Greetings, guys and ghouls. Halloween is just around the corner, and I don’t know about you, but here at aimClear we love a good scare. Any seasoned search marketer will tell you that in our industry, there’s blood-curdling terrors and freak-shows to behold… if you know where to look. From downright dreadful habits of search conference speakers to positively hair-raising social media faux pas, the petrifying threat of intra-community bloodshed… sometimes it’s like we’re one bucket of pig’s blood short of a B-rated horror flick. (Side note: Carrie = not B-rated.)

But perhaps one of the most spine-chilling aversions the search marketer could encounter is a so-called marketing must-read filled with outdated, misguided, flavor-of-the-month type garble, all held together by a gaudy eyesore of a book jacket and a really god-awful title.  In the [evil] spirit of sharing a spook and scream with our friends in the online marketing industry, we tapped into our Twitter communities this morning to help assemble the quintessential bookshelf of horrors. I give you: 66 of the Worst Search Marketing Books You’ll Never Read.

Special hat-tip to Bryan Eisenberg and aimClear’s own Matt Peterson for inspiring this post. Since they’re the brains behind the blog, they get to go first. Mmmmmmm, braaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnsss…..

Matt Peterson | @Matt_Peterson

• ME-Commerce: Self Centered Social Selling in the Cybersphere
• Why Rats Turn Left: Master Irrational User Behavior Inside The Clickzone (a McCartney-Lennon collaboration with Marty Weintraub)
• The How-To’s and Why’s of Competitive Speed Linking
• Killer Plurk Ads: Do These Even Exist?
• Tweet Ur Way 2 Congress: Convert Ur Followers 2 Legal U.S. Voters
• Meta-Stuffing RankClicker! & Other Winning SEO Insults
• Goalchieving Your KPIs through Logfile Analytics: A Comprehensive Pamphlet
• Title Tag Optimization: A Guide for Optimizing Title Tags | Tutorial & How-To Book About Title Tag Optimization
• Pasted Rage Wank – A Troubled Teenagers Guide to SEO
• Dirty, Kinky Data: Avinash Tells All! (Seriously Though, We Love Avinash)

Bryan Eisenberg | @TheGrok

• The Search Whisperer: Confessions of a Search Engine Optimist
• The Geek’s Guide to Gaming Google for Good
• Tales of a Marketing Renegade: The Marty Weintraub Story

Merry Morud | @merrymorud

• Marketing Wolfpack: Ways to Manipulate & Take Advantage of America’s Sheep
• In the Wild: Campy Low-budget Marketing Tactics Big Brands Can Learn From Local TV Advertising
• The Yellow Pages Aren’t dead: How to Get Your Ads to Stay on People’s Front Porch
• Click Cash! Perfecting the Gossip Blogz to Earn You Fast Cash

Netmeg | @netmeg

• Maybe They’ll Find It

Paul David Madden | @PaulDavidMadden

• Whitehat Link Building 101

Casey B. Yandle III | @cyandle

• The Keyword Tag is King! Why Businesses Don’t Need Social Media & Why Your Business Doesn’t Need a Website in 2011

Alex Payne | @alexmpayne

• Why Facebook is Dead and Where You Should Go Next
• Retro-Marketing: Keeping the Myspace Alive
• “Hey, Look Over Here!”

Claire Carlile | @claircarlile

• Customer-Centricity: Any Colour As Long As It’s Black

Kerry Dean | @kerrydean

• Rel Canonical & You: Sculpting the Modern Internet
• Marketers Are People, Too (j/k LOL)
• Learning to Lie With KPIs

Melissa Mackey | @mel66

• Forget Negative Keywords: Broad Match is the Way to Go – PPC
• SEO is Pointless – Just Buy All Your Traffic, It’s Easier

Scott Cowley | @scottcowley

• Link To Google From Your Website And Other SEO Secrets Search Engines Don’t Want You To Know About
• Blowing Up Foreign Embassies And Other Indirect Forms of Link Building

Elmer Boutin | @rehor

• Get More Followers: How to Hypnotize the Masses Via Social Media

Lisa Raehsler | @LisarocksSEM

• SEO is from Mars, PPC is from Venus

Aric McKeown | @aric

• Random Keywords: Playing Darts While Blindfolded in a Dark Room and Benefiting
• Social Encroachment Obsession: SEO and Why We Want To Be Stalked

David Taylor | @linkmonkey

• Let’s 301 to My Room: Pulling at SEO Conferences
• Ranker Spanker: How I Learned Everything About SEO From Being a Gimp

Bryant | @bryantdunivan

• Marketing in the Age of Yahoo, Panda and You: A Survival Guide to Algorithm Updates, and Black Hat Society: Still Hackin’

Joe Leyba | @joeleyba

• SEO Cloaking the Klingon Way
• Overseas Link Building – Putting the Seoul Back in SEO

Chris Countey | @chriscountey

• A Puppy in the Woods and Other Marketing Tactics We Can Learn from People Who Should Be in Jail
• Make Them Look! Making Websites That Look Like Actual Eye Tracking Results

Tad Chef | @onreact_com

• The Ultimate Guide to Kiss Social Media Ass for Fun and Profit

Angie Schottmuller | @aschottmuller

• The SEM Health Plan: SEO Workouts & PPC Liposuction

Jason Meininge | @shadowdaddy

• I Didn’t Know I Needed That! and Other Tales of Online Conversion Optimisation

Joshua Titsworth | @joshuatitsworth

• SEO the CRO for SMO of ROI

Alyssa Engleson | @aengleson

• My Eyes are Bleeding: Why Watching Realtime SERPs are Your Only Option
• Hipster SEO: Page 1 is so Mainstream, Page 8 is Where to Be
• Why Marketing Should be Left to the Interns

Last but not least, your [g]hostest-with-the-mostest had some ideas to toss in the pot:

Lauren Litwinka | @beebow

• Imma Sit On Your Facebook! How Real Community Managers Squash Competition
• Social Media Success: The Ryan Secrest Story
• How to Win More Website Hits Like A Baller
• SHUT YOUR FACE[book]! Why Social Media In the Workplace is a Really Terrible Idea
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Mark Zuckerberg Story
• Persuasive Marketing: Getting Your Customers To Do Absolutely Anything, Even Kill A Puppy
• There’s A Bandaid In My Burger! Sweeping Bad Social Media Under the Rug
• RT, PLZ! Surefire Tactics To Get Your Social Media Story Heard
• On-Page Optimization & Keywords: How To Stuff Them In The Right Holes, When, & Where
• Shave The Panda: How To Feel Better About Yourself After You Lose All Of Your Site Traffic
• Beneath The Bath Towel: Old Spice Guy Tell-All
• Even Old MacDonald Had A Farm: The Legacy of Content Farming
• Optimized Title Tags & Other Marketing Myths
• Auto-Play Videos, Pop-Up Live Chats, Scrolling Marquees, & Other Ways To Refine Your Website
• The Death of Site-Maps: Useless for Users, Pointless to Search Engines
• 2011: A MySpace Oddessy
• You’re Doing It Wrong! Ways To Repurpose Advice From Your Ex-Girlfriend For Better Online Conversions

Big thanks to everyone from the Twittersphere for their shocking / stellar contributions. You guys have the best / worst sense of humor Happy Halloween!

Obama for America’s team, or some troublemaker, is buying YouTube InStream pre-roll ads on a video featuring nude pictures of Scarlett Johansson. The President’s paid “follow-me” pitch introduces soft-porn.  This is a classic example of what can happen when demographic targeting is not carefully conceived and channels properly vetted.

Revenue from YouTube InStream ads is shared with the video’s publisher, so a percentage of every dollar Mr. Obama spends functionally subsidizes celebrity hacker-porn. Google, owner of YouTube, is the middleman.

We were watching MSNBC this morning and Scarlett Johansson’s cease and desist letters, surrounding the nude picture leak, was a top story.  Being curious and not readily familiar with Ms. Johansson, we had a look to see how Google was handling things.  The obvious search was for “Scarlett Johansson nude pictures.”

The pictures had already been removed from most sites. However, a bit down in the search engine results, there it was…a racy video posted on the Mahalo.com YouTube channel.  Now there’s some “high quality” [cough] content, as Mahalo promises in their YouTube profile blurb.

Imagine our surprise to fine that a pre-roll advertiser on the video is none other than our Commander in Chief,  President Obama [cough again].

President Obama is actually in fine company. Various Scarlett Johansson pic-videos are also fronted by YouTube “In-streaming” ads for other mainstream advertisers.  Nike is a member of the Scarlett Johansson soft-porn advertising club.

So is NBC.

It must be some careless YouTube demographic targeting which resulted in a pre-roll ad for Beneful dog food. Bow wow!

President Obama is most likely not aware that someone is schilling his brand introducing hacked nude pictures of a celebrity via YouTube ad units.  The big boss does not seem like that kind of guy, so perhaps he’ll have a word with whoever set up the ad’s demographic targeting.

Earlier today, we published the second half of 44 Must-See Internet Marketing Conference Speakers– a two-part blog post that paid tribute to industry luminaries who color the conference landscape pretty with smarts, sass, and everything in between. We believe search marketers are among the most beautiful people in the world, and that mini-series was one way to give back to those who give it their all. We also believe that there’s two sides to the conference-speaker-coin, and not everything can be all sunshine and pussy cats…

Fueled by what may have been but a playful suggestion from our friend @ToddMintz, @aimClear typed a tweet, lit a match and ignited a lightning-speed cyber-chat that moved so fast it was hardto keep up. Frankly, I’m surprised didn’t take down the server. Or become a trending topic. But… what was the topic?

What you, yes you, positively hate in conference speakers.

Mumbling, plugging, dishing out old news like it’s hot sh*t– the responses spanned the spectrum. The convo swayed back to admirable speaker qualities, then back to pet peeves– each response more colorful than the last. We wanted to capture the moment and share it here.

So… without further adieu, the unanticipated alien-third-arm of this Internet Marketing Conference Speaker series, 483 Things The World Loves & Hates About Internet Marketing Conference Speakers. (Well, it seemed like 483. Okay, shameless clickbait…)

The totally impromptu thirty-seven minute thread garnered more than five dozen responses. It spawned this blog post. It even made us some new friends. Best. Lunch break. Ever.

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All this talk of speaking has us excited for our Q1 conference calendar. First stop is SMX West….will we see you there?

‘Tis the season for peace, joy… and spamtastic holiday emails! No, this isn’t a rant about eCommerce direct email marketing campaigns– though life certainly would go on without explosive email blasts every morning at 3:25 am from a certain popular clothing store just itching to promote sweater sales & shipping discounts. The luxury of crossing everything off that mile-long gift list in a cool 60 minutes of online shopping whilst wearing sweats & slipper booties, sipping coffee spiked with Baileys is totally worth those pesky, more-often-than-not opt-out email blasts.

Our digital culture has almost grown accustomed to seasonal junk mail– sure, it kind of sucks, but it’s part of the package deal: with online shopping comes emails about online discounts, etc. However… when that holiday spam-mail isn’t coming from a chain retail store, but a church… and the recipient is a feisty marketer… eyebrows contort Grinch-style in curiosity, and the question begs to be asked: WWMWD?

Yes, what would Marty Weintraub do?  What indeed…
‘Twas the night before Saturday, December 11th, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring until BZZ BZZ went the smartphone at 11:37 PM, pulling Marty out of a  warm, cozy, productive, coffee-fueled book writing sesh. The couldn’t-wait-til-morning news? An email blast from church located about 2.5 hours south of Duluth, announcing its “~ CHRISTMAS BY THE CREEK in Maple Grove.”

Bothered by the needless break in concentration, the inclusion on an opt-me-in-without permission list, and the glaring lack of “Unsubscribe” functionality, Marty sent a simple request-reply:

To which he received this response from the sender the following morning:

To which Marty replied, at length:

Whatever the takeaways, we know now what Marty would do did. What about you? Does this instance make your skin crawl or is it a simple case of shrug-off inbox noise?

photo credit: slworking

The disdain on their faces is usually palpable.  I’ve been experiencing subtle Facebook derision from mainstream SEOs now for two years. Last week’s edition was a conversation with Greg Boser, President and CEO – 3 Dog Media, a new friend and brilliant speaker on the SMX Search Marketing Conference series circuit.

Dude is a salty-dog SEO genius. However, as we each shared what we were planning to discuss with Australian conference attendees, I had barely started when Greg made it clear, with nary a word, that Facebook demographic segments are a bunch of bullshit.  He actually squinted when I referred to Facebook “organic” as “SEO.” Go figure…

I didn’t take it personally. I never do.  Lots of SEOs have shot me similar vibes. Greg is representative of a generation of classic SEOs pioneers ranging from Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Aaron Wall to Todd Friesen, Andy Beard, Mike Grehan & Bruce Clay. Even PPC gurus like Andrew Goodman have dutifully curled their lips at me whilst I blissfully evangelized Facebook.

Don’t hate ‘em for that,  FB marketing fans. Not many in our industry were taking Facebook seriously compared to Google in 2007.  At that point I was busy blogging to (mostly) nobody with such semi-classics as Hail Mary Facebook Ads Saved Christmas and Does Facebook Social PPC Belong at Search Marketing Conferences. In 2008 when the late FB product Lexicon made me publicly giddy for all its demographic research prowess, it seemed like barely anybody cared.

Hey All You Dudes, now Facebook is up yer’ snoots. Like it our not, Facebook organic is SEO.

The SEO Pie Is Bigger Now
Look, Google is a channel not a strategy-a place where we market to users asking specific questions by their typing in a box and pressing “submit.”  For the last decade organic and paid “search” have ruled the roost.  Google is the last search-super power standing, at least for now. The art and science of so-called “SEO” has always been about prominence in search engines. Thus our industry’s true moniker was born. SEM means search engine marketing.

Marketers were first drawn to social media centering on participation’s propensity to index in engines’ organic SERPs (search engine results pages).  SEOs and reputation managers have been playing a social profile’s tendency to index in organic SERPs for years now. That’s because using social media profiles for SEO is low hanging fruit. In  those early days conversational marketers didn’t quite have enough volume of users. The “inventory,” as represented by hundreds of millions of fanatical users, was  somewhere else… asking questions of search engines.  Now there are 400 million people in Facebook just hanging out.

SEO Just Grew Another Head
Enter Facebook. The statistics are mind-boggling.  Google is no longer the undisputed king of American traffic, engagement and loyalty.  Over coming weeks and months, we’ll all hear about “best practices this” or “research that” for optimizing fan pages, events, people (yep, optimized people), groups, status updates, etc… Facebook is, like, half the Internet.  Ironically, we have reasonable cause to believe that, on a number of levels, FB shows tremendous promise in the local space… a nut no search engine has ever effectively cracked.

Meanwhile, third parties ranging from Yelp, Yahoo! Mail and YouTube all clamor like rats to grab a piece of the 400 million fanatical user-mashup pie.  Dial in a heaping doseof incestuous-fan page-status-update-real-time-searches indexing in engines, and there’s really a case to be made that Facebook-organic is SEO too, boys and girls.

Adding stew to the soup, Facebook has blown the hell out of SEO by way of these insidious and lovely social plugins.  Marketers now must concern themselves with research-driven usage of the social participation channels, without being full of shit. That sounds a like classic SEO to me .

Privacy Matters
Most Facebook users probably don’t know that clicking on an ad in the right hand sidebar easily results in our knowing exactly who they are, their progression within our website’s content and other stunning, albeit intrusive, behavioral insights. Your mom  doesn’t know that participating on websites mashed up with Facebook Social Plugs results in reveals her booty of interests for the entire world to see.

Personally I hate Facebook for these reasons. I only use the service to mirror restaurant-food-picture-from-around-the-world-tweets to my family and a few friends. I think privacy features are way too complicated for the average user.  It’s possible to clamp down the privacy settings as deeply restricted as possible, and still expose some profile attributes to complete strangers.

Reciprocally, ethical marketers like us can mine that data and leverage it for friending, leads, sales and other KPIs (key performance indicators). Dude, we’re all for privacy but if users are going to give us this data, we’re going to respectfully market to them. The problem is with affiliate dickheads who make hay on the backs of unsuspecting users.   It’s funny to think of Matt Cutts and other Google engineers quitting Facebook publicly. Really, who gives a shit? Where the rubber meets the road is that YouTube uses Facebook Share Buttons. YouTube is owned by Google. Go figure….

SEO Means Any Attainable Organic Search Result, Independent of a Specific Channel.

Facebook is an ecosystem sporting both organic contextual (fan pages, events, groups, profiles, apps’ & other participatory nodes) and paid contextual (Facebook PPC, MS brokered ads & Google Content Network). Organic nodes are fueled by participation and whole-hearted adoption of Facebook tools to organize a sharing community of real people.  Paid channels are all about mining extremely personal user attributes and serving highly-focused walk-by traffic.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t just for search engines. The moniker has grown to mean much more. SEO means optimizing content that appears any place people hang out.  However, if you must have that “search-in-a-box” mentality, simply start with  Facebook’s internal search engine focused on people, fan pages, apps, etc… greet that query with prominence advised by research. That’s SEO.

Then, get used to the idea of optimization of organic contextual.  There are so many people walking by so much content in Facebook that valuable collateral interrupt-marketing can be highly targeted and made more compelling by “SEO.” Trust me dude, the whole world is going to be making sure their events and fan pages are “optimized” soon enough.

Say it’s not really SEO. Say it’s called mango chutney IT botany. Whatever… just don’t call me late for dinner.  There’s little time for semantic disagreements amongst pundits. SEO only focused on Google will be relegated to being SEO for half the Internet. Even so, Facebook organic contextual will index more in traditional search engines as the social graph advises those precious Google & Bing algorithms. The question begs to be asked: What the hell is SEO now anyway?

Additional Resources:

• Facebook Internal Search: SEO & Ranking Hacks
• 10 SEO Tips For Maximizing Facebook Visibility
• Why Facebook PPC Is Crucial For Branding & How To Sell Your Boss
• Degrees of Separation, FaceBook, Twitter & Social Distribution Networks
• How to Use Facebook Ads Reporting Without Going Insane
• Branding, Direct Response, Intent & How Search Made Us Soft

Picture “Where the Hell Did YOU Come From?” courtesy of Lauren Litwinka (@beebow)

Here at aimClear, we’re proud of our in-house authors. Like many publications we also open our pages as a community platform to host guest bloggers. Sometimes guest posts are written by industry professionals whose practices are perceived by some as controversial.

Wait. Let’s stop right there. “Controversial.” That word can carry a negative connotation, one of altercation, agitation, even acrimony. But on the flip-side of the coin, “controversy” can be a beautiful thing. Controversy when hosted on a public, unbiased, progressive platform, such as a third-party blog, can function as an open invitation for conversation- healthy debate, passionate exchange of perspectives and core occupational beliefs. Other times, visitors with an unrelated agenda attempt to ruin the discourse.

As with all of our articles we hope such conversations germinate in the form of lively comment threads. We all thrive when readers absorb content and feel moved to take the experience to the next level by engaging the author or other commenters– right then and there. Harmonious, supportive comments are always nice… but sometimes there’s nothing better than a spicy swap of opposing points of view. Hell, we’re no strangers to a fight.

I may be stating the obvious but, when we publish a guest blog post, aimClear is not the author, or some schmaltzy endorser. We’re not saying we love or hate the blogger or topic. Think boxing: we’re not the referee breaking it up. We’re not the coach dabbing sweat and holding the spit bucket. A good blog editor is the Master of Ceremonies offering the mic. We’re hosts.

To emphasize, we’re careful to conclude each guest blog post with the same standard disclaimer: Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily aimClear. It’s crucial to note that our mission with guest blog posts is to provide a neutral platform where industry professionals can explore their perceptions, practices and principles, even… or especially… when they may be taken as contrarian.

Two weeks ago, aimClear published a guest blog post by Dennis Yu called, How To Make 45K a Day Scamming Facebook Ads. That’s a contrary sort of title, no? If you’re unfamiliar with Dennis Yu, note that there are differing opinions surrounding his work as an affiliate marketer.  We have no opinion.

Back in November of 2009, Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) published a blog post that really dug into his personal and professional experiences with Dennis Yu (not all sunshine and pussy cats). This was totally Schoemaker’s prerogative as it’s his blog and he can certainly write about any topic of his choosing. The post accrued 210 comments, many of which disparaged Dennis and thanked ShoeMoney for the heads-up. This may not have been the friendliest post or comment thread, but the relationship between one and the other, the relevance, was obvious: the post was about Dennis Yu… the comments were about Dennis Yu.  Everything was above board and everybody stabbed everybody else in the front. Bravo!

On the other foot, Dennis’s guest post for aimClear Blog explored the anatomy of alleged Facebook PPC ad scams. It did not address his professional work, his personal life… in fact, he barely used the words “I,” “me,” or “mine” at all.  The post was about marketing! The thread amassed over a dozen comments, agreeing with the post’s perspective or opposing it… a.k.a. healthy conversation surrounding an apparent controversy. Bravo again!

That said, one comment in particular offered genuine criticism speaking to the alleged Facebook ad scheme discussed in the post.  The commenter even shared that he had a sketchy past himself.

Spliced between the penultimate sentence and the final sentence of this comment, Harrison decided to add, “For all of you please see [this],” including a link to the ShoeMoney post, “to see the real dennis” (his capitalization, not ours).

Really, Harrison? Was that necessary? Doesn’t almost every affiliate and their mother know about ShoeMoney’s post? Why do our readers have to know Shoe’s vision of “the real dennis” in order to understand the main points and intent of this blog post? What value did your external dropped-link resource contribute to the topic at hand? That’s like saying you need to know about Michael Jackson’s trials to dig the song Billy Jean. Bunk!

After aimClear President, Marty Weintraub, allowed the comment, our publications manager (moi) asked herself a few salient questions and decided to trim the comment, removing the “take a look at how Dennis sucks” afterthought and irrelevant link to the ShoeMoney post. We no found redeemable merit in attacking the author. Out of respect, Harrison was notified via email.

Shortly after, Harrison left another lengthy comment, pictured below. We removed additional language  where he went into some detail regarding experiences with Dennis Yu and, uh, shared unrelated matters  regarding Dennis and Harrison’s mom and dad. We also thoughtfully pruned parts where Harrison reproached Dennis’s participation in various ventures and flat out called him crappy names, all the while proclaiming that he himself was simply “trying to help [us and aimClear Blog' readers] not fall for [Dennis's] con and just feed his reputation with free publicity.” Fail!

We contacted Harrison, again to let him know we had edited personal attacks out of the comments thread and publicly made note with an inline bracketed message. That’s just how we roll, above board.

Marty even inserted a short and general disclaimer about aimClear Blog etiquette as a separate comment. This was out of respect for Harrison and our readers. We do this in the rare occasion when we feel compelled to remove user generated content.

While we don’t reveal private exchanges that take place between our staff and readers, suffice to say that multiple individuals raised the concept of freedom of speech-impinged to us via email.

To those confused persons who believe this matter to be a freedom of speech issue, y’all could learn something from limited-time-only Miss California, Carrie Prejean. Horrified by the aftermath of her controversial (there’s that word again!) response to a pageant question about gay marriage, Ms. Prejean argued to the point of tears that her holy first amendment, her freedom of speech, had been ripped away.

Newsflash, hotshots: freedom of speech is “the right to speak, or otherwise communicate, one’s opinion without fear of harm or prosecution,” and that’s prosecution in the legal sense. If we were the government, and you typed that comment, and we trimmed it here and there, then you might consider your freedom of speech impinged. But we ain’t. We’re aimClear.

“Freedom of speech is not a blanket guarantee,” Marty pointed out the other day. “For instance, it is against the law to engage in hateful speech that results in a mob being incited to murder, even if the victim is a pedophile. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater and it’s against to law to liable, which means saying disparaging things in public that are not true.”

Here’s a simple run-down of our blog comment-expectations, in the ever-eloquent words of Marty Weintraub (who was visibly upset) for you and the “sniveling immature monkeys who think they know about American law:”

• “If you take issues with the alleged facts, call us out. We’ll publish your comments right away and admit if there’s been a proven error.  Our blog is replete with appropriate redactions, apologies and respectful discourse. Otherwise, fuck off.”
• “If you have issues with any content’s tone, hoist the flag, pal, and we’ll step right up.”
• “If all you want to do is publish some out of context bullshit case study to prove that someone sucks, go somewhere else because we’re more ethical than that.”

The Editor’s Take
To my mind it boils down to this: had the blog post been a flagrant touting or damning of Dennis’s character, Harrison’s comments would have been applicable, and therefore, remained intact.  By truncating the comment, we weren’t defending Dennis Yu’s  honor like some knight in shining armor- we were preserving contextual relevance.  We barely know Dennis Yu but the post raised what still seem to be serious issues regarding Facebook’s ad platform.

If a blog post addresses marketing tactic, blog comments should address the tactics, and not question the personal constitution of the author.  This is not “Law and Order.”  You’re welcome to tell us we’re wrong. Tell us the assertions are off the mark. But discuss the freakin’ point at hand as opposed to using our pages as your personal pissing posts.  Take your petty playground name calling outside and grow up, please. </rant>

photo credit: Nick J Webb

Whether dealing with a Twitter avatar,  teenager, office associate you see each day, ex-boyfriend or StumbleTrolls, resorting to ugly name-calling is counter productive. Because social media amplifies physical life and vice a versa, it’s doubly important to be civil.

A review of the daily news and subsequent social media buzz highlights how damaging rhetoric flares between physical and online channels.

“You lie!” Regardless of whether you agree with Congressman Wilson or not, he was criticized for his lack of civility.  Wrong time, wrong place.   But there is something more than a lack of congressional civility at issue.  Congress has never been a model of civility.  Remember Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton  settled their dispute with a duel.

But, such behavior is becoming more acceptable in our everyday lives.   The diplomacy of every day interactions is giving way to name calling, angry outbursts and hyperbolic rhetoric.   Otherwise rational people try to one up each other with degrading labels slung at anyone who thinks differently, dares cross their interpretation of the truth or looks at them funny.  This is a problem that transcends political, religious or civic affiliations.

What does name-calling get us?   Liar, cheat, thief, lazy, socialist, fascist, ….none of these labels work towards a more peaceful existence – for anyone.  This isn’t about global peace, this is about peace in your home, school, family and community.

Just look at how Congressman Wilson’s name-calling was amplified in Twitter as a national leader fostered a nasty dynamic:

If you label someone a liar, do you feel better?  If you call an idea or person your Facebook friend supports stupid, unpatriotic or evil what have you proven?   That you can write a nasty email or scream across a crowded bar (in cyberspace)?    Instead, name-calling serves to entrench everyone in their positions to prove they are correct in their labeling or to prove that the label is false.   No civil exchange of ideas can take place with those words on the table.

Our energy is better spent finding ways around the misunderstanding (the “lie” may actually be someone else’s fair interpretation of an event or a difference in philosophy).  “I’m sorry that’s now how I recall our decision, can we find a way to work through this” would be so much more productive to long-term peace over the Thanksgiving table than “I never agreed to host Uncle Tim, that fascist louse, for the holidays. I can’t believe you would tell such a lie to everyone, but what should I expect you are such a liar about everything.” Even simply agreeing to disagree would be better for all.   “I am so sorry we don’t recall the discussion the same.  I simply don’t have room in my new condo to host the entire family.  Perhaps we can meet Uncle Tim for a movie after dinner.”

Yes, there are liars in this world.  Cheats, lazy people and also sorts of other bad people.   There are ways of holding people accountable if they have breached a law or contractual obligation.  But, in day to day dealings with the co-worker in the next cubicle, our family and even the person in front of us at the store, throwing out such labels does nothing but bring us all down.

Shouldn’t we be better than hurling epithats at someone we don’t like with whom we have a disagreement  by now?  Haven’t we all had enough therapy, conflict resolution and anger management training to know better?   My mother told me “if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.”   Sometimes, I am very quiet.

But, I never regret refraining from name-calling.  Sometimes I even find out the other side of the story and realize my initial impression wasn’t based on all the facts – and (horror!) I may have even been wrong.   But, I don’t have to say I’m sorry or find a way to make amends if I simply accept that same people don’t see the world the same way I do.   Depending on the issue, I can decide whether to invest in finding a middle ground, improving communication for next time or simply walking away.

Which brings us back to Joe Wilson.  What did he gain by calling the President a liar?  He certainly cheered his constituency.  But, did he make it possible for his position to be heard, considered fairly and maybe move leaders’ opinions?  Probably not.   So what is better for the issue:  to cheer your base or create an atmosphere where mature, thoughtful dialogue can occur on any issue that may bring about improvement in the situation?   I suppose the ultimate answer is whether you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Laura Weintraub is a Duluth, Minnesota Attorney

photo credit: sinisterbluebox

<rant> I was strolling along the lake towards our lovely Canal Park Office this  morning, when my Blackberry (sonar sound) alerted me to an email. I was consumed noodling on possible blog topics for today and weighing ideas against our team’s imposing schedule. The sound of an email spammer trying to buy doFollow aimClear Blog content links that violate Google’s terms of service, jolted me a bit. Little did I know that some moron was about to make my day.

I read the email. It was some link-building dude trying to buy hidden doFollow links, to build links to his link-building business! My first thought was freakin’ LOL! The second thought was more efficient.  “Well that takes care of my blog post for today, Marty!”

Upon arrival at the shop, we took a staff vote, overridden by me…and decided to occasionally publish these types of emails in the future as an exercise of cleaning spam out of our email boxes. Before we share the spam letter I received, here’s the recommended takeaways from this post in advance:

• Tip #1: Don’t send stupid solicitations to SEOs, you never know when they might publish it.
• Don’t ask SEOs to violate any search engines TOS, at least not in writing.
• Tip #2: Don’t piss off SEOs
• Tip #3 Reread tips #1 &#2.

——Original Message——
From: Paul White
To: Marty WeintraubSubject: aimClearBlog Contact Form
Sent: Aug 26, 2009 8:03 AM

Paul White wrote:
Hi,
I would like to become an advertiser on your site. I am looking to place a
small text link ad. Do you allow those types of ads and if so would you be ok
with a do-follow link?

I usually ask for one line with just a few words. I prefer them at the top,
middle, or bottom of the main content area of the site. However, I am sure we
can work out placement.

The keywords the ad would be targeting would be “link building” related. If you
accept this type of advertising please let me know what you would charge me to
place a link ad on your site. Feel free to call me if you have any questions

Thanks

Paul White
Inventory Manager
inventory.pwhite@gmail.com
(661)754-6089
Website:
IP: 116.71.178.97

</rant>

Egregiously incompetent, cutthroat, reckless or outright dishonest? No matter how you slither it, the latest generation of predatory SEO creeps proffer blatantly false information camouflaged by pretty reports. Deceptively branded reports aside, buyer beware when the snakes come to call. Here’s some hard facts to dispel this week’s crap-ass haze of myths and misinformation.  [Author's Note: This post is not aimed at any specific SEO firm, rather the amalgamate of experiences we've had over many years.]

Background
The subject of our indignation today is an SEO “audit” one of our brand-clients received.

No worries. We don’t have any reason to be defensive, as our work has helped move the client’s website from a single PR2 property to (4) PR5 properties in a little over 18 months. I was invited to the conference call to receive a personal presentation of this audit, but could not make it. It’s probably better that I didn’t participate. We received a copy of of the “free SEO report card” a little later.

To Be Fair
There are some issues revealed in the audit, that any mechanized site-grader tool would catch. Life happens in the day to day evolution of a CMS as a result of new application development in between quarterly audits. However any good information in this business-grubbing ploy, is vastly obscured by dangerous hyperbole and lies.

Here’s just a few scary highlights as a warning for future report card recipients.

Free SEO Report Card writes: “Also know that only 1 page is indexed in Google and only 24 pages are indexed in Yahoo.” Fact: Oops! The site has hundreds of pages crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo. So far as we’re concerned this egregious error tells everything that needs to be told about the quality of the reporting company’s work. Here’s a snapshot of Google WebmasterCentral’s crawl stats relating to Googlebot’s activity in the last 90 days.

Of course, Googlebot crawling the site does not mean that pages are indexed. We tested the site using the following SEO 101 pages-indexed queries (aimClear Blog substituted for client’s site): Google, Yahoo, Bing. Had the audit technician run these basic tests they would have seen that site-grader program misfiring. Bing, Yahoo and Google all show over 700+ pages indexed. Fail!

Speaking of the big crawl, Free SEO Report Card writes: “H1/Header Tags (The H1 text is a vital area for spiders (crawlers that “crawl” your page for information) to find vital information to improve your rankings.)”

Ooooh Noooo Mr. Bill! Fact: H1 tags are important for structure & usability, not for stuffing your “Hey Google, look at me!” keywords. At SMX Advanced last month (on a panel I was on) Rand Fishkin showed correlation data revealing H1, H2, H3 etc. tags are just a sliver of the important on-page features. “Vital for spiders?” FAIL! Better sign up for some training or at least read a bit more before you spew incorrect data from last year.

Let’s talk about W3C Validation. Free SEO Report Card writes: “Strong W3C validation: NO (58 errors and 10 warnings) Facts: Let’s begin with the report card-toting interactive company’s homepage. It’s got W3C CSS validation errors.

The good news is that while it’s optimal for site visitors, using interpretive devices, to have access to validated code, Search engines do not penalize (some say devalue) unless the site literally can’t be crawled, far from reality in this case.

Adam Lasnik of Google said “Rewarding validation & accessibility of documents would be a slippery slope.” Our client’s validation errors have no noticeable effect on usability or search engine performance. The site was coded for users and then search engine spiders, not for a web standards body. It happens to work in my BlackBerry too. The only reward you get for the time spent chasing these errors is a little W3C badge you can put on your site. Guess what? FAIL!

Free SEO Report Card reads: “Overall grade: D.” WTF! Advanced SEOs debate how to assess the progress and success of websites. Search engine algorithms are complex amalgamates of raw power distribution, trust and semantic clues.

What is the continuum of this grading scale? How are these criteria ranked, equalized and correlated to some f_ucked up grading scheme? You have not seen analytics, progress over time or WebMasterCentral. Heck, you don’t even know how to value the most basic SEO attributes. What the hell are you doing telling a company that their site has ANY grade.

The best is saved for last, perhaps the most irresponsible assertion of all. Free SEO Report Card writes:

Fact: Free SEO Report Card has no clue what keywords are targeted and the client’s objective for the site. Every word on an HTML page is technically a keyword. In this case the research that went into defending our client’s brand and products considered many sources including analytics, traditional KW research tools and social media chatter.

The keyword strategy resulted in hundreds of thousands of new visitors on keywords that were targeted. It’s an incredibly deceptive practice to flip out such damning rhetoric to get business. Shame on you.

Conclusion: Forwarned is Forarmed
Fact: This is not kindergarten Mr. SEO report card. This is a beloved national corporation’s online presence and livelihood. There are other marketing firms involved in its interactive products, which (though not perfect) we’re all plenty proud of. There were other silly assertions in the “audit,” but we don’t have time or inclination to address them all.

We take note that searching for your company and it’s visible personal results in a great big ZERO in the thought-leadership department. It’s easy to see why. The brag-sites you’ve posted on your online brochure look one step ahead of payday loan sites. Here’s our SEO report card for you. FAIL!