ClickBrain

Evidently the data trackers at Facebook are seeing what I have been saying for weeks and that is that they are screwing up the model that made their system so addicting and that is that users use it to validate their existence and when they know that others may not see what they post, they will go elsewhere to send photos and updates. So, now Facebook is rolling out a Sort option to let users change the way they see their feed and get rid of the “let us do the thinking for you” model. Of course, the Sort to most recent is not the default option, because Facebook thinks their algrotihm is more important than their users needs and experience and so users have to know enough to make the change and see things how they want them. Here’s why this is still a miserable failure, because it still doesn’t mean your friends will see what you post, because they may not know how to make the change or even that they can.

Arrogance can be a very good thing in a technology company and it can be a bad thing. In this case it’s Zuckerberg trying to be Steve Jobs and know what is best for users, but in this case he doesn’t know what is best for users or his business.

Over the next few days, Facebook will roll out a “Sort” option at the top of the news feed that lets users select to see Recent Stories First instead of the default Highlighted Stories. The new feature should appease users miffed by Facebook’s move to combine the old Most Recent and Top Stories news feed tabs into a single stream. Until now, the hybrid news feed launched in September forced users to first see what Facebook considered the most relevant content. Some users found these decisions inaccurate even though they have the option to teach the algorithm.

The Sort feature lets users prioritize real-time updates over older content that’s been deemed compelling because of Likes, comments, clicks, and the viewer’s relationship to a story’s author. However, it doesn’t split the feed in two. Facebook tells me “The intent behind these updates is to make News Feed easier to navigate while still showing all the news in one place.”

via Miss “Most Recent”? Sort Facebook’s News Feed By Recent Stories First | TechCrunch.

Busy, busy, busy day. This is a great chart of the winner’s and losers in the most recent update to Google’s search Algorithm.

However, the sites that lost SEO visibility after the changes didn’t seem to represent any one group, as they also included some brands, blogs, broadcasters and even Google’s own Blogger.com, which dropped over 20%.

via The Winners & Losers Of Google’s Freshness Update Revealed | TechCrunch.

I’ll check it out and post more, but Google’s “Facebook” is becoming more Facebookish today with the launch of pages.

Google+ is taking another major step needed toward becoming a full-fledged Facebook rival: it’s launching Google+ Pages, which allow brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, and everyone else to establish a presence on the service. The product is a lot like Facebook Pages, but there’s one major difference: Google is baking some elements of Google+ Pages deep into its bread-and-butter search product.

via Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands (And Everything Else) | TechCrunch.

Here we go again. This just makes the case for fresh content updates being mandatory.

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items.

Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

via Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacts 35% Of Searches | TechCrunch.

Image via Wikipedia

Earlier today, I noticed what is called a pingback to this site which is essentially someone linking back to your content on your blog from their blog. Usually, that’s a good thing and I would send the author a thank you for pointing their visitors to my site, but in this case I was extremely annoyed. Why was I annoyed? Well, my content was being used in a page full of nonsense content on a site that is selling marketing services. The site in question was using a search engine optimization tactic of copying content from other people’s sites, mashing it all together to make the search engines think that it’s original content and essentially tricking the search engine into thinking that it was real and sending people to their site and boosting their rankings. There is no value in the page they created except to them and it’s against the rules for all the major search engines.

If you click the image to the below, you can see a screen shot of the original page to see what I mean.

Besides being against the rules, in my opinion, this is a dishonest and unethical tactic and if the company that did this is using this same SEO tactic to promote client sites, then it can also cause great harm to their clients and get their site dumped from the major search engines. Sadly, this is not an uncommon black hat tactic and you can find dozens of scripts on the web to take the lazy way out of creating content for search engine optimization purposes. Rather than take the time to create content of value to people and create something that people would actually want to see, they choose to take other people’s content and make the web a jumble of crap. The good news is that the geniuses at the major search engines continue to clean out the riff raff content on the web created by these SEO tactics, but it’s sometimes tough to keep up. We prefer to create original content based sites for our web marketing clients here in Miami, that provide real value to their potential customers and to the web in general while optimizing the content for the keywords that are important to them. Distributed content strategies are our number one SEO tactic and we would never risk our SEO clients’ reputation by using anything but ethical and honest tactics.

So, why does this have to do with being proud to be an idiot? When I submitted a form on the web site asking them to remove my stolen content, here is the response I received:

Hey cry baby, when you agreed to have your content syndicated you made it okay to publish this anywhere. You should be happy as your content is getting extra visibility but like the fool you are you are offended. What an idiot you are

So, I wrote back:

I have no problem with someone quoting my content for professional purposes in the context of their own original content, but when it comes to these types of pages that are used to trick the search engines into sending traffic your way, I want nothing to do with it.  So, if being professional and operating in an ethical manner in this profession is foolish, then I am proud to be called an idiot. Remove my content from your site.

I am proud to be an idiot and to be able to assure our clients that we never resort to these types of tactics. If you are in this business, then I hope you’ll join the proud idiots of the web marketing world and resist such desperate methodologies. There are sound and ethical ways to generate a lot of traffic to your web site, but it does take time and effort. Put in the investment and you will provide value to your prospects and to the web and you’ll see a return on your investment.

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