Contest Introduction Brought To You By Brian Carter

If you haven't heard, Martin Bowling loves Zima. He loves it so much (or so people say), that Google Suggest has permanently associated his name with Zima- they're officially related now.

Martin Bowling Loves Zima is a meme (a viral idea) that was started by Andy Beal and his wife, and has been embraced and fueled by search industry personalities such as Rob @SEOcracy, Sheila @govisithawaii, Todd Friesen, Brian Carter, Todd Mintz, Joshua Sciarrino, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, and others.
Now Martin is announcing the Martin Bowling Loves Zima Meme Contest... it's the contest that asks "Who can create the best whatever (video, blog post, tweet series, captioned picture, avatar, twitter background, the sky is the limit - want a great example check out ZimaFan on Twitter) about the Martin Bowling Loves Zima meme?"

The prizes are awesome, the judges are cool, and the contest is going to get a LOT of attention.
Here's what you have to do by October 3rd, 2008

1. Create your thing
2. Put it on the internet, and you don't EVEN have to link to the contest blog post, that's right this isn't a ploy to steal your link juice :)
3. Tweet about your entry with a link & Leave a comment here with your entry (just incase as we all know that twitter is sometimes teh suck)
4. Rinse & Repeat, cause you can enter as many times as you'd like!

Then you wait for our judges' decision anxiously while chomping on your nails, knowing the outcome could change your entire life forever!

The second half of this post brought to you by your regularly scheduled host Martin Bowling

And now on to the good stuff, how is this going to get my ass to ScarySEO? Well here is how these are the fabulous prizes:

1^st place

Win a trip to ScarySEO, (includes conference registration and Two Nights Stay at the awesome Hilton Deerfield Beach Hotel - Sorry Folks Airfare not included, unless someone would want to sponsor it :wink: )

$50 bar tab provide by yours truly, and no drinks will not be limited to Zima only :)

And one of these awesome Zima t-shirts

2^nd Place

So you don't get the free ride to the awesome ScarySEO mini-con, but we still want to hook you up with some SEO knowledge so

SEOmoz SEO Training DVD’s over 7 hours of SEO knowledge from Rand & Crew

One of those awesome Zima t-shirts pictured above.

3^rd place

3 month subscription to Online Reputation Management Monitoring Tool - Trackur.com subscription, so you can make sure you don't have your own Zima Meme disaster :)

Zima t-shirt

 

*Honorable mentions to receive random Zima treasures

 

**Contest will be judged by the following panel of Zima experts: Andy Beal, GoVisitHawaii, Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Dave Snyder, Brian Carter.

If you need more details about the awesomeness of ScarySEO go check out this great post by Eric Lander (who is also speaking at ScarySEO) and if you don't win or don't enter don't forget you still have time to go register for ScarySEO.

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As expected Rob's latest tool DataPresser (DataPresser is a one-of-a-kind utility that leverages the giant collection of databases available for sale at Seocracy.com to allow you to create massive amounts of wordpress blog content with zero programming experience required.) One note on the description I changed it from wordpress to blog; because I am using DataPresser with blogengine .net which I will be posting about at a later date! I first wanted to congratulate Rob on such an successful launch but I also want to remind anyone that didn't get in on the first round should go get on the DataPresser waiting list now Rob will be opening up a few more spots in the coming weeks and I believe it's a first come first serve kind of deal. So don't wait get your name on the waiting list. Second, I wanted to say oopsie! I meant to write this up on Friday and way to try and help Rob drum up some business for the DataPresser launch but given the huge success of the DataPresser 30 minute sell out - looks like he didn't even need my help. Which of course I didn't expect him to cause he always makes such great tools. Again congrats on the success DataPresser 30 minute sell out

Over the past several weeks there has been much discussion about serp hijacking and ninja linkbuilding. Whether or not you should be transparent with your clients and engage in knowledge sharing. We have recently started a project with client to help them properly manage their own online reputation and increase their social media presence. They were already working with another company on redesigning their Web site. This was not only a redesign of the site but a site overhaul to improve the search friendliness of their site. As we were moving forward with our portion of the project we did an internal analysis of the sites SEO so that we would know how the site would play in our plan. Discussing the preliminary results with the client - lead them to tell us not to worry all these issues were being addressed. That we should wait till the second week of January and we would be able to view the new and improved site with all of these fixes and more in place with a brand new look and feel!

We were rather excited about the prospects of the client getting and updated look and feel along with some much need search friendliness. We kept moving forward with our planning knowing that all of our concerns some of the things that raised a flag in our analysis were being addressed - and we would have a more solid jumping off point when the project went forward in January. The email stating they have gone live finally arrives, I anxiously open up the email and click the link. The browser opens to a Flash Splash Page, not just a splash page but one that hasn't even used any <NOSCRIPT> to provide any additional SEO boost and it doesn't have any links pointing the rest of the site! And even though google says they are reading flash files, there are some ongoing seo and flash tests that seem to indicate otherwise. So googlebot is already with a massive hurdle in indexing the "new and improved"   "rehased" website. I click on the button in the flash animation and enter the site. I see only two paragraphs of text and some links. Links that I find are all hidden behind some javascript.  But as I continue to scroll down the page I come across something that I find to be very disturbing.

This is the footer that is included on each page. I have blacked out the company name as to not drag them into this, even though this is about outing them to the client I don't feel that outing them to the world is appropriate or my place. But each of the red circles in the above graphic indicate a followed link, a link that has been styled to not appear as a link. They have given themselves 9 followed links with varying anchor text, appropriate title attributes and on images alt attributes. The attributes are something that they somehow forgot to include on any of the clients pages. So this of course leads me to dive into an all out analysis of the "new and improved"   "rehased" Web site. And I proceed to find problem after problem.

We now have a bit of a quandary they have paid for services that we are now telling them they didn't receive. On top of that we are going to tell them that they really need to do these things so that all of their internet marketing efforts aren't in vein. I don't feel particularly comfortable with going back to them and handing them another bill to go back and fix someone else's work. Especially someone who has an established relationship with the client; we are the new kids on the block (yes, I just linked to 80's boy band new kids on the block). So the team comes together and writes a massive report on the "new and improved"   "rehased" Web site. In this report we include everything we look at problems and their solutions - we spell it all out for them. We have decided by engaging in knowledge sharing; by not forcing them into choosing us that we will gain both trust and help make them successful - which is our ultimate goal. We don't want to create a drove of people who are dependant upon us. We want to create successful strategies, we want people not to need us; but to want to work with us on a continued basis to be a part of the process that creates the next winning strategy for them. Everyone on the team is feeling great about this decision. The client now knows what their problems are and how they can be fixed.

As soon as we deliver this report of course the client goes into panic mode. The president wants to know what is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed is. We of course mention that some of their pages are ranking better for some the other companies terms and even their brand than they are for their own terms. And that they are leaking lots of link love on every single page to this other company 9 different times. I also wanted to stress that one link is acceptable but 9 was a little excessive and that they should really talk to these people and see if it was done on purpose, cause as I forgot to mention this is a .EDU site. And we all know how we SEO's covet .EDU backlinks. So we establish that this is indeed the standard footer and that they just want to build lots of links :) So there wasn't any attempt to game this client in particular; that they just game all their clients in this way. Anyway back to the story, we continue to work with the client and their internal Web department to identify things that they can easily fix and what they can't. Well as we get into the site more and more we realize that this is truly a mess. It's an ASP.NET CMS, that actually isn't really being used only it's database is being used - then they have ColdFusion pages making calls to the db pulling out content to display. So there is no "Theme" to edit and fix the menus, every one of the 23,000 pages has this stuff hard coded, they don't even use any include files. They let us know after the last group created the "look and feel" they went in and manually edited the pages to incorporate them. Wow! I was amazed. Many people had came through their doors - this was the 4th rework of their site; but no one had taken the time to integrate any of the different parts of the sites. Just band-aided them together and let the client worry about the consequences.

We are currently working with the client to help them decide how to best move forward. And I really believe that it was the transparency and knowledge sharing that really gave us the extra bump in their trust of us. They saw that we just wanted to help make their efforts successful, that we weren't trying to just make another buck. We honestly had their best interest in mind. We empowered them with the knowledge to fix it themselves or hire out someone else. But instead they turned to us; because they now know that they can trust us - we put their success first and it's paying off. I would encourage more Search/Internet/Social Marketers to engage in knowledge sharing and be a little more transparent and see how positively it impacts their bottom line. I will keep everyone updated as the saga continues to unfold :)

Google Operating System starts this fiasco with the "January 1 TCP/IP" query and how Google is unfairly rewarding new pages with inflated ratings, out raking rank for everything under the sun wikipedia. So of course since this comes from Google's mouth the gates open and a flood of bloggers start picking up the news and reciting this as fact like the algorithm really had changed. BlogStorm finally offered a voice of reason:

This search had very few results and wasn't commercial enough to trigger any kind of spam filtering so straight away bloggers started to rank highly purely based on simple factors like title tags.

He then goes on to talk about the Query Deserves Freshness and how that more than likely played a major part in the way that the results were displayed for the "January 1 TCP/IP" query that started all this madness. As BlogStorm points out in the excerpt below

Because the search term "January 1 TCP/IP" went from no previous search history and very few results to millions of queries in one day it triggered the QDF algorithm ranking new content highly.

So Google OS go on and continue to make a point that people then started to game google exploiting the new algorithm.  But really any of us who have been following Google Trends and how it can be gamed like LocalSEOGuide.com has been showing us all of December know that this algorithm isn't new & isn't anything excited & isn't anything that can really be gamed in a spammy kind of way.  It's probably more akin to spamming on the square.

But really none of what I said it was I think this post was about, this post was all about Google OS linkbait. And if you asked me it seems to have worked beautifully. Since October the blogosphere been a buzz with talks about Google Smackdowns, the evils of PayPerPost, how all sponsors must be nofollowed and finally Matt Cutts makes the revelation that you must nofollow for all links from compensated content even links that are editorial and not from the sponsor of the post.  So all this negative buzz about Google, so Google OS decides hey let's write up something nice and get the blogosphere talking about something positive an algorithm change that they can exploit! Do you really think that the Google OS people had no clue about the QDF algorithm and the ramifications that it will have on "trendy" search terms?  I think Google OS is gaming the bloggers and I think it worked brilliantly.

So what else is happening tonight ABC showcasing the Wife Swap Season Premier, On Fox we have the BCS Bowl presentation of the Fiesta Bowl Tostitos Bowl Tostitos Fiesta Bowl where we see the Oklahoma Sooners take on the WVU Mountaineers. What will a WVU Victory mean to WVU Football next season or better yet what will a lose mean to Oklahoma Football?

Well guess that's enough Google Trends Gaming for me :)