Old Spice Man Answers Tweets On YouTube—Ropes In Kevin Rose, Alyssa Milano, And Justine Bateman

What if commercials really did talk to you? What if a familiar spokesperson addressed you by name and responded to your thoughts and feelings. In what is definitely one of the more creative social media ad campaigns in a while, Old Spice is doing just that. Its shirtless, muscled spokesman, the Old Spice Man, is shooting YouTube videos in response to people’s Tweets. Many oft these are well-known people with tons of followers like Kevin Rose and actress Alyssa Milano, who retweet the videos and spread them virally. For instance, Digg founder Kevin Rose Tweeted out that he was sick, and in response the Old Spice Man created the video embedded above, in which he tells Rose that he has never had a fever himself because his body is “98 percent muscle.” He even talks to Rose in binary code so that Rose can understand, to which Rose responded on Twitter : HOLY SH*T, best get well video EVER from the old spice man! http://bit.ly/dpSeOs And : OMG… the old spice guy is stalking me.. ha’!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O44C765UiMw The Old Spice Man also made multiple videos for actress Alyssa Milano , as well as ones for Olympic skater Apolo Ohno , actress Justine Bateman (who Tweeted , “Can the Old Spice guy do ads for ALL the world’s products?”), and Gizmodo . But he also responds to less famous people on Twitter like “Gabe” (see below). The responses are often hilarious. (“My concern is that if I did ads for all the world’s products, it would cause global prosperity”). And they are certainly highly targeted. And it also just redefined the model for Promoted Trends. Old Spice is a promoted Trend, which takes you to the Old Spice Twitter account highlighting these videos as individual responses addressing each Twitter user who gets their own Old Spice commercial. The irony is that if Old Spice hadn’t paid to be a promoted Trend, it probably would have made it as a Trending Topic organically. But apparently you can’t appear twice as a Trend. There are already more than 100 customized Old Spice responses on YouTube. We just wonder how long the Old Spice Man can keep it up. Below is a sample, along with the original TV commercial. CrunchBase Information Twitter YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase

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Old Spice Man Answers Tweets On YouTube—Ropes In Kevin Rose, Alyssa Milano, And Justine Bateman

Twitter Starts Name Dropping In Search Results — Huge For User Discovery

Admit it, 99% of your Twitter searches are for vanity purposes. You do it, I do it, we all do it. And such a search revealed a potentially very useful and powerful new feature today. Twitter is now injecting name results into searches on twitter.com when you do a regular search for a name. To be clear, Twitter has had a name search option for some time, but this is the first time they’ve put it front and center in the main tweet stream when you do a search. As you can see, name results now appear just above regular realtime tweet results for name searches. These names are displayed horizontally rather than vertically (as regular tweets are). This feature adds another user discovery layer to Twitter. And this is potentially the biggest one yet. For example, when I search for “ LeBron James ” now I can see his actual account on top of the results and follow it with one click (thanks to the hovercard). That’s very powerful. Twitter recently updated its docs to reflex this new people discovery feature. A year ago, they tweaked their title tags to help with user discovery for SEO. The feature also uncovers a number of false or fake accounts — so verified accounts are likely to be more important than ever. Twitter smartly added the little blue checkbox next to name in these results to show the verified one (and presumably puts those ones first). Expect celebrities on Twitter to get a lot more followers with with new feature. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase

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Twitter Starts Name Dropping In Search Results — Huge For User Discovery

Google’s Brand Debacle Backfires

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free. Sure that can make sense for seasonal promotions, but you could do the same thing by having subdomains and sister websites. Dell.com can be the main site, Dell.net (or deals.dell.com) can be the deals & promotions website, and Dell.org can be the good karma charity site. No paying someone else for brand you already spent to build. Beautiful. But I digress… In October of 2008 Google’s CEO revealed which ad Dollars they were chasing , and what loophole they were opening up in their relevancy algorithms “Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” That led to the brand update , and now Google even recommends specific brand modifiers when you search for words like “digital cameras.” …and here is the problem… Less than 2 years after Mr. Schmidt’s prophetic brand drivel, the Financial Times is doing a series on Google, in which Google’s Amit Singhal is blaming brands as being a major issue : Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence. … Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition” : where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect , he adds. No mention (of course) that it was Google which put excessive emphasis on domain authority, or how Google gutted the link graph , or how Google funds most of the content mills with AdSense . Those are all irrelevant details, just beyond Google’s omniscient view. The other thing which is absurd, is that if you listen to Google’s SEO tips, they will tell you to dominate a small niche then expand. Quoting Matt Cutts : “In general, I’ve found that starting with a small niche and building your way up is great practice.” And now brand extension is somehow a big deal worth another layer of arbitrary manual inspection and intervention? Meanwhile scraper sites are still clogging up Google , and they claim they need to write better algorithms to detect them. It isn’t hard to see the sun at noon! If sites which expand in scope deserve more scrutiny then why is there so much scrape & mash flotsam in the search results? What makes remixed chunks of content better than the original source? A premium AdSense feed? Brand?

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Google’s Brand Debacle Backfires

An Inside Look at Competitors Backlinks with Open Site Explorer

Posted by fabioricotta This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Hi SEOmoz folks, Sometimes we begin a new SEO consulting job and do not to know where to start our Link Building. We have a lot of options but the first thing I really like to do is to analyze what my competitors are doing. As we know, one of the best ways to analyze backlinks is by using Open Site Explorer (OSE) . With this tool we can submit a domain and see which pages on the web are linking to it and some awesome metrics. We can use it to begin our analysis. The first thing you need to do is to create a competitor list. Then you need to go to OSE and insert your competitor(s) domain(s). Then you will filter by links from “External Pages Only” and “All Pages in the Root Domain”, as you can see below. With these filters, we guarantee that we will have an overall look at your competitors’ website backlinks. After the above steps, we need to export all this data by clicking on “Export to CSV”. After that, you will import this data to Excel: Next, you will remove the 6 first lines, as they are only comments. Then you need to select the first line, click on the Data Tab and select “Filter”. This will give you the ability to sort every column by some filters. Now we can begin our competitor analysis. For this part, I have chosen 9 commonly used link building strategies that you can use OSE and find what your competitors are doing. So, let’s take a look: Finding Directories As some SEOs know, using Directories as part of your link building strategy can provide a good value to your backlink profile. If your competitor is using any directory strategy, we can find it using OSE data, filtering the Title column by the text filter “directory” or you can filter the URL column with text “directory”. The good part of that is that you can see the Page Authority and Domain Authority of each directory page that your competitor is listed in and figure out to which one you should submit your website. A “bonus” filter you can use is filter by PA above 5 and DA above 20, so you will remove all the bad directories from your list. Niche Forums One thing that I really like are forums, maybe it’s because most of my knowledge came from there. Well, thinking about link building and SEO, when you find a niche directory, you find a community that talks about the same thing (or related) as you. If those members recommend your services you can get really good leads. So, one thing you can do is to investigate which forums your competitors were recommended in, so you can interact with those people. The idea here is to filter the Title column by the text filter “forum” or you can filter the URL column with text “forum”. Using it will retrieve all the forums that provide at least 1 link to your competitor. You can use the same tip here that I gave in the last topic. Powerful Profile Pages Sometimes when we do a link building strategy we use some profiles to post and interact with customers and people about our website. And sometimes, those platforms that we use for it provide ways to drop a link (eg. user website). Based on this idea, one cool idea is to check which social networks your competitor is working. You can do it easily by filtering the URL column or Title column by text filters “user” or “profile”. After identifying those profiles check how you competitor is working with it, like how is he interacting with the community, check if he is creating new content, check which keywords he is using on that new content. A good tip here is to check the backlinks to that profile page. We noticed that some competitors are buying links for that profile page, so they can get more juice and spread it to their content. I am not telling you to do the same, but maybe you can file a spam report. Tag Pages A common and cheap link building tactic is to submit your website to social bookmarking websites. Sometimes, social bookmarking does not provide a strong enough value, but many SEOs use it as a base for their link building strategy. So, you can find which social bookmarking websites your competitors are using. The good thing (tip) here is to find a niche social bookmarking website. Those kind of websites can provide you some good leads as they are related to your niche. So, be careful when checking this. To find the tag pages and then the social bookmarking websites, you can filter the Title column by text filters “tag” or “tagged”. Another filter you can use is “tag” in the URL column. Where They are Submitting Articles As Rand pointed in a previous Whiteboard Friday , if you create a good Article Submission strategy you can get some good links and traffic. For example, you can filter the URL column with some already known article directories (“ezinearticles.com”, “amazines.com”, “articlealley.com”, “articleindex.net”, “goarticles.com”, “articlesltd.net”, “365articles.com”, “articletrader.com”, “articlesbase.com”, “thebestarticles.com”, “mycontentbuilder.com”, “thinkarticle.com”, “articlerumble.com”, “gsarticles.com”, etc…). The idea here is to find where your competitors are gaining links and then find their profiles. After that, grab a list of all articles that they posted and run a OSE report for each link (you can do it using the SEOmoz API). Check which ones have a large number of backlinks. Then you need to check why they attracted so many links and just use that idea to create some new content. A bonus tip here is that some article directories enable comments with link… so, try to comment in your competitors’ best articles. Resource Pages as Good Backlink Sources Some years ago, one of the common things that webmasters did was to create pages listing some useful links as resources. Nowadays it’s not common but the point is that there are a lot of resource pages out there. So you can check if your competitor is listed in any resource page and then ask the webmaster to include your valuable website. It’s really easy, but don’t forget to be generous and really show that your website can help their visitors. To find the resources page, you can filter the URL column using the text filter “resources”. I’ve tried to filter the Title column but I didn’t like the results I found. Competitors Press Releases When we talk about press releases we need to be careful about our objectives. The first thing here is to identify which company your competitor is using to distribute their press releases. So you can filter the URL column by the common PR Distribution companies (“prweb”, “send2press”, “prnewswire”, etc…) and since those companies sometimes publish the press release inside their domain, you can find your competitor’s press releases. The second step is to grab a list of all press releases they published and do the same thing I told you about article directories’ profiles. Find which are the most linked press releases and why. This will give you some advantage in your next press release. Linkbait with InfoGraphics One of the latest link building tactics is to create amazing InfoGraphics . The cool thing for link building is that if you create a good infographic it can go viral and provide a lot of backlinks. So the point here is to see if your competitors are using infographics to get links. To check it, just filter the Title column by text filter “infographic” and you will find the list of infographics that give links to your competitors. The point here is that you can tell me “Hey, when I create an InfoGraphic I post it at my site, not in someone’s else blog”. You are right, but the point here is that some websites can’t use / post those kind of images inside their structure, so they need to publish it as guest post. A tip here is: if you find an infographic inside a blog, don’t forget to comment in the comments area. You can get some value there. Trusted links: Any .EDU or .GOV links? Most of the linkbuilders love .edu and .gov links. They are strong, they are trusted and they really rock. Based on that, you can check if your competitors have any link coming from any of those TLDs. You can find it filtering the URL column by text filter “.edu” or “.gov”. You need to check why your competitors have those links and then try to find a way to get them. Don’t forget to avoid those .edu crap networks. Wikipedia Links Worldwide known, Wikipedia is a great source of visitors and leads. We can’t count their backlinks because of nofollow, but they still provide value by sending you traffic. We made some Wikipedia strategies for some clients and those links are just growing our referral visitors. You can find the Wikipedia pages that link to your competitors by just filtering the URL column by text filter “wikipedia.org”. One thing to remember is that Wikipedia (moderators) does not like spam or commercial stuff. So the easy way we find to get a link from them is by adding some valuable content, specially when you adds notes about statistics that you published in your press release. This really rocks and in most cases they allow you to reference your data source (you). Conclusions We saw in this article that using a SEO tool such as Open Site Explorer could help you to find what our competitors are doing, providing us some insights on how to create our SEO strategy. It is important to highlight that I am not telling you to get the same backlinks that your competitors had, but I am trying to show you is that you can begin your strategy by getting the best of what your competitors did, and then, improve with your own ideas. Hope you liked this post! Fabio Ricotta is the Co-Founder of MestreSEO , a brazillian SEO company. Do you like this post? Yes No

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An Inside Look at Competitors Backlinks with Open Site Explorer

6 Ways to Learn SEO

Posted by randfish One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is “What’s the best way to learn SEO?” There are

Content Farming – SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t

Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms. Content farms, such as Demand Media’s eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry “concern”. “Industry” being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being “competitive threat”. A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled ” Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout “. They talk about “job threatened journalists” and “diminishing content standards”. Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press! The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs. For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns “quality” results. Since when has Google ever been about “quality” results? Google’s aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant . “Quality” and relevance may not be the same thing, and thinking in terms of an arbitrary notion such as quality is to misunderstand what Google does. For example, if a searcher, with a below-average level of reading in English wants a quick answer to a question about the common cold, then who’s to say a simple, peer-produced bullet-point explanation is less relevant than a doctoral thesis on the same topic? Everyone benefits when the answer is factually correct, of course, but there’s nothing to say the content mill won’t offer factually accurate content just because the production process is low cost. If geared towards rankings, the content may also offer the facts in a format the user finds more useful. Google is mostly about utility. It’s about providing value to the end user. “Quality” is very much in the eye of the beholder. Let’s also not forget Google argue that Adwords – advertisements – are content, which are also rewarded by a relevance algorithm. I’m guessing the council won’t be arguing that advertisements can be a form of quality content any time soon. And what does quality mean anyway? And who defines it? I think I can guess what the elitists at the ICSC may argue – they know what it is, and they will define it! Nice work if you can get it, I guess. Solutions To The Content Crisis One solution they offer to this perceived “content crisis” is to create a set of public guidelines for internet content, or an accreditation process for syndicated content. Heh. Reminds me of the SEO “best practices” debates of years past. The result will be the same, of course – they’ll end up talking to an audience that consists entirely of themselves. Everyone else will be getting on with the job of producing content. What concerns us is that most of these new content syndicators are producing low-quality articles that are link based,” said Tim Duncan, the ICSC’s recently installed executive director. “They are designed to score high on search. That drives down high quality content. Wikipedia, and white hat SEOs, might not agree, of course. Content can both be ranked well and be highly relevant. This is, after all, Google’s aim. Some ICSC members have even advocated reaching out to Google to urge the search giant to tweak its algorithm to give more weight to content quality in its search results Hilarious. I think they mean “any content they think is quality” Perhaps Google can send them a regular cheque each week, too! I suspect money is the true driving force, as opposed to any real concern for editorial standards. Have you seen some of the trash the MSM serves up ? Quality stuff, certainly. At the end of the day, quality standards arguments are pointless. Besides the confused frame of journalistic news vs Q&A-style content, the end user decides the level of quality they will accept and pay for on the internet. The real problem traditional publishing and the mainstream media is facing is that their business model is screwed. Their content production costs are simply too high, and they are being undercut. If they think that people want higher quality, then the answer is simple – produce it and let the visitor decide. And get some good SEO advice, so they don’t inadvertently bury it. Google Joining In? In a further twist, Google might be looking to join the content mills at their own game. An interesting patent, ” Identifying Inadequate Search Content ” identifies keyword areas where there is search demand, but low levels of relevant content. That’s essentially what Demand Media does. Assuming Google don’t/can’t get into publishing for every vertical in existence , Google would do well to make this information publicly available. Especially to their hordes of Adsensers How You Can Create A Successful Content Mill Ignore mainstream media journalists and whiners who like to form councils. Understand that Google is looking for relevant content. “Relevance” is, in the end, deemed by the searcher. If there are a lot of searches for “pay levels for doctors” and you publish a page that shows “pay levels for doctors”, then you are producing relevant content and Google will reward you. Google are, no doubt, measuring how relevant visitors think the information is, and there are various signals that could be used to determine this. These signals will not come from a council of elitist, self-interested old media. The signals will be based on user activity and user voting patterns. These signals must be scalable i.e. links, visits, timeliness, recommendations, frequency of appearance, re-quoting, etc. Increases in “quality” i.e. content depth and accuracy – will come from end-user voting. If users want deeper answers to search questions, either Google will deliver it, or users will abandon Google and go somewhere that provides it. Perhaps that’s what ICSC should do – start their own search engine Having said all that, a lot of samey, lightweight content won’t survive in the long run, because Google likes to provide variety in their result sets. Look for ways to differentiate your content. Quality is only one – arbitrary – point of differentiation. You’d be better concentrating on aspects such as ease of access, readability, findability, relevance and freshness. Keep the end user firmly in mind.

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Content Farming – SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t

Mark-up Your Events Online with Microformats

Posted by richardbaxterseo Today, we’re going to talk about

International CRO – Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps

Posted by Sam Crocker Good morning Mozzers! Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries. WARNINGS: 1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world. 2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site. 3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow. 4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about. Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples.

Google As Publisher…

Widgets Video content Video games Product comparison Travel eBooks They might prefer to use different labels (so as to minimize fear in the marketplace & slow down regulators), and they might claim that aggregate statistics control the investments & thus they are not really publishers, but they plan on skimming a big piece off of the top of many big markets. AdWords was just the start! Videos, maps & product search…look how Google self-deals in each while managing to call it a value added feature (or some such). If Google collects data, hosts data, sorts data, recommends personalized consumption habits , and then makes small investments in new content from proven past performers (and then give them a bit of stealth promotion on their network)…how is it possible for Google to lose money? (Outside of lawsuits)? How much of the online ecosystem can Google consume before publishers promote other views of the web? One way to fight this sort of strategy is Yahoo!’s sell or outsource everything but the logo strategy . It increases short term margins, but in the longrun it makes one that much more vulnerable. Google can always buy the partner of choice and then ride off the free promotion & validation that the acquisition gained from earlier partnerships. Sure adding more noise to a noisy market can bring in eyeballs, but fleeting ones. Death by a thousand compromises . The other is to work in markets too small for Google to be interested in. Or to define & create a new vertical, like Zynga did. Even with as shady as Zynga’s founder is , longterm that company is in a better position than Yahoo! is.

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Google As Publisher…

The History of SEOmoz (1981-2010) + Open Q&A

Posted by randfish Last week, Mixergy’s Andrew Warner interviewed me about the founding of SEOmoz and our trajectory to date. It was a very personal interview about the background of the company, but turned out to be a great experience. I’ve posted it below for those who might want to watch over the weekend and if you prefer, there’s also a full text transcript on the Mixergy blog post . After the interview, I