All About Content

Om Malik, in a March 20 blog post titled Social No-Working, writes, “not a day passes when we hear about a new social networking company stake its claim to be the next MySpace.” His reaction to a recent slew of news regarding yet more social networking sites enjoying large rounds of funding: we’re in the middle of a “Social Networking bubble.”

People who have little or no handle on consumer are getting funded, or offering funding. Designing high-end switches and getting kids to switch from MySpace – two entirely different tasks. Anyway this insanity is understandable. WSJ has an article about start-ups getting showered by money, some getting unsolicited emails from VCs offering barrel loads of cash. The trend “absolutely harkens back to the bubble days” of 1999 and 2000, Tom Blaisdell, a general partner with DCM-Doll Capital Management, tells the WSJ. I let him have the final word on this.

PS: In case you were wondering when there will be a market top — look for a journalist quitting his job to start a social network!

The post includes some comments from the very entrepreneurs Malik is criticizing. Interesting stuff. Think he’s right about the bubble?

It has recently come to the public’s attention that it’s possible to publish “fake news” and have Google News index and display it — even if the fake news is about Google itself. To which I say… yeah, duh!

ZDNet reports that the press release, written by a high-school sophomore, claims the author was hired by Google to work on a Gmail security flaw. Google’s response was to set up a college fund for the kid. Actually, not really, I’m just kidding. It was the fake press release that attributed this quote to Google CEO Larry Page: “The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education.” To repeat: this kid does not work for Google, never has.

While some reports make it appear that Google has cut all relationships with i-Newswire as a result, it’s more likely that Google News specifically is no longer accepting automated i-Newswire feeds. The site is not banned in the main Google index. i-Newswire is tightening up its editorial standards, and I imagine they’ll be back in the news index eventually.

There are a variety of services that allow you to send press releases for free and even the paid services cost as little as $10 per release, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that people abuse them. This has been going on for a while, actually. What’s different this time is that Google was the subject of the press release, and to paraphrase: “If it bleeds (or it’s about Google), it leads.”

(For what it’s worth, I’ve tested quite a few of these services, including i-Newswire, and PRWeb is the one I like best. PRWeb also just entered a partnership with Topix.net, another very popular news aggregation site, so this is probably one of the more valuable wires to submit to for SEO purposes.)

Once Google News has your release indexed, it’ll show up in news search based on the time stamp. Yahoo News usually includes this type of content in its “blog search” results but in a separate section to the right of the screen, reserving the main results section for a (loosely) pre-qualified set of sources.

That’s why Yahoo News has always been the far superior service for news aggregation. The aspect that makes Yahoo so vexing from a regular search engine perspective — that listings are heavily determined by human editors, not algorithms — makes Yahoo News not just more credible, but (usually) also more interesting.

Google maintains the advantage of timeliness though. A search this morning on “Google News prank” pulls up much better results in Google.com and Google News than it does in Yahoo News.

Technology journalist Dan Gillmor is prodding Yahoo to buy the San Jose Mercury News, one of the now-defunct Knight Ridder’s chain of newspapers.

Gillmor says the move could “turn the Bay Area — far and away the best place for this in America — into a living laboratory of tomorrow’s journalism.”

Yahoo could become the international test bed for the transition we all know is coming in print journalism. (One place it could start is fulfilling the promise of the under-utilized SiliconValley.com asset that Knight Ridder has failed to nurture.) Again, the shift to online is clearly happening even though papers have some future ahead of them. Yahoo, better than most — if it cared — could help make that transition the kind that honors the reasons we all should care so much about the future of quality journalism. If Silicon Valley and environs aren’t the best place in America to start, what is?

On the Web, it’s easy for your image to spin out of your control. Just ask the talentless hack or our favorite miserable failure. My recent post about using bloggers to your PR advantage touches on this subject as well (although I actually started this particular post months ago).

Even assuming a large group of people aren’t colluding to Googlebomb (or “link bomb,” if you prefer) your site, and you aren’t in crisis control mode for some reason, there are still things you can and should do to optimize for your company or product brand name; you want to make sure that people who do a keyword search on your brand name see what you want them to see.

The Basics
First order of business when managing your image online is to have your corporate homepage rank #1 for searches on your company name. If you don’t, then at best you’re missing an easy way to reach visitors who are already looking for you; at worst, you give your competitors and detractors an opportunity to blemish the first impression many of your customers are going to have.

No-brainer steps would be including your company name in the site’s title tags, making sure you have an About Us page, and getting listed in relevant Internet directories. That’s low-hanging fruit. Depending on your name and industry that might be enough to snag you the top two spots.

Press Releases
Write well-optimized press releases and get them widely distributed on the web-based PR wires. Don’t forget to link your company’s name to your website – the lede and the boilerplate are two obvious places where you can and should mention your website’s URL.

Adding these press release to your own website will increase the amount of relevant high-quality content you have. Submitting them for web distribution gets them distributed to Google, Yahoo and Topix. Good, newsworthy releases can get picked up by both bloggers and traditional journalists, with even more opportunities to get links to your site. Think of well-optimized press releases as the gift that keeps on giving.

Now you’re cooking
For the hardcore SEO campaigns, when the top 2 spots aren’t enough, you need to get pages on other websites optimized for your name. Leverage what relationships your company already has. If you have distributors, partners, or affiliates, see if they’ll create a page about you on their site. Get some of your best customers to write testimonials on the popular reviews sites like Epinions or Amazon.com — these pages will already start off fairly well optimized since your name will be in the title tags, your name and logo will appear on the page, and it’ll probably include at least one link to your site. Being on a popular domain gives the page an advantage as well. These types of pages can easily rank for your name once you get some good customer-generated content on them.

These are just some ideas for dominating the whole first page of results when people search on your brand. I’m sure there are many more unique opportunities in your vertical if you spend some time looking for them. Get creative. (However — and this should go without saying — don’t go on any indiscriminate comment spamming sprees. It’s not effective either in terms of SEO results or considering conversion… and the resulting mess will be hard to clean up, as I know from experience.)

A couple of months ago when “Google bowling” was the hot buzz phrase whipping lots of marketers into a panic, I scoffed. I still scoff, but I have to do so less vehemently since Rand Fishkin (of SEOmoz.org) says he’s seen it work. I hate to believe it, but if randfish says it’s possible, then it seems less incredible.

There’s a significant caveat: it doesn’t work with established sites; i.e., those sites you’d target for Google bowling in the first place. If you’re targeting a site with established rankings, you’d just be helping them.