| LED Digest 1790: Prospect, Perspective and Perception |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ April 26, 2004 Issue #1790 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Reciprocal Linking: Dead or Alive? ==-- ~ Dirk Johnson "This simple and long-standing practice represents nothing more than an opportunity, plain and simple." ~ Jill Whalen "...I speak and write about plenty of other topics too, including link-building." --== HTML Editors? ==-- ~ Rosemarie Wise "...nothing beats rolling up the sleeves and getting intimate with the code..." --== Keeping it in Perspective ==-- ~ Mary Ann "...I keep the three 'P's...in my mind at all times." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Patent Attorney Needed ==-- ~ Steven Rothberg --== Monkey Encoding Emails ==-- ~ John Barendrecht ~ Ivan J. Jimenez ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Reciprocal linking As expected, any talk of reciprocal linking brings forward a barrage of over-heated discussion. Since I started this thread, please allow me a chance to respond to much of what has been said, both here and elsewhere on the web. From a strategic perspective, I still do linking they same way I did it before Google even existed. I ask for links from relevantly-themed sites that publicly offer to exchange them, using the recommended method of submission, be it an online form or via email. And I make offers to exchange with other relevant sites that want to ask for links from the sites I manage. This simple and long-standing practice represents nothing more than an opportunity, plain and simple. For a marketing-oriented person, the goal here is to achieve a strong presence within a relevant realm of interest. The direct traffic from the links can be significant. But link saturation within in a large realm is something that is not easy to do, due to the data management challenges involved. Like most other opportunities, it takes work, time, and commitment to yield big results. At it's core, linking is actually a branding function, not a search engine optimization function. Then Google came along and rewarded this practice, and in doing so, they became known as very useful, relevant search engine because of it. Who knew that this would happen? I sure didn't, but I'll certainly take it. Certainly, the Google-factor has expanded the number of linking opportunities considerably. So now, the most prepared, determined, and experienced at linking are able to increase their link popularity even further against those who choose not to do this. Again, I don't make the rules, but I will pursue these new linking opportunities, to the benefit of both parties in the exchange. Those who decide not to participate in these exchanges will not benefit from them. It's a simple, private choice that site owners make. Curiously, some of those who chose not to do it have decided to also rail against it. They want Google to see the "error" of their ways. This kind of talk is all over the web. They can talk all they want, but I seriously doubt that Google is going to take their advice from the very people who want to turn the results in their favor. The opponents often propose a very simplistic solution. They want "one way" links to count more than reciprocated links (I see virtually no current evidence of this, btw). We've already seen that this type of "one way" link popularity can easily be bought with paid placements, and that those links can even be disguised as "natural" content citations. The cost to keep these paid links in place is often significant, and it's ongoing. So if Google ever does punish reciprocated links, then we can watch the practice of using paid, one-way link placements to explode even more than it already has, with ever more sophistication in how they are presented, in order to appear "natural". Reciprocal linking is the way that undercapitalized sites can compete with well-funded rivals, since well-funded sites still prefer to buy their traffic outright, and they avoid having to link back to anyone else. Take away the benefit of reciprocal links, and those with the most money will finally crush almost everyone else, as they do with pay-per-click now. And there are those who want the search engines to devise ways to reward sites that are more "worthy" than others. In their opinion, the most worthy sites are usually the sites that they manage. Good luck. Search engines are just glorious word crunching machines. Google recently confirmed this quite specifically and publicly when they refused to manually edit the results for certain religious search terms. There will always be ways to optimize a site for better indexing. There is a whole industry in place whose goal is to do just that. Whatever works best is exactly what will be done. The concept of the "honest" or "natural" website (whatever that is...the definition is self-derived in every single case) is quaint and it can still work in a narrow niche, but it is no longer a viable posture in a competitive environment. That's where proper content, page structure and solid link popularity are the critical factors to earning free search engine results. The judge and jury here is a hide-bound machine. Search results do not come from a bunch of well-meaning, highly-educated, social-minded activists hired to do an emotional, subjective review of websites, and then picking the ones they "like", all while they sip away at overpriced lattes. That approach, again, quaint and human, is more commonly called paid research, and it's kind of expensive. The rest of us get what we get for free, from a silicon-loaded box. It's not perfect, and it's based on defined rules, so people with a financial interest in the outcome will always try to game it. I am not claiming that there are not problems with linking. There are spammers out there who scarf email addresses off a site and send link requests, even though the prospect site makes no offer to accept submissions, or they provide a submission form as an alternative to an email request. There are other annoyances. Not everyone who offers to reciprocate does, even if we ask politely. Not every site will send us the traffic volume that we send to them. Not every site will have a higher PR than ours. Not very site we link with will be a graphics and content tour-de-force. With linking, we have to give to get, a concept that makes some people uncomfortable. The answer to that is to just not do it. Find other ways to get links. By and large, most link reciprocation takes pace between legitimate sites who follow proper protocol, and do it above board. There is nothing underhanded about it. Cheaters and hasslers lose their links. Irrelevant requests are usually just ignored. It is a private transaction between two willing site owners, to their mutual benefit. It's a well-established practice that pre-dates all search engines. It is a pervasive, beneficial, and most importantly - a free-choice practice. For these reasons, every search engine has a very difficult time punishing it. They have to deal with the web the way it is, and not they way they want it to be. Yet Google seems to have done well for itself by rewarding basic linking. The detractors can complain loudly, based on whatever annoys them about all of this, but, in the end, that doesn't really change things very much. Reciprocal linking takes place between two sites that mutually offer to do it. Either side can deny the trade, at their individual discretion. Each site has their own private reasons for doing it, and they would likely not do it if it did not provide a benefit to them. In practice, nobody else is involved with that decision, nor should they be. Thanks! Dirk Johnson, Owner LinkStrategy.com http://www.linkstrategy.com djohnson, roiwebsites.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Jill Whalen Subject: Reciprocal linking > At some point [spamdexing] may stop working and you'll > have to start from scratch, but it'll work nicely for you at the > moment as evidenced by many of the top-ranking sites > being shown at Google at this very moment. - Jill Whalen, LED 1787 > Wow! That is a hell of an admission from you Jill. > You've been telling everyone that you get all your > pages to the top ten via content only. - Bob Wafker, LED 1788 You must be mistaken, Bob, as I've never in my nearly 10 years of optimizing sites ever said that you get all your pages to the top ten via content ONLY. In fact, I was probably the one of the first companies to include linking campaigns in my list of services way back in the mid-90's. It wasn't called that of course; I called it a "Custom Submittal" and I knew of no other company at the time that was doing it. I've also been partnered with my good friend Debra Mastaler from Alliance-link since somewhere around the year 2000 to offer her linking services to my clients. In fact, she and I just came back from my seminar in Chicago where she did a great presentation all about linking and its importance. I've run tons of articles in my old RankWrite newsletter about the importance of link building back in the years 2000 - 2002, and in my current High Rankings Advisor newsletter from 2002 till the present. It is true that I often talk about writing for the search engines at conferences and also have an e-handbook on that topic, but I speak and write about plenty of other topics too, including link-building. It doesn't happen to be my specialty, as it takes a certain type of person to find the appropriate sites worth requesting links from, etc., but that's what I have Debra for! Hope this helps clarify any confusion you may have had over what I believe and don't believe in regards to search engine optimization, and more specifically link building. Best, Jill Whalen High Rankings http://www.highrankings.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Rosemarie Wise Subject: HTML editors Hello LEDers, > And as for the purity of hand-coding... I respect those that can > do it - but I don't want to learn that much programming. Look at > just a moderate page. Imagine doing all of that in a text editor! - Michael Linehan, LED 1788 I do all my coding by hand, well by that I mean I use a text editor. I just wanted to chime in to say that "hand coding" a page from scratch does not have to be difficult. If you have the right tools to hand in your text editor you don't need to do "all that" to get a page together. I think some people are dis-illusioned that "programming a web page" is a dark art that should either be left to the programmers to hand code or the designers with their WYSIWYG editors. While it is true that HTML editors and web sites are seemingly becoming more and more complex, the actual code used to display the page on the screen (ie the HTML/XHTML and CSS) has changed relatively slowly in comparison! XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets are not difficult to learn, it's just that some people are too afraid to have a go at learning the inner workings because they think it is too complicated! Developing XHTML and CSS code by hand doesn't have to be time consuming either. I use Textpad, which has all sorts of helper tools to speed up the more mundane tasks of working on a site without having to see the changes at each stage. I could happily take a chunk of text and design around it - there are various clip libraries available that allow me to wrap whatever tag or text around or over selected text at the click of a mouse. If I don't like the templates available I can create ones more appropriate for the task at hand, leaving me just to "fill in the blanks" that change with each new [fill in the blank] tag you want... no different to using a drop-down in a WYSIWYG if you ask me. I started out with FrontPage Express and moved to FrontPage 98, abandoning it after I learnt just how much "junk" code it added and how badly my pages looked in Netscape. Now that I hand code I find that I have no patience with the forms and wizards that WYSIWYG provide - for me it is much quicker to fill in the blanks on a text document than to wrestle with drop downs and text boxes because I can visualise how the code they generate should look (in the text editor that is, not on the page). Floating and overlapping windows, flipping between code and preview mode and having to fix the code that was auto created to get it to work how you hoped it would did little for my patience. Perhaps I'm in the minority here but I tried using Dreamweaver once after I thought it would help me throw together a template quicker than I could do it by hand... talk about frustrating! I certainly didn't find it easy to use and within an hour I reverted back to TextPad... Some people are more productive using WYSIWYGs and some using text editors... but nothing beats rolling up the sleeves and getting intimate with the code when it comes to troubleshooting browser display issues! Rosemarie Wise http://websiteowner.info/ ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mary Ann Subject: Perspective > I believe that our knowledge about the Internet is getting > more important, day by day, but in the meantime, let us > brand ourselves as *marketers* not Internet marketers. - Lennart Svanberg, LED 1786 As a business person and naturally a consumer, I keep the three "P"s, Prospect, Perspective and Perception in my mind at all times. Acclimating the consumer focus away from Perception based to Prospect and Perspective based is admirable, difficult, costly and most of all somehow thoughtful. Thoughtful marketing, now that is interesting! Mary Ann ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Steven Rothberg Subject: Patent attorney Mark Frank is right: one of the primary values of a patent (or any other intellectual property right) is that it will help to prevent problems, including problems with large corporations. Despite the ongoing problems with a small number of very greedy executives at a small number of very foolish publicly traded companies, the vast majority of large corporations are not evil or reckless in their dealings with small organizations. Indeed, my experiences have been quite to the contrary. I'll give you an example. In 1998, we obtained the name CollegeRecruiter.com for our career site for college students and recent graduates. Our intellectual property attorney recommended that we federally register the name. We spent a few thousand dollars and did so. At the time, I felt that I would never see or gain any benefit from that expenditure again, but it was sort of like home owners insurance in that we would be more foolish for not buying it than if we bought it never used it. We referred to it a few times in cordial letters to organizations who were infringing on our rights (i.e., a university professor registered CollegeRecruiter.org and created a career site for students), but a couple of months ago the expenditure easily paid for itself in one incident. I became aware that a domain VERY close to ours was being used to direct traffic to a career site that can accurately be described as an 800 pound gorilla. They probably spend more money on business cards over the course of a year than we do on advertising, so the threat greatly concerned me. My attorney sent a cordial letter to their chief legal counsel (their in-house attorney) to make sure that they knew of our rights and to request that they stop using the similar name to compete with us. On the same day that our letter arrived, their attorney picked up the phone and called my attorney to assure my attorney that the similar domain did not belong to the 800 pound gorilla and that they knew nothing of it. His actions were prompt, cordial and, I have to believe, at least partially motivated by our rights. Because the owner of the domain was hidden by their registrant, Domains by Proxy, our next step was to send a letter to the registrant. We told them that their customer, the domain owner, was violating our intellectual property rights and therefore the registrant's terms of service. We requested that they provide to us the contact information for the domain owner. They immediately did. Again, I have to believe that rights we obtained when we federally registered our name paid off. We then sent a cordial letter to the domain owner, who immediately stopped pointing his domain at the 800 pound gorilla. His explanation for why he did so was feeble (he claimed he just wanted to help people find a good site), but his actions were what we had hoped for. For the few thousand dollars to register the name and a few hundred dollars to send out the letters, we prevented what could have been a disaster. Money well spent. Steven Rothberg The Highest Traffic Job Board for Students & Grads http://www.collegerecruiter.com steven, collegerecruiter.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: John Barendrecht Subject: Monkey encoding > I've been testing [Don Morris'] e-mail cloaker code > for newsletters for the last few weeks... The code for > a post would look like this in your newsletter: > http://emailcloaker.com/helpdesk/waller,ep.com/AdJungle - Eva Rosenberg, LED 1789 One must be careful with email cloaking. If you're using a service like emailcloaking.com, you may be eliminating 10 to 20% of your customers. First there are those people on cable, all mail access is blocked unless you're home. Even their (cable) web mail won't work unless they are home, so they use a hotmail-like email. Second, people who travel a lot, retirees and people who work away from home. Often, they'll only use web email, so they can be in constant contact. Using a laptop with only hotmail, emailcloaking.com did not decode the email address supplied in LED 1789. I have no way to contact you. With all the dot com failures, will the decloaking company still be around in 6 months? As for the other encoding. If the email is a click-able link on a web page or newsletter but encoded in java script, vb script, hex, decimal, etc., it only takes one line of code to extract the email addresses. If it is not encoded, use exactly the same one line of code. If you've added spaces, commas, "remove this", etc., it takes a few more lines of code. But there are numerous examples on the web, including how to skip addresses like This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it I get 500 to 800 spams per day, so I'm against spam, more than most people. Tweaking filters is also time consuming. Web forms offer some relief but people don't like filling them in and usually don't get a copy of the correspondence. Those reply-to-prove you belong to the human race (challenge / response), just seem like too much trouble. I'm treated like a criminal until proven innocent. I'll deal with another company, thank you. I get 3 to 5 challenge / response emails a day because someone faked my "From". Aren't these spam? In order to not get spam, you spam me. As long as spam is a multi-million dollar industry, it is here to stay. I am working on my e-book "Zen and the Art of Staying Calm when you receive Spam". Should I advertise it by harvesting the emails in LED? John Barendrecht Adult educational videos http://www.videoridge.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Ivan J. Jimenez Subject: Monkey Encoding > I say forget about it and use the old @ sign. With various > filters and services to keep out unwanted email, I have no > problem leaving my email address exposed and available... - Brad Waller, LED 1788 All these ideas sound great however I see one thing missing -- simplicity. The goal is to post valuable information without creating extra work. I'd rather have Adam spend the bulk of his time going through feedback rather than monkey coding e-mail addresses (which by the way, he's doing to save us from getting sp^mmed). I happen to like the "comma coding". It's simple, effective and doesn't take a rocket scientist to "get it". Additionally, it's much easier on the eyes than using cloaker code and some of the other stuff out there. Ivan J. Jimenez http://cosmicbreath.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "She's spazzing out on a cosmic level, She's meditating with the devil, She's cooking salad for breakfast, She's got tofu the size of Texas." - Beck |
