forums: embedded link or links in signature?

I recently participated to a thread on a SEO forum (http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html), which spreads over 5 pages. I initially picked up the thread because it was featured on the newsletter sent by the site - a good bet that this thread would be read by a fair amount of visitors.

It is certainly not what people say in there which would justify spending more than a few minutes on there. So, is it useful to stick on there for links?

I targeted my blog, and checked the stats after a few days.

1) One page is outperforming the others: page 2 has been bringing 50% of the traffic so far. Why?
2) The only difference in page 2 is the actual links to the blog I have embedded in the post. the other pages have got a link to this blog, but only in signatures.

=> traffic wise, it is therefore more important to get an opportunity to stick a link to a site in the post itself, rather than relying on the actual link in the signature to bring traffic.

Note: we are talking about ~5/10 visits/day for 1 thread, not a wide scale experiment. But figures are relevant enough though and I think that a larger scale experiment would lead to the same results.

List of sophism. Do you mean syllogisms?

When I started writing my post about SEO sophisms I realised that it was a bit challenging to find actual examples of sophisms.

I searched for "sophism list", "examples of sophism", etc .. but could not find a proper list of examples.

I switched to "my favourites sophisms", and found a page about paradoxes:
http://brainden.com/paradoxes.htm

On this page were listed 3 sophisms, good start..

"A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child. His mother begged to have him back. The crocodile could not only talk, but was also a great sophist and stated, "If you guess correctly what I will do with him, I will return him. However, if you don't guess his fate, I'll eat him." What statement should the mother make to save her child?"

"Sophist: "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow. However, he doesn't have the cash with sorrow, so he gives what he doesn't have.""

"What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss."

I then looked up in google for "A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child", "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow.", "What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing", hoping to find other sites listing one of these sophisms alongside others... but not much success, these sophisms were hardly listed anywhere else.

Back to square one. On one hand Google could not find famous sophisms for me, but on the other hand I was convinced that I had been taught at school that the syllogism "Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, hence Socrates is mortal" was a famous one. How come didn't I come across this one in my previous research. I then searched for "hence Socrates is mortal" and found out that it was classified as a "syllogism".

I search then for syllogism to refresh a little bit my memories, and find out that syllogisms was a kind of logical argument used extensively by sophists.

I then searched for "syllogisms quotes", and finally found what I was looking for on http://www.thinkexist.com!

Since I have written the first post (which was more about SEO than sophists really), I started getting about 10 visits a day from people looking for a list of sophisms. These people are probably like me, looking for actual syllogisms, but simply don't use the right search queries.

So instead of directing them to a SEO forum, I thought I could write an other post directing them to the resources they are actually looking for instead. In short, doing a bit of SEO for good :-), and hoping that this post will rank better than the other one.

SEO: top 5 list of sophisms

I recently participated to a thread in an SEO forum, and it struck me how many people in this fields are using sophism to try deceive people in thinking that they are search engines optimisation specialists.

What is sophism?
Sophism can mean two very different things: In the modern definition, a sophism is a confusing or illogical argument used for deceiving someone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Examples of sophism
"Whatever exists or does not exist exists"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/richard-sophister/

Have a look at this text from plato: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/sophist.html
.. very similar to some SEO forums...

Sophism is used to prove something which is either not provable, or which you cannot prove yourself, or in the worst case scenario something which is actually false.

Here is a list of sophisms I came across:
1) Proving that inbound links can hurt you
'"Tries very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B" is a pretty clear indication that it certainly can happen otherwise there would be nothing to "try hard to prevent" now would there.'
Quoted from http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html about whether inbound links can really hurt you or not

2) proving that you should care about keywords density
"There is much talk about the ideal keyword density of a web page. The bottomline here is that there is no thumb rule regarding the ideal keyword density in a website, mainly because the search engines change their algorithms frequently"
http://ezinearticles.com/?Keyword-Density---How-Much-Is-Too-Much?&id=401316

3) proving that you should care about duplicate content
"The solution? Don’t rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving traffic to your site. Should you avoid all duplicate content? Of course not. What kind of duplicate content is acceptable? Answering this question is easily another article in itself."
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/duplicate-content-penalty-how-to-lose-google-ranking-fast/1886/

4) proving that you should not use a dynamic site
"Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites
Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly (as I’ve recently discovered), dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time."
http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/static-html-vs-dynamic-urls.html

5) proving that inbound links can damage your site (an other one!)
"While there are links TO your site, the majority of them are nothing more than a list of links to similar vehicle tracking sites - which are not considered to be the ultimate type of links, and in some casesis even considered a scheme or link farm, which Google specificallywarns against in Google's "Quality Guidelines - Basic principles", "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank ..." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.htmland from Google's explanation of why your site might not be listed, "... certain actions such as ... setting up pages/ links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html"


there are many more, but running out of time really.
http://searchengineland.com/070830-074852.php: this is a good list of SEO myths. Pick any of them, go on a SEO forum and check out what so-called specialists have to say about it - doesn't take long before digging out sophism examples -

Useful TIP: forums moderators are usually the most prolific users of sophism. That why SEO myths spread so easily.

SEO should get in bed with PR

As a SEO consultant, I am often asked whether we can help companies increasing the exposure of their sites on blogs, online social networks or online news websites. I usually answer that increasing the exposure of a website is online PR, not SEO, and that it is not something I specialise in.

I came to realise this morning that the difference between online PR and SEO is very blur at the moment, and people feel that they need to depend on a SEO company to manage their online exposure.

This should not be the case.

SEO requires technical skills, in order to optimise the HTML of a site, format the content in order to make it semantically relevant for chosen keywords, and submit the site to online resources.

Online PR requires a good understanding of the business and a good network of relevant journalists/bloggers/media owners who will take on a press release and push it forward a large volume of viewers.



SEO and online PR don't share the same objectives

SEO's objective is to drive long term traffic, whereas online PR's objective is to drive short term traffic.

Now, if you are interested in increasing your traffic overall, the solution is simple: Get the 2 of them in bed together!

The picture below illustrates the concept. Instead of running SEO and online PR as two separate marketing strategies, SEO and PR should be combined in order to maximise return on investment.



The situation is a bit similar to the situation a few years ago when website owners depended on web design agencies to update the content of their website. Then came in content management systems, which now reconciles web design and web content management.

Companies should not rely on SEO agencies to run their online PR campaigns.

It is now time to consolidate SEO and online PR agencies, and release tools allowing PR agencies to combine their activities effectively with search engines optimisation. There is no such tools on the market at the moment.

I believe that someone coming up with such a tool would revolutionise the online marketing industry, the same way CMS revolutionised the web design market a few years ago.

Google: Vertical search - secret weapon?

Targeting profiles
I think one of the reason Google is providing a better search experience than other rivals is its ability to deliver very relevant results to specific profiles of searchers.
E.g. 1: businesses or individuals looking for local suppliers



If you search for "printers london" for instance, Google will combine results with google map, and display directly a list of local printers in the results page.

E.g. 2: definitions

If you are looking for a definition of a word or expression, Google will return a series of definitions in search results.

Always adding new "vertical" results.
And Google keeps adding new "vertical add-ons":

E.g. 1: people looking for information on a specific site (large portals)




If you are looking for a book on amazon, you can use their search box directly for Google search results.

E.g.2: Programmers looking for code snippets
This one was added only very recently. Just type in some random code, and you'll find files containing this code



Some articles pointed out that Google was upsetting large websites such as amazon with their embedded search bar:
"[Google] has absolutely crossed the line because it's so blatantly about commercialisation and not user experience."
Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude

I personally don't think that these features are driven from the marketing department. By improving its vertical results, Google improves the user's experience, and keep them on its results page.

This is of course a matter of concern to all publishers (Amazon complained about the search box, and got it removed for instance), who get their number of page views reduced, and consequently their advertising revenue. But Google's mission statement is to offer the best results to its users, allowing them to find the right product/service/content directly from the search results, and the addition of these "vertical features" are going in the right direction, keeping Google ahead of the game, and definitely improving the overall user experience.

overcoming the minus 6 penalty

A lot of things have been written about the minus 6 penalty/filter added by Google recently.

It is quite easy to demonstrate:
e.g.: we have very recently released a site (http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk), and I was checking the ranking of this site for some specific/unique titles.

"Segmenting Your Customers - Uncovering Hidden Value": This is a very unique title, which should get http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/articles/segmenting-customers.html into position #1 straight away.

Instead, the page is ranked at position 6. It is clear that this position is assigned on purpose by Google (you can check yourself with other very unique titles for recently released sites), which is probably because this is the position the less likely to be randomly clicked on.

Google probably tracks the number of clicks on results it returns, and take this into account in the ranking algorythm. But provided that some people just click on first links without thinking about it, positioning the "on probation" link in position #6 gives Google more chance to test effectively if the link is actually relevant.

I think that it is just a temporary position. Google hasn't computed all data yet, and hold the site in the position until more processing has been done. Nothing really to worry about, it is in my opinion just a sign that google has crawled the page, but not asssigned a proper ranking yet.

Using Facebook as a promotion tool

I am still trying to figure out the benefit of using Facebook really. The site can become quite addictive, but the actual "benefits" of using it are still a big mistery for me.

You can certainly hear from people you had lost contact with for instance. But there is usually some good reasons why you had not kept in touch with them in the first place. After catching up with them for a while, you soon realise that you will very probably loose contact again very soon..

I have started a group, GetBiz, to cover my activities with www.getbiz.co.uk.

I don't really want to invest too much time on this, since it is just an experiment. But maybe worth the try. Very much like keeping up with a blog really, with the ability to attract readers more easily through connections. The downside is that it is not as SEO friendly as blogs though.

marketing his own private life

I came across http://mysuperproposal.com/ recently, run by Rand Fishkin, a SEO expert. I have really mixed opinions about this.

On one end, this is like reality TV. You are embarassed to watch it, but you watch it, and you kind of like it. And when I watched the proposal, I could not wait watching the reaction from his girlfriend.

On the other end, this is even worse than Reality TV. I doubt anything was staged, he is inviting everyone in his living room, in order to get a few links at the end... a bit sad after all.