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marți, 18 februarie 2014

The California Drought, and How We're Helping

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The California Drought, and How We're Helping

On Friday, President Obama headed to California to tour drought-affected areas and talk to those affected by impacts of one of the state's worst droughts in over 100 years. While there, President Obama announced new actions that the Administration will take to help the farmers, ranchers, small businesses, and communities being impacted.

See the drought's effect up close, and watch President Obama's announcement.

Why Your Brand Shouldn't Fear Assigning Authorship

Posted: 17 Feb 2014 03:16 PM PST

Posted by MarkTraphagen

Over the past two years I've spoken at numerous conferences and written articles beyond counting (including one here at Moz) on the subject of Google Authorship and author authority online. By far the most frequently asked questions I get on the topic are from brands fretting over whether or not to allow individuals to become brand representative authorities.

Typical forms of these questions include:

Wouldn't it be better for our content to be branded with our company name/logo?
Will individual author authority really translate into better exposure, trust, and (bottom line) new customers for our brand?
What if the employee author leaves our company?

The brand-content paradox

While the issues of brand representation by individuals bleed over into many areas (such as social media, conference speeches, etc.), I'm going to focus on what I think is the "hottest" and most important area right now: brand content marketing. In other words, the issue of who or what "authors" your brand's content.

Let me start by saying to brands, "I feel your pain." Or perhaps more accurately, I understand your fears.

The Internet age has created an odd paradox. At the same time that brands have more access to potential customers than ever before, that very fact has made it more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. On hotly contested and immensely valuable real estate like Google's first page or Facebook's News Feed, brands contend frantically for attention. I can understand why they would be reluctant to embrace any strategy that seems like it removes the prospect one more step away from the brand name.

However, in this article, I'm going to propose that that "removal" is exactly what brands need to be doing to stand out and win customers in the highly-competitive world of online marketing.

Let me address each of the three questions I quoted above.

1. Shouldn't our content be authored by our brand?

Hello, I'm Brand X!

Since the dawn of advertising, brands have been willing to invest huge sums of money into getting their brand name known. We've gone from cultural icons like this:

to this:

In the "Mad Men" era of the rise of the big Madison Avenue agencies, the focus was on campaigns that "branded" the client brand's name on the minds of consumers. But as brands proliferated over the next 50 years, this became less and less effective. When Colgate and Crest and Close Up all are telling you "we are best at fighting cavities!" they just become a blur when you reach the supermarket shelf.

But even back in those days (or at least in the fictional version of those days), some people understood that there was a unique power in associating a powerful personal brand with a corporate brand:

In that scene Mad Men's Don Draper is taking advantage of a second chance at getting interviewed by a major news outlet. He had blown his first opportunity by being aloof and refusing to give the reporter anything personal. After his Sterling Cooper Draper Price partners threw a fit over the resulting boring newspaper article, Don got the message. As you see in the clip above, when the reporter asks him if Don Draper is the name that defines his agency, he barely hesitates for a moment before responding confidently, "Yes."

You forget a name, but you never forget a face

Have you ever noticed how many Facebook ads use a human face image (sometimes with unexpectedly embarrassing results)?

That's because advertisers know that the human eye is drawn to human faces. That's also the reason you see faces in most ads for law firms and real estate agencies. They get that when making some of the most important transactions of their lives, people want to feel like they're connecting with a real human being.

Google gets that, too.

So they created Google Authorship, the opportunity for individual content creators to verify their original content from across the web with their Google+ profiles. In return, these authors might get search results for their content in Google Search that display their profile photos next to the result:

Not only do these rich snippet results take advantage of our evolutionary programming to be drawn to faces, they reinforce that there is a real human being behind the content. That can have a profound psychological effect on someone scanning down those 10 blue links on a Google search page. It's perfectly true that all the content linked by the non-Authorship results may be by real humans as well. But the author-photo results guarantee it.

Let's get personal

And that leads us to the true value of identified, human-authored content for brands: It's what searchers want. (See proof in this study by Justin Briggs.)

It's a simple fact of human psychology: people will identify with and trust a person long before they'll give the same consideration to a faceless brand.

I often tell the story of my first visit to a huge online marketing conference. I was passing through the crowded corridors between sessions when a stranger grabbed me by the shoulders, held me at arms length, and staring intently at my face, exclaimed, "Wait! I know you from somewhere!" After a moment it dawned on him: "I know! You're in my search results all the time!"

Because I write about topics for which he frequently searches, Google Authorship showed him my face again and again. And as he clicked through, he found my content helpful. So now when he searches and sees my face, he automatically goes to my content first, even if I'm way down the search result page.

Conclusion to Question 1: Personal brands are powerful. People trust and listen to a person before they trust and listen to a logo.

So now a brand might ask me, "Fine, personal brands are effective. But..."

2. Will personal brand authority build a corporate brand?

My guess is that this is really the #1 concern of brands when they are challenged to let employee authors represent the corporate brand. Why should they invest company time and other resources into letting an employee build up his or her reputation online?

I think the response to that lies in the powerful synergy that can occur when a brand is consistently associated with authoritative content that is combined with authoritative persons.

Want proof of that? You're looking at it. Not this post (although I believe it actually is a small example), but the site on which it's published. Why is Moz such a household word in the online marketing industry? There is little doubt that it's largely due to the names of Mozzers we know and trust: people like Rand Fishkin, Cyrus Shepard, Jennifer Sable Lopez, Dr. Pete Myers, and too many others to mention here. They write the content that we have come to rely on as authoritative, trustworthy, memorable, and very shareable.

And when we become part of the audience of people like that, one of their fans, it doesn't take us long to figure out with what brand they are associated. Then the trust and, let's say it, affection we feel for them inevitably gets transferred to that brand.

The face that makes phones ring

Several years ago I was working for an agency that had no blog. At the time I was managing AdWords accounts for clients. I loved to write, but frankly found the 95 characters of a Google ad a little confining. So on my own I started a blog for the company.

I wrote post after post with very little readership. But I kept at it, developing my own style, learning more about my field, and transferring that knowledge into the best content I could create. Then in June of 2011 I got an early beta invite to Google+. My network there took off, and soon my posts were getting widely shared. They started to earn natural links that made them start to rank in search.

As soon as I heard about Google Authorship, I adopted it for all my content. Soon my face was showing up next to search results for my posts. I started to get known as a trusted expert in my field. Out of that came opportunities to speak at major conferences.

And then the agency's phone began to ring.

"Mark Traphagen has helped me time and again with his content online. If you guys have him working for you, you must be pretty smart. Send me a contract."

That began to happen more and more frequently.

Eventually, that was working well enough that Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting made me an offer I couldn't refuse to come work with that fine outfit. Eric saw I had reputation, trust, and a large and loyal audience. He wanted that associated with STC. And now it is.

Conclusion to Question 2: If you encourage gifted employees to go out and create a synergy of authoritative content associated with their trusted name and face, your brand will bask and benefit in the reflected glory.

But when I left my former agency, wouldn't that leave them asking...

3. What if that high-reputation employee leaves?

NEWS FLASH: Almost no one stays long term at one place of employment these days. A survey by PayScale revealed that in the Fortune 500 tech companies, mean tenure of employees is about one year.

So if your company allows an employee to invest serious time into creating content and building up her social following, if she gets a sterling reputation in your industry that starts reflecting well on your brand, and even starts bringing you customers, if she leaves is all that down the drain?

Thanks to the power of online reputation and the emergence of Google's growing understanding of entities in semantic search, the answer is a resounding NO.

Through Google Authorship, I stay connected in full sight of Google to all my content, no matter what I do or where I go in real life. At Stone Temple Consulting I continue to work hard to create truly useful content and to build my reputation and authority. As those continue to grow, they continue to benefit the content on my old agency's site. That content continues to get recommended, shared, and clicked on based on my reputation. And that's traffic my former employer can continue to convert.

I've actually had brands ask me if they should remove the content of an employee who has left them, or change the authorship of the content. I hope by now it's obvious why that would be foolish.

Certainly there may be circumstances under which severing the connection would be wise. If for some reason the former employee becomes a public disgrace, or simply starts moving in directions that will not enhance his reputation in your industry, then you might want to disassociate your content. But I would hope such cases would be rare.

(As an aside, it might be a good idea for companies to begin to think about and formulate clear policy on ownership and authorship of employee-generated content, both during employment and after. I can see a day coming when author reputation may become so valuable online that problems could develop if a company tried to remove or change authorship on a piece of content after an employee left.)

Conclusion to Question 3: If a former employee continues to build a great reputation in your industry after she leaves, then that reputation continues to work for your content.

The face of the future

Obviously I am strongly in favor of not only allowing employees to develop high-authority online reputations in your industry, I see it as increasingly essential. The social web has forever changed effective marketing from being impersonal brand broadcasting to highly personal connectivity.

Not only do authoritative employee authors cast a reflected glow of trust and authority onto your brand, they also help humanize it. Even in the "coldest" of industries, at the end of the day, people still want to buy from people they like and trust.

What experiences have you had with developing real human authorities for your brand? What obstacles did you need to overcome? What concerns do you still have about this idea? Let us know in the comments!

Image credits:

Brand X: Purchased photo under a license from shutterstock.com
Burma shave signs: by peterme used under a Creative Commons License
Goodyear blimp: Purchased photo under an editorial use license from shutterstock.com
Facebook ad: From anthroblogia (used by permission)
Darth Vader and Luke: by shaun wong used under a Creative Commons License

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Link Audits: What should you be looking for?

Link Audits: What should you be looking for?

Posted: 18 Feb 2014 01:37 AM PST

Link Auditing

Link auditing has been something that has been examined for a considerable time within SEO, but has never been as important as it is in today's changing landscape. Since the Penguin algorithm there have been SEOs up and down the country conducting link audits, not just to identify penalties but to ensure there isn’t a possibility of getting in trouble.

Due to the algorithm updates, the way people conduct audits has changed, as have the metrics and type of information and/or websites they look at. We are constantly looking to improve what we do internally at White.net, and I wanted to share with you some of the metrics that we look at and the reasons behind them.

I have even managed to rope in a few others to give their thoughts on what they look at when conducting a link audit.

What's Changed?

It’s long been known that the quantity of links is no longer a factor in the algorithm. Rather, it is the quality of the linking domain that provides the value. Therefore, there is little point, except for benchmarking, in looking at the total number of links pointing to your domain, especially if you have identified that the majority of those are low-quality links such as directories, website comments and articles.

What to look for?

Although most of the industry has changed the way that they are acquiring links, there are still some who continue to acquire links unnaturally, or who have used this technique in the past. This all means that you need to be extra vigilant when looking through your link profile. It's important that you can spot any trends and issues to ensure that you action something instantly.

Below are a number of factors (not all) that we look at when conducting a link audit:

Authority/Influence Score
The majority of us use some kind of score when looking at links, whether that be Domain Authority from Moz or Influence Score from MajesticSEO/Linkdex, as it gives you a very quick and visual look at the state of your link profile. As with anything, this is a top-level view and you also need to manually assess those links.

This is generally one of the first things that I do when conducting a link audit. I can quickly see if there is a major issue, especially if the chart is showing more links to the lower side of the authority/influence score. Once I have done this, I can then dig deeper into those links that are below where I would hope them to be, and this provides a good starting point for analysis.

Linking Influence Score

*The chart above is also a very good way to represent it when showing clients. It allows them to easily understand the state of their link profile without going into too much detail.

Where are your links from? (Link types)
So all your links are from directories and guest posts! That looks natural.

By looking at the link type, you get more information on how natural your profile is, and what you need to be considering moving forward. There are a number of tools available for you to see quickly what link types you have, such as Link Detective and Linkdex.

The ideal scenario is that you will have a number of links from everywhere: directories, blog posts, news, image banners, text, followed and no followed links, all with different or natural anchor text. This will be classed as much more natural link profile than if they all come from a certain tactic.

If you do spot areas of concern, especially if the majority of your links are coming from the same area, then you need to think carefully about what value they are providing, and how this will affect your strategy going forward.

Things you should be looking for in more detail are:

- Site types (blog, news, directory, forums, etc.)
- Link type (images, text)
- Followed vs NoFollowed

Anchor text distribution
Brand variations should always be the main terms you find when having an initial look at your link profile. If your brand doesn’t occupy the top 5 to 10 then you are likely to be in some serious trouble. People don’t naturally link by your core terms! People link with Brand, URLs, Click here, etc. This is natural!

If you do spot that your anchor text distribution is predominantly non-brand, then you need to consider whether they are good links, or if they should be removed. If they are good links, then you need to be thinking about a brand building campaign that will drive natural brand links to your website with the aim of having a more natural profile.

Anchor Text Distribution Chart

Links from the same IP
If you have links from the same IP, then this could be seen as a clear signal of networking. Building lots of links across a network of websites that sit on the same IP can be seen as a manipulative technique and possible lead to penalties, whether manual or algorithmic.

Being able to spot IPs can be somewhat difficult if you use standard tools, but you can pull these in with either the Excel for SEOs tool or by using other paid tools such as LinkRisk.

Once you have this information you should filter it in order, and go through each of the links. You are likely to see a pattern, whether it be a type of site, such as directories (most probable), or blogs that are all on the same topic. Either way, they are likely to need removing, but this is something that you need to consider before starting out.

LinkRisk Profile
As previously mentioned, Penguin has caused many people to be looking at their link profile for all types of reasons. But now no matter what you are doing an audit for, you need to be looking at it with penalties in mind, and how you can prevent your client/website from getting one.

We have been using LinkRisk as the first stage of risk identification, with clear scoring patterns that allow you to quickly see the health of the website. However, once a report has been created, we also go through manually checking to ensure that a human eye has been cast over every domain. Time-consuming, I hear you say? Well yes, but algorithms can make mistakes no matter how complex they are, just ask Google.

During this process we look at the links from a human perspective asking ourselves some questions:

- Will this link drive traffic?
- Has this link been built for SEO purposes?
- Was this link built via manipulative/paid means?

If our answers aren't "Yes", "No" and "No", then we start to create a list of website owners to contact to have them removed or to create a disavow file. This is a key part of our link audits, and one that is highly recommended being in yours.

LinkRisk Score

But these are just my thoughts, what do others think?

To help me with this, I asked Paul Rogers and Paul Madden (All the Paul’s) for their thoughts on what to look for when auditing a website.
Paul Rogers

“For me, link auditing is one of the most important skills for an SEO professional to have these days – as unnatural link patterns represent a huge risk for websites and they can often be difficult to detect.

I start by outputting links (from multiple data sources) into a spreadsheet and apply formulas to identify low quality links (e.g.: targeted anchor)

There are lots of things to look out for when auditing a link profile, such as:

- High number of similar links (group of sites, c-blocks, similar format etc.)
- Suspicious looking individual links (sitewide, directory, comment etc.)
- suspicious looking trends (directories, networks etc.)
- Obvious footprints (guest post, sponsored post etc.)
- Links from sites that clearly sell links

These are just a few to go alongside what you have mentioned, but there are hundreds of signals to be looking out for.

These days, even websites that have never been impacted by the penguin update should be looking to optimise their link profile, in order to future-proof their organic visibility.”

Paul Madden

“Doing a link audit is a skilled task and shouldn’t be left to someone without the correct level of experience.

Some things to consider when you are doing a link audit include: -

Try to use as many data sources as possible for the initial audit. Our experience suggests that the best sources in declining order of importance are: -

Google Webmaster Tools

Majestic SEO Historic and Fresh

Ahrefs

Existing client SEO link building reports

Moz

Bing Webmaster Tools

If the site is under penalty then you will have to confess to and reverse nearly all the SEO activity within the profile before you can expect to escape the penalty. This includes removing or disavowing all commercial anchor text links and all links from site types that have been used to gather links over the years. This would include directories, articles, sponsored links, widgets, site wide (sidebar, footer and widget links) and nowadays you’ll have to look more carefully at things like detectable guest posts and press releases.

Think about the links you see in the profile in terms of what is algorhythmically detectable and what is not. This will include thinking about things like obvious footprints as well as looking at whether the linking site is likely to have appeared on Google’s radar already in other penalties and disavow data.

We have literally thousands of disavow files now uploaded to LinkRisk and its been very interesting to see what the quality of that data tells us about the thinking of most SEO’s when doing the disavow and cleanup work. Our most disavowed domain has been disavowed at “domain:” level over 180 times so far (I can’t name it I’m afraid) and people have even been disavowing the highest quality domains in an attempt to wipe the slate clean (domain:youtube.com 52 times / domain:bbc.co.uk 12 times!). This also tells us something about Google’s expected ability to use the disavow data against us… its patchy as far as quality for web spam detection at best.

When you submit your disavow you have two choices to make on timings. You can wait for the Google cache to update on the sites where you have had the link removed (a few weeks typically) before submitting the reinclusion request so Google can confirm that they have gone (this is our preferred method). You could also submit the reinclusion earlier but this will sometimes necessitate the disavowing of many of the domains that have actually said they will remove or Google will be unable to confirm that the removals have taken place.

Whilst its tempting to get the reinclusion in quickly I would strongly suggest that, on moral grounds, disavowing should only be done as a last resort and its unfair to disavow if the site owner is working with you to remove the links.”

What’s Next?

As links change, and in some people’s thought become less important, what else should you be looking at?

Well, this is something I have been thinking about for a while, and I think there will be two additions to those metrics above.

Social counts at page level. This will be based on the ability to reach a wider audience by sharing your content, allowing you to increase authority, traffic and, of course, build links. This metric will allow you to see how well it correlates with those pages that have attracted the most natural links.

The other area that I feel we will be looking into going forward, is looking at the person that has placed the link. Are they an authority within your industry or niche? Do they link to competitors? What websites are they linking from? Do they have a good following?

I think these are two metrics that will be looked at increasingly over the coming months and years as these link audits evolve.

So, those are some of the metrics that we look at when conducting a link audit, but don’t think that's the job done! At the end of the audit, you need to be able to produce some actionable takeaways to show the client. Do they need to remove links? Is there a gap that needs to be filled? Do they continue doing what they are doing? These are the types of questions you should be able to answer, adding to your strategy moving forward.

What do you look for when auditing a website? Do you disagree with any of the above? What other items would you suggest adding to an audit document? I would love to hear your comments below and of course on twitter @danielbianchini.

The post Link Audits: What should you be looking for? appeared first on White Noise.