The Weekly Feed #58: When a newspaper "rips off" your blog's research...

Today I'm going to tell you a story about a blogger called Ian, how a New York newspaper allegedly stole a story that he broke, and how he smacked them down. 

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About a week ago, Ian Miller wrote a great blog entry debunking the existence of miniature giraffes and exposing a DirecTV marketing campaign. He figured out that a website marketing "Petite Lap Giraffes" with a real-time video feed was registered to Grey Global Group, a marketing firm. He also noticed a tiny giraffe in one of DirecTV's ads and surmised that they're probably launching a campaign with the little star. He also identified some stock photography that was used in the campaign. 

According to Ian, LongIslandPress (Lets call them LIP) then proceeded to rip off his research and "break" the story on DirecTV's about-to-launch marketing campaign without giving him attribution. They posted their blog entry two days ago and have since removed it, but you can still find it on Google's Cache. 

The way Ian handled the alleged rip was textbook and is an example of what to do when you get plagiarized. I've summarized the steps he took below:

1. He posted a polite comment on the LIP blog and made sure he captured their original articles text so that he could track changes.
2. 20 Minutes later he made note that LIP had edited their blog entry and recorded the changes. 
3. 90 minutes later he noticed another change that actually insulted him suggesting he was claiming credit unfairly. 
4. He took a screen shot of his comment awaiting moderation on the LIP blog. 
5. He then wrote a blog entry calling out Long Island Press and including all the above data. He pointed out that he broke the story, provided evidence of the plagiarism and evidence it was his story. The tone of his blog entry was civil and rational. 
6. Ian then posted his blog entry to Slashdot, a popular tech social media website.
7. From Slashdot it went viral and appeared on Hacker News among other sites. 
8. All the while Ian was posting updates to his blog entry with additional research including what he had found in his server logs showing LIP had visited his site. His updates are clearly marked. 

The result was that LIP has taken the article offline and Ian has proven himself as a solid researcher, a source of great blog entries and has a flood of new readers from the controversy. The whole episode cost him nothing but time. This is in my opinion the textbook way for a blogger without a legal team to handle plagiarism. 

I'm not a lawyer so don't take this as gospel, but I'd add the following tips to avoid getting sued for libel:

• Make sure you only state facts in your blog entry and back them up with hard evidence.
• Keep the tone civil.
• Re-read your blog entry and delete all sarcasm and any conjecture that isn't backed up by evidence. 

One final tip: An easy way to find out who is copying your blog entries is to look at referrers for each blog entry (the sites that sent you visitors) because often bloggers will leave in original links to your site when they cut and paste your content. You can also examine your logs for referring URL's that have the text "wp-admin" in the URL because that indicates someone clicked through to your site while they were in their blog's admin interface, probably while writing a blog entry. You can also google phrases that you used in your original blog entry about 24 hours after publishing it to see if anyone else has published those same phrases. 

Happy blogging!

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Weekly Feed #57: How to limit the impact of negative online reviews

You're finally ranking on page 1 for your key search terms, your list of repeat customers is growing and you are building a trusted brand online. One morning you wake up, wander over to your kitchen iMac and notice through blurry eyes that someone has posted a negative review about your business. What should you do to prepare for this and how can you make sure negative comments don't rank #1 in search results?

That's the subject of this today's Weekly Feed, sponsored by Feedjit Rush. Yesterday we expanded Feedjit Rush ads from two lines to four. You have a lot to say and now you have the space you need to get your message across. We've also included an awesome guide on writing ads that sell with headline examples that work. The price is still an incredibly low $49 for 6 Million impressions. Click here to set up your Feedjit Rush Ad now. 

Preparing for the inevitable

Once you start growing and attracting the right kind of attention online, it's only a matter of time until a competitor or a disgruntled customer writes something negative about your company online. It can come in many forms: A negative product review on a retail website, a negative service review on a scam checking website or you could even show up as a false positive on McAfee's SiteAdvisor as a dangerous website. 

The best way to prepare for this event is to build a strong positive foundation for your brand's online reputation before the storm arrives. Here are a few proactive steps you can take:

• Encourage every customer to write a positive review on a relevant review website. There are several sites that allow businesses to post a rebuttal to negative reviews and that include a rebuttal process. I would give these websites a strong preference when choosing where to direct your customers. 
• Post your company profile to relevant websites. If you're a web startup, make sure you're listed on Techcrunch's Crunchbase. List your business on AboutUs.org. Find any other relevant directories and get listed in them. There are many free options, so don't feel obliged to pay for a listing. 
• Link to each profile you create for your company, either from your company website or another website with a reasonable search engine ranking. That will ensure Google finds these profiles and ranks them higher than any negative reviews.
• Create a Twitter account for your company using your company name and link to it from external websites. Then post at least a handful of tweets each week and respond to any @replies you may get. Use Twitter's search engine to find users discussing things relevant to your brand and engage them in conversation by posting @replies to their posts. 
• Create a company page for your business on Facebook and link to it from an external website. 

Daily reputation management

Google your brand every day to see if any positive or negative reviews are being posted. Use Google's advanced search feature and limit the results to items posted in the last 24 hours. Also use Twitter's search engine to check for negative tweets, although Google will probably pick these up eventually. 

When you see a positive blog comment, tweet, forum post or blog entry make sure you post a response thanking the author and try to encourage a dialog. By doing this you are adding more content to an already positive review that will increase the likelihood of this item ranking higher in search results. Make sure you include your brand name in the positive response to increase keyword density for your brand on that page. If the blogger responds, try to keep the conversation going without coming across as obnoxious or psychotic. 

When you see a negative item posted online, think very carefully about whether you want to respond publicly or privately. When you post a public response you are feeding the SEO machine and will probably cause the item to rank even higher in search results. If the item is already ranking highly in search results, or if there are several posts already from multiple users, your comments will have less influence on the page's ranking and you should be more open to responding.

Posting a response to a negative customer comment or review

I recommend one simple rule when responding to angry customers either privately or publicly: Before I hit the send button I make sure that I'm comfortable with my email or comment appearing on the front page of the New York Times. (I also apply this rule to daily business emails.)

Always assume that if you send a private response to a public comment, the original author will post your reply publicly. 

Always be courteous and professional and you'll begin to notice a strange phenomenon: The angrier a customer is, the more polite they are once you make things right. There's nothing more gratifying than having a customer who started out furious send you a thank you note once you've resolved their issue. 

I recommend a zero tolerance policy toward obscene language. Angry emails and online comments are an unfortunate reality and something you need to get used to, but never respond if the comments contain threats or obscenities.

Dealing with a false positive on a safe-browsing or anti-virus website

All good safe-browsing websites like SiteAdvisor have a process whereby websites who have been listed as unsafe can submit a request for reconsideration. Many sites take months to reconsider or re-crawl your site so if you're unlucky enough to be listed as dangerous, you may be dealing with this issue for months. 

Legal threats don't work. Sites like SiteAdvisor by McAfee get legal threats all day long and unless you're a large company employing one of the top 3 law firms in the country, they won't budge. 

I recommend going through their standard reconsideration process. Then get on the phone and start working your way up the customer service food chain. Call at least every few days for an update.

In the mean time, many safe-browsing sites have room for comments and on some you can register as a company owner and post owner comments. Post comments explaining what has occurred and how you're dealing with the issue. Encourage your customers to post their own positive comments. 

Then wait. The solid foundation you built for your reputation, your list of happy customers and their comments and your own professionalism will get you through a temporary hiccup in your online reputation.

In summary:

• Start by setting up a solid foundation for your reputation
• Check the status of your reputation daily or at least several times a week
• Always respond to positive comments
• Think carefully about responding to negative comments. Don't feed the machine unless you have to. 
• Always assume your private or public responses will end up on the NY TImes front page.

Have a great week!

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Weekly Feed Supplement: Update regarding Feedjit Rush Ad Network Pricing

Dear Weekly Feed Subscriber,

We have a very exciting announcement today. During the last few weeks Feedjit has seen huge growth in the number of impressions we have available for advertisers. As a way of saying thank you we are going to pass on the benefits of that growth directly to you, our advertisers. 

Two weeks ago we announced a Feedjit Rush special that gave you 6 million ad impressions for $49. 

Today we're announcing that due to the huge growth in our available ad inventory we're going to extend this pricing indefinitely. In other words, from now on you'll be able to buy 6 Million ad impressions for only $49 at Feedjit. 

That makes us the most price competitive Ad Network on the Web.

Click here to place your Feedjit Rush Ad now with our new low pricing.

Thanks for supporting Feedjit and we will continue to work hard to deliver more value for your ad dollars, pounds, yen and euros. Our regular Weekly Feed newsletter with SEO and marketing tips and info will go out later this week.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Weekly Feed #56: The SEO rise and fall of two online retail giants - and the tactics they used

Welcome to Issue #56 of The Weekly Feed. Since we chatted about Google heavily penalizing websites in the last edition, I have two anecdotes on the rise and fall of the worlds largest online retailers - and one of them happened today. 

But first, Feedjit is having a huge blowout Ad Impression sale this week while stocks last. We are doubling the number of ad impressions for all Feedjit Rush Ads and we have a crazy door-buster:

• Geotargeted ads get double the impressions: $49 for 2 Million Ad impressions. 
• Globally targeted ads get double the impressions: $49 for 6 Million Ad impressions. 
• Globally targeted ads are also available at $249 for 30 Million impressions. Usually this price only gets you 5 million impressions. We're offering a small number of these crazy door-busters. 

Click here to set up your Rush ad now and take advantage of these limited time specials. 

We're doing this while inventory lasts and once we're sold out, we're going to revert back to our regular pricing. So if you're promoting a new blog or website, buy your ad impressions now because we won't do this again any time soon. Remember that you can schedule your ad to run at a future date, even after we end this promotion. 

Now on to our regularly scheduled programming:

The JC Penney Story

Less than 2 weeks ago the NY Times broke a story titled "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search" about JC Penny using Black Hat SEO marketing tactics to artificially boost themselves to the top of Google's search results. JCP's search marketing firm created links from a large number of spam or questonable websites back to JCP's website and optimized for phrases like "black dresses", "tablecloths", "comforter set" and other products in their range.

The result was that JCP ended up at the top of the search results - higher even than brand name manufacturers of some products. The result of the NY Times article was that Google penalized JCP. On 1 Feb JCP ranked an average of 1.3 for 59 search terms in their product range. Ten days later their average ranking was 52.

There has been some backlash from the search marketing community who feel that if they weren't a large brand who spends ad dollars with Google, they would have been penalized clear out of the search results. A ranking of 52 seems awfully generous of Google. 

The Overstock.com Story

On January 12th someone posted to webmasterworld.com SEO discussion forum that Overstock.com was ranking extremely well and it might be worth reverse-engineering why they're ranking so well. In a rare instance, the moderator on Webmasterworld actually allowed the reverse engineering to take place. 

Then after a month of picking apart their tactics the discussion wound down. Today the Wall Street Journal broke a story that Overstock.com has been penalized and they've been demoted in the search results to exactly the same spot as JC Penney: between 40 and 70. 

The discussion on Webmasterworld has a few additional comments since the Wall Street Journal story broke today - mostly political stuff.

Until this story broke the general consensus was that Overstock actually was using acceptable tactics to market their site. But Google's web spam team (specifically Matt Cutts) hangs out on Webmasterworld and Google doesn't like to be embarrassed, so they took action and you now know the result. 

So what tactics did Overstock.com use to get on page one? Simple:

1. They created PDF's that they sent to universities.
2. Each PDF was customized for each university e.g. it had the university logo, and the text was customized.
3. The PDF said that students at the university could get a 10% discount at Overstock.com.
4. It also provided specific text for each university webmaster to post on their website. e.g. Ladies jackets, comforter sets, mens wear all 10% off at overstock. The important phrases linked to those specific sections on Overstock.
5. An important point here is that the link text and links in each PDF were DIFFERENT for each university.
6. Many university webmasters posted the text verbatim on their websites.
7. Some webmasters simply put the PDF on their sites. Links from PDF documents also pass pagerank and give you a boost in the search results. Few people know this and the posting of these PDFs to university websites was the real genius of this campaign.
8. The result was that Overstock.com ended up with a large number of dot-edu links to different sections on their website. 
9. Google gives links from .edu domains a much greater pagerank score than regular links, and the result was page one for every product section on Overstock.com.

Until today when Google penalized them. If they had kept their heads down or if someone had not "outed" them on Webmasterworld, they would still be ranking #1 for a large number of categories for potentially months or years. 

That my gentle readers is the story of JC Penney and Overstock and their rise and fall. I shudder to even speculate how much money these search penalties have cost both of these online retail giants.

Have a spectacular week and weekend and I wish you the very best in your online marketing efforts. Don't forget to buy your Rush Ad before our special ends. 

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Weekly Feed #55: Google Heavily Penalizes Websites, Great Nutrition for your Blog Visitors and Speak2Tweet for Egyptians

Welcome to Issue #55 of The Weekly Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. The Weekly Feed is published once a week when we have news, information and helpful tips to share. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of this message. You can read previous editions of The Weekly Feed on our blog where we may also post additional content.

Our site of the week is the awesome Nutrition search engine SkipThePie.org that gives you your very own nutrition search widget for your blog's sidebar. Visitors can get detailed nutrition data without leaving your blog. I've already put it on my personal blog so that I can look up calories before I eat them - and hopefully it helps a few of my visitors stay in shape too.

Three days ago Google launched and update that may radically affect the amount of search engine traffic your blog or website gets. They're calling it a minor update to their algorithm, but it has already had a major effect on some sites. 8 Days ago I mentioned on Hacker News that a site that was scraping the popular StackOverflow was ranking higher than them - by republishing their content. Well Google has updated their algorithm and the scraper site's traffic immediately plummeted by about 90%. The day-over-day drop is 40%. I'm not a fan of sites that steal content, but ouch!!

Here is Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti-spam team making the announcement a few days ago.

From industry buzz it seems that Google is going after two kinds of sites this year. The first is sites that scrape content from others and republish that content unmodified (scraper sites). The second is sites who have low quality content farms, where large numbers of low wage humans generate low quality content purely to try and attract search engine traffic. We've now seen hard evidence of the new anti-scraper policy but not much evidence of Google going after content farms. 

If you run a blog or content site that relies on SEO traffic, here is how you need to react to this:

1. Make sure you limit the amount of republished content.
2. If you do republish content, make sure there is at least the same amount of original content on the same page to balance it out.
3. Beware publishing large amounts of low quality content. We haven't seen any evidence of penalties in this area yet, but trust me they're coming. 

I'm also modifying my back-link strategy slightly:

Google has always had a duplicate content penalty but over the last few years scrapers have gotten good at getting around that by mixing and matching content and adding just enough of their own to have it appear unique to a machine. Now Google have made a few additional changes to their search algorithm to penalize scraper sites. The question is, what changes did they make?  

My guess is that one of the things they are looking at is the number of "deep links" you have from other websites linking to content deep in your own site. Sites that scrape content tend to have many links from high ranking sites to their home page but few links to content deep in the site because people just don't find the content valuable enough.

So one of the ways I'm reacting to this algorithm change is to make sure that it's not just our home page that is linked to, but pages deep within the site too.

Expect to see a few more changes from Google like this as the year progresses. Remember, the most important thing is to have unique and useful content and to let the right websites know about it. 

Lastly, Google just launched a service that you'll hear about in the news tomorrow to help Egyptians stay in touch with the rest of the world as the government there removes Internet and Cellphone access. It's called Speak2Tweet and it's a collaboration between Twitter and Google. Here's the quote from Google's Blog in case you don't have web access and are in Egypt:

"It's already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet."

There are already some incredible messages being posted by Egyptians including this one referring to the million person march planned for tomorrow.

On a personal note, having lived through the transition of South Africa to a democracy, I'd like to wish any Egyptians who are Weekly Feed subscribers or Feedjit members a safe and influential week! 

Best regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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