If you haven’t heard yet, some major, major sites are taking action to protest two major acts that are being run through congress. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House and PIPA (Protect IP Act) in the Senate are both set up to change the internet in a huge way if they pass. Essentially – the freedom we enjoy to express ourselves and communicate freely online may be in jeopardy.

SOPA has also been titled “The Great Firewall of America” and would allow the DoJ or related copyright holders to have sites blocked by search engines, advertisers, and even internet service providers to effectively shut down any sites that are deemed a threat to national copyright in any way.

The biggest issue with this posed by most opponents is that it will essentially cripple the Net as we know it. And some of these opponents are rather… well known.

As a response, several of these opponents will be taking action tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, in an online “blackout” to help educate many of what a real threat this could pose. Some of these organizations are as follows (all links below go to relevant pages regarding each site):

• Reddit.com – Will be completely shut down from 8 AM to 8 PM EST, instead displaying links to educational resources.
• Wikipedia.com – Will be blacked out for 24 hours starting at 5:00 UTC.
• Google.com – Will not black out, but will post a link on the front page to help educate users.
• Imgur.com – Will black out their gallery from 8 AM to 8 PM EST with a message about the acts.

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In the effort to get links and spread word of your business online, many people can get a bit overzealous.  Ryan Sammy put together an excellent list detailing the 7 deadly sins of content promotion.  I’ve summarized them here, with my own input on it.

1) Greed (Excessive promotion)

Some people think that putting everything that they have written or available and putting it online to link back to themselves is the only way to do it.  However, when doing this a lot of the content you put out is useless.  Spammy.  This will not do well for your image and can get you a bad reputation, and in some cases get you banned from the sites you submit content to for a temporary or even permanent amount of time.

Try to submit only quality content.  This will make people look forward to seeing your information, and if it’s not seen all the time, it also raises impressions of quality.  Plus it cuts costs in time and/or money to send information out.

2) Sloth (Trying to save time too much)

Doing good promotion work online takes a LOT of time.  This means early mornings, late nights, and details details details in order to do the job right.  A lot of people think, “I’ve got this content, let’s just fire it off using my easy-to-use software to all the social networking sites and we’re set.”  Well, there’s a major difference between Slashdot, Digg, Facebook, and Fark.  The same content will NOT do well on all of them.

Find out which sites would work well with the content you have.  Submit to them separately, not all at once, and uniquely, so you have different titles for your posts.  Identical titles will hurt chances of going viral.

3) Wrath (Attacking competitors)

Most sites have a way of reacting to posts.  By either giving it a thumbs up/down, making comments, or voting on the quality of a post, you can give a response.  Some people try to increase their post rankings by down-ranking all of their competition.  This can give a little bit of help, but will generally produce only bad long-term results.  You’ll make enemies, and some of these people WILL target you and retaliate.

The better way to do this is to not attack, but try to make contacts with others, even your competitors.  Sometimes this can help you work with each other to promote your content mutually.  And it’s better to avoid making enemies, so any attacks on you are best ignored.

4) Envy (Taking great content as your own)

This is one that I see a lot of.  There’s some amazing content that’s right in your market.  So why not use it?  And claim it as your own?  Since you can’t seem to create equal quality yourself because of time or talent, the best choice is to use someone else’s, right?  No.  It’s the web.  People will find out if you steal, and find out quickly.  This will get you banned very easily from the networks, and if you do it enough people will place you on their “enemy” list, which can have a variety of ramifications.

If you find content you think is great, give credit where credit is due!  (Note: check out my credit to Sammy for his excellent outline on these issues, with a link in place and all.)  By posting credit to the original author and/or a link, you’re helping each other.  And this causes no ill will when you respect the author.

5) Pride (Bragging about black hat achievements)

Some people try to gimmick the system with certain sites and find ways to get their posts elevated or as a front page listing, but by using nefarious tactics.  Even if you weren’t caught originally, talking about doing it and how you were tricksy with your techniques will get you caught.  The penalties for this can be drastic and long-lasting.

It’s better to play by the rules.  This way you keep your reputation and recognition for legitimate information.  The focus should be on providing quality content, not on gaming the system.

6) Gluttony (Single site promotion)

There are times when you find great success on one specific site.  Then when you learn how you succeeded, you can get more and more success by using the same methods you used originally.  The problem is when you forget about using other sites and focus ALL your energy on the one site.  It only takes a minor change to their system and site setup (or even the site to disappear) to ruin everything.

Try to distribute your time to multiple sites.  It will help get it to more markets and crowds, plus if one site makes a major change, it won’t hurt you nearly as much.  Keep up with the way each site works, and adjust when needed, without pouring all your time into a single channel.

7) Despair (Breaking the rules)

If you try everything and nothing seems to work, it can get frustrating.  Sometimes it seems like the only answer is to try dirty tricks, in some cases a lot of the same mistakes listed above.  Well, it may not happen immediately, but playing these types of tricks will get you into a bad place.  A lot of them will get you banned from sites, networks, and even search engines.  Then you’re dead in the water.

If you’re having problems, try looking around.  See what other people have been doing with legitimate methods, try some of them.  Ask people in your industry what they’ve been trying or have them look at what you’ve been trying.  You need fresh eyes to revise your approach.  Doing this will help.

Conclusion

Even though it may take a lot of time and get frustrating, playing by the rules of sites and social networks will pay off.  Create unique quality content to put on the web in a variety of ways and it will reward you.

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When working on a business, sometimes you get a bit sidetracked and don’t always keep up with some things.  In this case, it’s been the blog.  However, the site has a new look to it, and with it, some changes are to be made.

Well, it’s time to get working.  I’ve still been doing plenty of research, continually learning more about SEO and PPC (and other internet marketing approaches).  Sadly, I have not been placing this information on the blog, but that will be happening soon.

If there’s anything in particular that anyone reading this would like to find out more about, please feel free to comment here and let me know, I’ll report on the latest for any questions that are posted.

And let us know what you think of the new design!  We’ve worked quite a bit on it, hopefully it’s a good step forward.  Yes, we designed it ourselves.  Put a few little nuggets of bonus stuff in there for the extra nerdy visitors to the site.  Take a look, check it out.

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Guest blogs are a new area of content creation becoming more prevalent in the blogsphere nowadays.  Is this something that is good for SEO?  Or is it worthless for link building?

It’s a form of SEO that can work, to a degree.  The main issue is that there are several blogs out there that will accept “guest blogger”s that produce any level of quality information, including bad posts.

This reduces the level of quality for that particular blog, and will usually have a bad result in general.  Quality posts are respected and tend to be spread (and linked) more.  In this way blogs that only accept quality posts will get more traffic, get more attention, and the search engines will notice this.  Because of this these are the blogs that will rise in rankings, and those that accept any sort of riff-raff as content will fall behind.

So yes, guest blogging can be good SEO – as long as the content produced is quality content.  Anything else will not work as well.  But this is a standard rule for any type of link building in SEO.  Only quality content will build links.  The rule still applies here.

So keep this in mind – if you want to do good SEO, produce good content, and you’ll see more results than you would otherwise.  Outsourcing content creation to “writers” who do not know the material (or even the proper language, fully) will not help you in the long run.

My good friend Ann Smarty had more to say on guest blogging on a post she wrote at the Blog Herald.

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As many blogs that get decent traffic know, you often get a lot of spammy comments on your posts, even when you have a decent anti-spam plugin or two.  Well, there are other routes to go when you STILL get spam comments.  And I’ve found a nice one.Any good web designer knows what the htaccess file is and what it’s used for.  What a lot of people don’t realize is how powerful this file can be, when used right.

The htaccess file is a file that works properly from the root directory of your domain.  Usually it’s used to handle issues like canonicalization, but can also adjust the traffic you get in different ways.

In my case, I had found a few individuals from China that seemed to like trying to comment on my blog about luxury shoes.  Now I understand the general misunderstanding from people trying to do SEO on blogs with comments, but really – commenting on internet marketing blog entries about shoes?  That was enough to make me go ahead and take action.

So what I did is collected the IP addresses from all of these spammers (easily findable through any of my multiple log tracing tools, in addition to being blatantly visible through the blog back end comment tab).  I took these addresses and then created two lines on my htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} 222\.79\.17\.112
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/spammer.php [R=301,L]

Once these lines were entered, what it will do is take any visitors from the specified IPs and redirected them to a lovely page I made, just for them.  And no, the IP address has NOT been hidden to protect the guilty.  To make this work properly, all you need to do is make sure you put these first two lines in your htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

After that, just change out the IP address for the one you want to redirect, and then make that page one which you want to point them to (can be another domain entirely, if that’s your choice).  Then they can spam no more!  Or cease to bug your site, with whichever way they have offended you.  Have fun with it!

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I’m updating the blog.  It’s been too long, but I thought it might be good to start adding more than ONE new post a month.  So what I’m going to do is put some posts to link to other pages I find interesting and relevant.  I’ll still add informative posts of my own, although probably not quite as often.

To distinguish between me and my linking love, I’ll keep my name on the posts that are all me, and then for the posts that are linking out to a cool piece of SEO news or something, I’m using George.  So if you see George, he’s here to tell you about some cool new post on SEO news, something Matt Cutts might have mentioned, or an adjustment to one of the algorithms in the search engines.

I’ll be posting quite a bit more (well, George will), so keep watch.

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