SEO News Blog

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

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Posted by randfish

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has some rules about online marketing that may surprise you - they certainly surprised me.

Recently, SEOmoz’s own Sarah Bird was interviewed by Eric Enge on a wide variety of contract and legal topics. As I was proudly browsing through the piece, I was especially curious about what Sarah had to say around marketing on social media networks:

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Some sites like MySpace have begun policing ads:

The main reason that they killed the dating ads was that people were using copyright images as well as girls under 18 to advertise for CPA sites. It got to a point where the ad approval team couldn’t police them anymore. The dieting ads were killed cause the FTC is just starting to crack down on the fake blogs that promote the diet offers.

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Just about anyone who has worked in a large office has seen the company they work for make rash decisions about how firing an employee will affect their company. Although it doesn’t happen very often sometimes these decisions have a way of just blowing up in the companies faces and creating a PR disaster. Today I read about Ivell Marketing & Logistics who recently fired someone because of the contents of her Facebook account.
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John Andrews highlighted how the narcissistic “social” media platforms are in many ways replacing links

The players producing platforms are manipulating the currency that they see those platforms aggregate — which is mostly links. As you type type type your content into Twitter or Wordpress.com or Wikipedia you are fueling the coffers of an elite group of benefactors, and if they continue to manipulate the open web, we lose the “free” benefits of our world wide web. They used to encourage you to sign onto their systems, but now they need you. We’re not linking because our tools don’t make it easy enough to express our linking selves. Those who make the flexible tools today do so for personal gains, not the betterment of the web, and so they manage the linking. Greed is the new black.

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Reciprocal links really started getting punished after there were tools to automate link exchanges and link exchange hubs developed.Nofollow was a direct response to automated blog comment spam software.Directories really started getting punished after there were tools to automate submissions and there Read the rest of this entry »

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In most markets worth being in and with most sustainable business models, sales is not a one time event, but a process. You first have to create awareness, then build trust, then finally make the sale. Do all 3 happen at once for some people? Sure, but probably not for the majority of customers.

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Fake Businesses

Today I came across an AdWords ad for an automated ebook business model website. Their screenshot highlighting their Paypal account was:

hosted on another sitenamed powersell_paypal2.jpgdid not show payments but showed withdrawalsFake Business Statistics

A lot of (mis)marketing techniques are more covert though, through the use of

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Most CMS systems today are capable of generating clean URL’s. Unless you are dealing with newspapers or magazines where existing legacy systems it’s almost a non issue. However I came across two incredibly horrible URL’s in the same day
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/commercial_aviation/TowersAndTarmacs/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a8427003a-9a63-4261-aa47-5e4b356bb224Post%3adc1b7f60-ab5d-4d6b-85cc-b81b43775a97
and
http://blog.stylehive.com/index.php/weblog/entry/everyones-got-posh-spices-bob-and-youre-next
while Read the rest of this entry »

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Stumbleupon is one of may favorite social media sites, Not only can it drive traffic that matches or often exceeds that of Digg, stumbleupon users are much less critical/confrontation/judgmental than the typical Digg user. In addition they are much more likely to subscribe to your blog/rss feed and click Read the rest of this entry »

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