Link-building comment spam

That ever-present pox on blogs and just about any site with commenting – otherwise known as comment spam – is finally getting its day in the sun. In this case, the sunlight is sanitizing, and Google's most recent algorithm updates have actively and aggressively penalized the sites who used comment spam for link-building.

I've covered legitimate ways to build to links in class, and those methods – seeking relevant, quality links from other sites – are still good practice. But the darker art of massive-scale link building that went on for many years in the comments sections of websites around the world has now come back to haunt the companies that benefitted from those strategies, and the results are sometimes hilarious.

For a great rundown of how all this happened and the plaintive requests that site owners are now making to have their links removed, read this great piece over at The Awl. It's a fine, brief history of "black hat" link building and a pretty humorous review of the requests that The Awl is now receiving to have those links removed.

Listicles are here to stay

In the web marketing and advertising class, I talk about how short lists are often irresistible subject lines for marketing emails. But listicles may be soon be the top form of online content consumption for many people. What started as a teaser to get readers to view longer-form articles (see: every magazine cover for the last 20 years) has become a predominant form of publishing content online. Between the ascendancy of Buzzfeed-style listicles and Slate's what-you-think-you-know-is-wrong contrarianism, we may have a formula for online content for the next decade. Is this awesome or sad?  Read up on it in detail over at DigiDay and let me know what you think.

Auto-posting to social networks

One of the key tools in the "Pro Toolkit" that I talk about in class is Hootsuite, a web site/service that enables you to schedule social media updates (using the "Publisher" feature) and also auto-posts articles from any RSS feed (often your blog) to your social media profiles.

If you're creating a substantial amount of content, services like Hootsuite or Seesmic can be a good way to nail that all-important marketing automation part of your business, so that you can go and do the things that are important to your operations.

Journalism.co.uk has a good review of another automated publishing tool, dlvr.it, which is geared toward organizations that publish a lot of content. If you're planning on extensive content creation, it might be worth a look. The article also mentions Buffer and IFTTT, the latter of which is one of my favorite web-based automation tools (though not for the technophobe). Read the article.

Where's the Ad? Half of Us Can't Tell

As I mention in class, the ads that Google and others run in their search engine results are often not obviously different from the natural (or "organic") search results themselves. Apparently, the FTC agrees and this week told search engine companies that they need to do a better job of identifying advertisements. I guess that barely visible light yellow background for Google's pay per click ads isn't doing the trick; a study by SEOBook found that almost half of searchers didn't recognize the difference. Full story at the New York Times.

The power of lists (and listicles)

Over at the Hubspot Marketing Blog, Dan Lyons has a (very) light piece on why lists have become a primary form of information presentation and consumption on the web. There's some lighthearted commentary as well as a few serious thoughts about how we've all become accustomed to casual skimming the place of actual reading. Like most lists, the piece is cheeky, easy to consume, and light on actual content. It's meta.

I don't know how much people truly read online, although Farhad Manjoo at Slate (also referenced in Lyons' article) has some real data about online reading trends that are pretty troubling if you value longer-form writing on the web. The long and short of it is that everything is getting, well, shorter.

One of the tips I give in the email marketing class is that subject lines with lists ("5 things" or "10 tips") are a nearly foolproof way to increase open rates. This isn't exclusive to online publishing; magazines have been doing it for years to entice you to grab an issue off the newsstands. (Websites initially embraced lists spread across multiple pages as a way to juice page views, but advertisers caught on to this, and now more and more lists are simply spread the length of many screens.)

Should we lament our susceptibility to this informational junk food? I don't know. We all seem to be wired to crave a quick fix, a simple solution. The web has just given us our best delivery method yet.