people ever use the expression ‘what sorcery is this?’” A search in quotes gives 1,440 results, so yes, to a limited degree. While web results wouldn’t suffice as a perfect indicator, they give some idea. I might supplement this with a query in the keyword tool to see if people search it, too.
- I sometimes search for a phrase in quotes and see the results as further information to see if I should buy a domain name composed entirely of that phrase. As long as the query is specific enough, it might lend itself to some branding potential, even if rarely searched.
- If I’m debating between which of two synonyms is more commonly used in popular culture, I might search both words individually and compare their totals. One definitively more common than another would be enough for me. Trends would be more accurate, but a Google search tends to be quicker.
- The above principle is used when checking spelling in Google. Barring a total academic failing of the majority of the Internet population, the version with the most results is probably the correct spelling. And even then, widespread use of particular spelling and meaning variations sometimes ends up changing the norm, in strange antonymous ways.

All to say, to anyone who knows how search engines work, search result total science tends to be remarkably pseudo. Publications whose authors and editors submit these errors would be wise to shape up before the majority of the populace catches on. Large results totals on searches not in quotations do not serve as an indicator of anything quantitatively relevant about human beings.

Oh - and search results are not a good indicator of term competitiveness, either, for you search engine optimizers. They might be, sort of, if meta-titles were the main factor in page indexation. While titles affect where you rank, they don’t as much serve as the principal factor for if you rank at all. Text on the page can do the trick just fine. Total results will correlate to some degree, but aren’t nearly necessary nor sufficient evidence.

All this ranting, and my chai’s gone cold.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Have you ever been approached by someone trying to sell you a domain with a ranking attached? This counter-intuitive conundrum comes up consistently among my colleagues. If the domain is already ranking, why is the current owner not simply trying to monetize the traffic instead of the domain? I’m an advocate of buying sites with solid link profiles, as I’m sure every SEO is, but I’m not a fan of buying sites based on a current ranking without some investigation into the nature of where that ranking came from. Sometimes you buy a horse, and come home with a donkey.

In this article I would like to go over the methodology I employ in these situations – a good old fashioned backlink profile examination for domain and ranking value. I’m actually going to use a real-world example simply because the concepts will come across with greater ease, and because I know that in SEO, a little solidity goes a long way. I’m not trying to out anyone for anything – as you’ll see my conclusion isn’t completely conclusive anyway – if you happen to own the site I’m talking about, good for you, you’ll likely end up selling it for profit.

The domain in question is www.ejewelrysale.com

They approached with the promise of opening some traffic and sales stats – they rank #1 at google.com for the phrase ‘jewelry sale’, and they claim to have been around since 2004. They have over 1000 pages indexed at Google, and while their on-site SEO does not look spectacular (first glance reveals a lack of silos, a reciprocal link with their seo company, no canonicalization etc.) they do have a number of pages that are optimized enough that they may rank on a range of secondary key-phrases. They are a TBPR 4. A linkdomain: command at Yahoo reveals almost 19,000 links.

Pretty attractive at first glance – but a little more off-site SEO examination shows a bit of wooly bully.

Before we dive right into the backlink profile, lets start with checking the archive.org date for the domain – Okay yes it appeared in 2004, but the first time it appeared with any content at all was the very end of December 2006 – so in reality they have been around about two years.

Now it’s time to check the back-link profile. Though we can’t really know anything temporal about their link acquisitions (besides what archive.org hints at), we can certainly get a good look at where they’re getting links from and in what manner.

From a regular Yahoo prompt search this query:
Linkdomain:ejewelrysale.com –site:ejewelrysale.com

The format we’re using above keeps us from being pulled into Yahoo Site Explorer. Scan the resulting links and search for domains showing up more than once, or that look suspicious. We’re trying to find site-wide links so that we can eliminate them and get a cleaner look at their link profile.

Remove the suspected site-wide links with the addition of another –site: command.

linkdomain:ejewelrysale.com -site:ejewelrysale.com -site:icedotgear.com

Looks like about 100 links were from icedotgear.com, but this icedot thing seems prevalent in the link SERPs.

Add some more:
linkdomain:ejewelrysale.com -site:ejewelrysale.com -site:icedotgear.com -site:icedoutgearworldwide.com -site:icedoutgear.com -site:icedoutgear.de -site:icedoutgear.co.uk -site:www.icedoutgear-shop.co.uk -site:icedougtear.com

Now we’re down from 18,800 links to 4,440. We have a significantly cleaner list to look at – any more potential site-wides?

Tack on another: -site:resultspage.com

Okay, now we’re down to about 1,000 from the initial 18,800. This is their real link profile. And honestly at this point, it could still be a decent link profile – the site-wides could have all been innocent enough (okay obviously not because of all the icedout stuff, but that’s just this example) – now we have to evaluate the real-looking links that make up the remaining thousand pages.

Go, surf them – use your intuition to determine if this looks like a healthy, natural back-link profile built up over the life of the site.

What I see are a number of domains like the following: http://www.laketahoejewelry.com/blog/50ct-pear-cut-ruby-3-diamond-pendant/, http://jewelerysale.com/, http://www.jewelryworld.info/, http://ejewelrysale.info/, http://cheapjewelrygift.info/, http://www.ejewelrystore.info/

There are a mix of semi-legitimate sites, but a very large portion of the back-link profile appear to be low-value domains in the jewelry theme. Chances are these sites were all created by the SEO firm (I wouldn’t be surprised if the SEO firm owns the main domain in this case), some crap links were gathered for them to give them a tiny bit of page rank, then those links were ‘laundered’ via themed domains to the ejewelrysale.com domain.

This, in combination with some site-wide links on larger domains, is enough to get some semi-competitive, attractive looking rankings, like jewelry sale.

Their SEO process was obviously effective to some degree – as Google is indeed ranking them for this term and some stems of it, and they are presumably generating traffic and sales or they wouldn’t have offered to open those stats when they solicited the sale.

But herein lies the rub: if the SEO firm is controlling the entire back-link profile of the site, and it seems in this case that they very well may be, then they could simply take their network and decide to make another domain the primary jewelry site, drop the links to ejewelrystore.com, and get a similar ranking on another domain - then try to find someone to sell it to all over again.

Would you buy this domain?

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

Erik talks about his attempts to find love on the main social platforms to promote his own website, Famous Last Nerds. Those guys are well-known in the funny videos field since their participation on the Robot Chicken stop motion animated show in US.

Link sex doesn’t exist yet but link love does So here’s my gift for your genius viral video!

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

I’m so glad this is happening. Julie Babin did an amazing job with Julien Roudaut to get this blog up and the rest of the dev team (including Marie-Eve Bournival and Alexandre Bussières) did worked like crazy to get this up and running.

And now, it’s up to everyone at NVI to keep this blog alive… We’ve been very quiet over the last few years (besides a strong presence in 2006-2007 on SEOmoz.org and since 2007 on Go-Referencement.org), and we intend to participate more in the industry to help it grow and help it defines itself as time goes and Google refines it’s algorithmn.

You will see several NVI disciplines covered by our posts and we will challenge ourselves to bring you the finest explanations, tips, guides and how to’s to get your business or your expertise and skills to the next level.

We expect anyone interested in the field to participate and challenge every subject we approach here. We are friends with everyone who respects our industry and expect “common sense” to be a second nature.

Please recommend us any improvements and give us your feedback

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.

So the new Propeller design just came out. My god. No, it’s not April 1st. It’s a design so bad it wouldn’t even be plausible as the poster-child for bad design. Ok, maybe not that bad. Just kidding - it IS that bad. “What were they thinking,” is the appropriate cliché. See/click on the photo below for my in-depth analysis.

Post from: NVI Blog - Professional, technical, and a little bit twisted.