I was recently perusing a blog called “THE Facts on Print Yellow Pages” when I stumbled across a post about Minneapolis pizza.

Being a Minneapolis resident and a big fan of Pizza, I checked out what this site had to say about this very important topic (to me, at least):

I clicked through to the post referenced on the above site to find this blog post:

That looked strange to me. Notice how the two outgoing links are both tied to specific keywords? And why is someone so excited about the Minneapolis phone book that they’re actually blogging about it? This smelled like rotten fish rather than freshly cooked pizza to me.

It turns out that the person blogging about the Minneapolis phone book actually lives in Arkansas. Strange, eh?

The blogger who wrote the post has a link to PayPerPost on their site. Ah, I wonder is this happened to be a paid post? Of course it is.

And when there is one paid post there are usually more. Why would DexKnows.com only buy a paid post about Minneapolis pizza?

Sure enough, a little playing around with queries on Google found a common pattern among blog posts, revealing that DexKnows.com has, indeed, purchased blog posts from quite a few bloggers.

Why would DexKnows.com pay bloggers to write posts that include links to DexKnows.com from specific keywords within the posts? Are they doing it to gain traffic from the bloggers? Not directly. They’re doing it to game Google. Increasing the number of links to your site increases your site’s authority in Google’s eyes. And pages that are linked to with keyword-rich link text (anchor text) tend to rank a bit higher for the terms used in the link.

This tactic of link buying is frowned upon by Google, who has gone as far as wiping out the authority of bloggers participating in this scheme. The message is clear: Don’t accept payola.

This got a lot of buzz in November of 2007, but still continues to this day. For example, the DexKnows.com payola shown above is from August 2008.

Insidiousness

Here’s how this appears to have gone down.

1. DexKnows.com offers bloggers money in exchange for writing about topics covered in the DexKnows.com directory.

2. Bloggers take the offer and write the posts. Get paid.

3. Yellow Pages industry consultant, Ken Clark, writes about one of the payola posts on his blog called, “THE Facts on Print Yellow Pages”

4. He tags the blog post (you can’t make this stuff up): “Actual Experiences”

They’re actually making up “actual experiences” about their industry.

I guess we shouldn’t expect better from an industry that litters neighborhoods with phone books that many consumers no longer want. In fact, they try to prevent states from implementing opt-out legistlation.

If a Yellow Pages company is spending money to game Google, what does that say about the state of Yellow Pages vs Google as sources of information?

By the way, DexKnows.com does know how to buy ads on blogs without payola. My friend Aaron Landry is an authority on the Minneapolis pizza scene, and look who’s advertising on his blog:

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According to Zillow.com, the home I purchased last fall has increased by 70% in less than a year:

While I wish that was so, I have a hunch that any real estate agent I talked to would collapse if I suggested listing the property for what Zillow suggests.

There are two upward spikes in the green line on the graph that represents what Zillow has thought my home was worth over the past decade.

The first, a year ago, is when I purchased the house for WAY more than Zillow said it was worth at the time.

The second is when Zillow decided that the house was worth WAY more than I paid for it.

So which is it?

Neither.

But, if you look at a large enough set of data, Zillow’s numbers are probably pretty good. Notice the trend of the Yellow line. That represents the median price of homes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

But here’s the problem: I already know that my home is a bit above average if you take the entire city into consideration. You don’t need to show me a graph to explain that concept to me. What I care about is my OWN house, and I know that data is broken.

So what exactly is the value of this data beyond inspiration for a blog post?

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I love this show! Not only do we always have a great time, but I get to show off the latest and greatest technology to the masses. In this live episode we cover: TWITTER! Now keep in mind that TE is a bit more of a techie blog, but just the idea that Twitter is now on TV shows such as CNN and even the afternoon talk show tells me that it is either mainstream or very, very close to mainstream now.

Luckily all of the Twitter downtime happened right before the show and they were stable once we went on-air. Was a fun moment watching the hosts play with Twitter and get the ‘Something has gone wrong’ screen.

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Google’s policy against clicking AdSense ads on your own website continues to annoy me. This time, it was a post on the Inside AdSense blog that drew my ire:

However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.

I search the archives of this site almost daily in search of relevant links to things I’ve written about previously. I’d hate to see this site’s AdSense income wiped out due to clicking on ads served to me based on what I searched for just because they were served on my own site.

The ads site-search ads are, obviously, highly relevant to what I searched for, so clicking makes sense.

Google’s policy of discouraging clicking ads they serve against my own searches makes my site less usable for me.

As I’ve mentioned before, Google needs to come up with a setting that allows users to claim their own sites, then simply not compensate the site owner for clicks they generate themselves. This would make site owner’s own sites more valuable to themselves and benefit Google’s advertisers who would receive more traffic from site owners who could click with confidence.

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Being a opportunistic lawyer has never been easier, than to the web, as Kevin O’Keefe points out on his law blog. One used to have to actually hang out at the emergency room to find injured clients. Now you can fish for them using Google by advertising or optimizing for keywords prospective clients may type into the search box.

Here’s an example of how quickly lawyers jumped onto the results following the train crash in Los Angeles last week:

O’Keefe is not impressed with this side of his industry:

Do we have too many lawyers?

It’s behavior by plaintiff’s trial lawyers chasing clients like this that results in laws taking away the rights of the people these advertising lawyers say they are trying to help. Laws passed in the name of tort reform. It’s conduct like this that gives lawyers a bad name.

Maybe these lawyers do not care about more tort reform. Maybe these lawyers don’t care how they look to the average Joe on the street. Maybe in the chase for the money, they’ve become blind to how they appear. I don’t know.

While this has some downsides, it’s probably better than lawyers pitching their services in person where vulnerable prospective clients have less choice. And it’s certainly better than relying on the size of lawyer’s ads in the Yellow Pages as a measure of competence.

via paulj

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Dear PR Spammers,

I’m been wracking my brain trying to figure out why you send spam to the people who write blogs you clearly do not read. For the longest time, this practice of yours has made no sense to me, and I finally think I understand why you do what you do.

I think that you think that bloggers have more time than you do. Or, maybe you just think your time is more valuable than that of people who share ideas with the world on a daily basis?

I imagine that you’re scrambling for time between scraping the web for blogger’s email addresses, crafting the perfect non-solicited email to send to those bloggers, and attending lots of boardroom meetings. Put that together, and I can see how your day would be stressful.

I also imagine that your perception is that the bloggers you spam are less busy than you are. How hard can it be to write something original that builds and maintains an audience on a daily basis compared to crafting spam emails?

And I imagine you have the word “junior” in your title and hope to replace that someday with “senior” or “director” so you may be willing to step on a few toes to improve your pay grade.

But here’s the deal: Every influential blogger I know is one majorly busy person. In addition to blogging, they do things like work for startups, craft business strategies, design things that have never been designed before, come up with the ideas that change companies for the better, travel like crazy, write freelance articles, have families, have hobbies, and like to sleep a bit from time to time.

I think if you had a better understanding of the lives of the people you’re trying connect with, you’d come across as much less shallow and, frankly, disgusting.

And get this: some PR people actually get this already. They take the time to get to know people, figuring that quality beats quantity. They’re the ones who’ve mentioned Twitter, Google Reader, and going out into the real-world to meet people from time to time. Get to know them. They’ll show you how to do your job better.

I hope you haven’t found this too insulting. It’s the result of dozens of emails PER DAY that I receive from those of you who show no respect and hurt your industry.

Peace out.

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Chris DeLine declared social networking bankruptcy earlier this year after deciding that he wasn’t getting enough value out of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, after taking an aggressive step away (he went as far as deleting his accounts) he found that there may be more to this social networking thing than he previously thought:

Reengaging Facebook

In the following months however it began to dawn on me just how shallow my approach to all this. All I really had to do was take a moment to think about the impact that online social networking has had on me, and my relationships, in order to realize the significance that these sites have had on my life. A good share of my real life relationships began, in one way or another, as online contacts and a lot of my real life interactions (event planning, networking, etc.) were at some point in time mediated by Facebook.

Well said, Chris.

As I look at people going through similar phases, I think the rut some people get into is focusing on the metrics rather than the relationships. For example, Dodgeball.com allows me to keep in touch with 20 close, local, friends. That’s truly valuable to me.

There really is a crossover opportunity between online and offline friends. Personally, I see this happening most often through Twitter and my blogs. Both help people discover other people with similar interests, passions, or senses of humor.

I’ve gone as far as inviting people to my home whom I’ve never met or even talked on the phone with before but “knew” through comments on my blogs, Twitter, etc. It was clear that they were someone that I’d like to meet. That’s real value coming out of authentic online relationships.

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Here’s an easy way to double your email value: Wait 5 minutes before sending.

That’s it.

That’s enough time to come up with one more idea that you could include in your original email. Time enough to fix a typo. And time enough to see if someone else has already responded to the same question (in cases of multiple cc’d emails).

How does this double your efficiency? By making the emails people receive from you twice as valuable. If you could cut the number of emails you sent in half, but make the ones you do send more valuable, the people who receive email from you will find your emails twice as valuable.

Also, within that 5-minute time window, think to yourself, “Will everyone receiving this email find it valuable?” If not, remove people from the cc field or don’t send the email at all.

Respecting your reader’s time makes your email (and you) more valuable.

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I think eReaders are awesome. While Ed and I disagree on the subject quite a bit, I do end up using my eReader every day. I think the technology is so cool that recently I appeared as a guest on Twin Cities Live to talk about eReaders, what they are and why they are way more awesome than Ed lets on.

For those who missed it, on the TE YouTube channel you can see my initial review of the Amazon Kindle when it first came out. I have a Sony Reader, an iRex Iliad and an Amazon Kindle yet I have not done a video review of the three in a shootout. Need some motivation to product that clip, anyone care to see the Kindle vs the Reader vs the Iliad?

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Google announced yesterday that that made a change to how long they’ll associate a search with an IP address in order to better protect user’s privacy:

Another step to protect user privacy

We’ll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.

Is this good?

What if I WANT Google to know more about me for longer? Now that they’ve dropped the time period to under a year, will I see less relevant results on searches I conduct annually?

For example, what I happen to like “Rose” wine, and like to purchase it for a friend’s birthday each February. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google knew I was looking for the wine and not the flower? By storing data for a year+ they may be able to do a better job with this.

See more on this here.

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