Search Engine Tigers

Just a quick reminder, if you change the theme on your post, make sure to add your analytics code in on the new one.  Otherwise you may wonder for a bit why your traffic has dropped to 0…

*cough* 

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but for the last week or so, Google Alerts has been sending me messages about mentions that happened well in the past.

It’s almost as if their crawlers have gone on holiday and are running a ‘best of’ alerts through the end of the year…

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, so what have I been up to?  Well, if you follow my Twitter account you’ll have a little bit more of an idea, but if you haven’t, the basic reason is that I’ve been busy.  Outside of regular work, I was heavily involved in putting together a conference in Las Vegas for SIPA (Specialized Information Publishers Association), which ran from Dec 8th to the 10th.  I thought it went great, with a few minor hiccups, as you’d expect from such an event.  I’d like to especially thank Frank Gruber, Li Evans, Stoney DeGuyter and Dana Todd for coming along and speaking to the publishing community.  For those that weren’t there, I believe that Frank became the first ever keynote outside of an educators conference to attempt to get the crowd to join in on a verse of “The wheels on the bus”. 

After Vegas I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at Search Engine Strategies Chicago on the topic of Reputation Management.   Despite being the last session of the last day, and up against the popular ‘Black Hat tips and tactics” session, we still managed to pull in a decently sized, attentive crowd.

Recently I was doing some research for a pharmaceutical client and came across several blogs that were showing up as having the text for a competing product, yet the blogs had nothing to do with that product. Taking a look at those blogs there was one thing in common, they were all on outdated WordPress installations.

When blog hacks are identified, WordPress is usually pretty quick about pushing out a new release of their code, but it’s fairly obvious that some people just don’t realize that they need to do this. Why don’t they realize it? Well, usually it’s because the links are hidden on the page, so unless you look in the code, you’ll never see them, unless you specifically look for them. What do they look like?

So what should you do? Well the first thing is upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and the easiest way to do that is by using the Automatic Upgrade tool, it’s push button, allows you to back up your work, and takes less than 5 minutes to run, really it couldn’t be easier. Next is to go in there and remove all of those bad links, this may take some time, depending on how badly your site has been affected, but hey, it’s the price you pay for not upgrading in the first place.

I’m not going to list the sites that I found, firstly because there’s too many of them, but secondly because there’s no need to, instead I’m going to email this post to those that have contact info, and if you’re one of those, I hope this helps you correct a problem you probably didn’t know you had.

To Joe Whyte on his engagement (even if it wasn’t a Superbowl commercial)

…and to Matt Mcgee on the release of his U2 book

This advanced operator has apparently been around in Google Experimental for over a year, but since I only came across it recently, it’s new to me, so maybe it is to you.

So what does view:map do? Basically, by adding it to the end of any regular query in Google, you’ll get a results page with a map, and on that map will be markers, and a list of listings that contains some form of geographic identifier. As you can see below posts of mine talk about trips I’ve taken and trips I’m about to take.

Now there are some false positives, I’ve never talked about Texas, but as my name appears on a popular blog near where someone else talks about working for a firm in Texas, it’s picked up, but on the whole it’s pretty good about showing the right results.

So how can this help you? Well, potentially it can enable you to see what locations your product is being talked about in conjunction with (note, not necessarily where the people that are talking about your product are). Sure only 10 listings doesn’t give you much, so go ahead and add &num=100 to the query string to get up to 100 results that mention geo-terms and see what happens. Below is the result for “Specialized Information Publishers Association”

As you can see there’s discussion about their conferences in DC, Chicago, their headquarters in McLean (hey, they’re just around the corner from me), talk about a sponsor in Hawaii, and about a board member from London. How can this help them? Well let’s say that there was a groundswell of SIPA members talking about how there really needs to be a conference in Lancaster, PA. The fact that that location would show up on this map would give them that information, and they could then investigate to see whether there really was any kind of demand for moving one of their conferences out to NYC strip mall shopping central Amish country.

All in all it’s an interesting tool, but there are some false positives that show up in the system that detract slightly from the results, which is probably why it’s still in Google Experimental. Anyway, go give it a play, and if you think of some great use for it, please share.

I’ve just posted a review of CauseWired:Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley, Nov 10, 2008) over on the EndlessPlain blog, If you’re in the nonprofit field, take a look at what I have to say, as it’s a book that you’ll most likely want to have on your desk.

I’ll be speaking on the topic of Buzz Monitoring during the “Search and Reputation Management” session at SMX-East. This event is taking place October 6-8 in New York City, with my session being held on the Monday from 3.45 to 5pm. If you’re going to be there please feel free to pop over and say hello to me, or just even attend the session (there are going to be 3 other great speakers, with some really interesting topics, including one that sounds to me like it’ll be a new approach to presenting on this topic - the future of reputation).

If you’ve not booked your ticket for SMX-East yet, then how about a $150 saving on the all access pass? Just enter the discount code smxspeak when registering and smile at the savings.

See you there.

From time to time trolls will attack you and / or your company, most likely for no reason whatsoever. Sometimes they’re just in it for ‘fun’, sometimes it’s to be malicious, other times it can be simply because they’re angry. So what should you do when one of these hateful little trolls pops up and decides that you or your company is the bane of their existence and should be treated as though you ripped a puppy from their waif like hands before callously throwing it in front of a steamroller while laughing maniacally twiddling your overly large comedy mustache.

The first step is to identify the hateful little trolls from the real people who have an issue that can be resolved. Usually it’s in the language that they use, and the way that they self-justify everything that they say and do, despite all evidence to the contrary (SMG has a great post detailing the differences between a troll and an upset customer).

Now, there are a few different types of trolls that exist in this online world, and here’s my breakdown of the kinds I’ve seen:

1. The attention seeker - “Look at me, look at me”
2. The instigator - just wanting to provoke a response
3. The righteous indignant - the only opinion that exists is theirs, all must bend to their will
4. The two faced liars - When you communicate with them they claim to have an understanding with you, then revert to their prior troll-like existence once they’re back in public
5. The ‘ethical moralist’ - Communicating with you one on one they are foul mouthed and abusive, back in public they claim to take the moral high ground
6. The multi-faceted troll - Take any combination of the above to create your own hateful little troll

So, what should you do with these hateful little trolls? I expect you’re thinking that I’m going to say that you should just ignore them, and that ’sticks and stones… etcetera, etcetera’, well that is, unfortunately, one of the best ways to deal with these ‘people’, if you don’t feed the trolls they will generally tire and go away to harass their next victim.

But what about the collateral damage? What about the comments and the posts and the reviews, and the people that they may influence? Well, in those cases the best defense is to get your evangelists out there putting out good content about you, giving them the tools and the opportunity to defend you by offsetting those negative reviews with positive ones, the truth will come out, and those lone voices will be seen for what they are, people who don’t deserve attention, or the spotlight turning on them for even a fraction of a second.

So the best way to kill a hateful little troll is with silence while it sits in the dark slowly fading away. Now it may squeal and grunt in a desperate attempt to be noticed, but to do so would give it power, so don’t give in, resist the temptation.

While doing a little updating on my Local Search slides for Search Camp Philly (pcphilly08) I noticed that between February and tonight Google has modified their disclaimer text at the bottom of each PPC geotargeting page. Take a look, back in February -

…and now -

As you can see they’ve now pushed it front and center that “You may receive clicks from outside our targeted locations”.