Recently some family of mine received a letter in the mail from their local chamber of commerce asking them to “Buy in Garden Grove!” The letter explained that 25% of the cities revenues come from the local small businesses. The direct mail piece is asking residents to try to keep all of their money within the city. Buying cars, groceries, etc… Makes sense. I mean everyone is hurting and I can’t even begin to tell you how many shops are empty and how many “for lease” signs are now up when I drive through the city.

However they made one really large mistake that is actually quite prevalent by many small businesses today. In their direct mail piece they are asking residents to go to their website (ci.garden-grove.ca.us) and click on the link “Buy In Garden Grove” so that the residents of the city can see all of the participating businesses and the deals that they are offering. The problem? There IS NO LINK, anywhere on their site that says anything about their recent promotion or “Buy In Garden Grove”. In fact the word “Buy” doesn’t even exist (except as part of the word “buyer”) on their home page at all.

This doesn’t surprise me from a government agency per se. I am assuming that they will put it up sometime this week as the mail piece did get delivered today. However the execution of this plan is very flawed. The “Buy in Garden Grove” should be up PRIOR to sending out any advertisements especially very expensive ones like direct mail. It should be up as it is a way to help out the local businesses. However this isn’t just a government problem. I have noticed more and more small businesses using direct mail in this very same fashion. Many small businesses are using the more expensive direct mail to send visitors to their website and than offering no follow through with information about the direct mail on their website.

What’s worse is that direct mail has a cost per conversion that is generally 9+ times HIGHER than the cost of search engine marketing. Now in terms of the city of Garden Grove they had to do the direct mail, really not much better way to make notice of their services to the people because of the government agency and Im sure being a government agency they get some kind of a deal when it comes to bulk mail.

However what small businesses need to take from this is to be diligent when it comes to the execution of your marketing program. If you are going to use offline marketing to advertise web specific ads make sure that your site is updated and ready to go before the first piece of mail or offline marketing even goes out. 

Link exchanges. Several years ago link exchanges, quite literally, were all the rage. Many webmasters and SEO’s alike saw link exchanges as a quick and easy way to gain much needed link popularity to a website. In fact a majority of SEO companies openly advertised, as part of their service, to engage a certain number of websites in order to complete link exchanges on your behalf. Some actually still do to this day!

Some took the time to conduct link exchanges in a manner that, were in part, actually creating relevance and were themed to the individual site. Thus creating somewhat content based exchanges. However, the reality is the majority of the webmasters and SEO companies were creating complete “link farms” (defined by Google as link schemes) with trailing pages such as:

Theirsite.com/links16.html and theirsite.com/links17a.html

To put this into perspective lets say we had a website about local produce, for the sake of this discussion we will call it widgetslocalproduce.com. During the “hay day” of link exchanges you would often find a page on widgetslocalproduce.com similar to this:

Widgetslocalproduce.com/links/link15ae.html

The page link15ae.html would carry a plethora of links. At first webmasters would create a single page, typically links.html (or asp - dependent on the technology used) that could include hundreds of links. Some even had thousands. The real estate industry used this technique heavily. Once news started trickling down that Google was only counting a certain amount of each page and only giving a credit to a certain number of links is when the multiple pages started to be put into place.

At first pages were held to 100, than to 20. The thought behind the drop to 20 was to help link exchange partners to receive more PageRank and “link juice” from the exchange. Most of these pages had no rhyme nor reason to who they linked too, they were just a pure intent to artificially increase the PageRank and overall search engine position of their sites. This was evidenced by the myriad of sites that say “widgetslocalproduce.com” would link to like online casinos and mortgage websites.

As you can imagine this quickly became against Googles Best Site Practices.

The Rise of Automated Link Directories
This practice of exchanging links was exasperated by automated link exchange programs such as Zeus, LinksManager, and many other programs that allowed webmasters to put their link exchanges on auto pilot and for awhile it worked… (and to a lesser extent still can on other engines, but always build for Google the others will follow) Abusive link exchanging was well documented and ultimately dropped the relevance of results across all of the major search engines. That’s when Google stepped in with their “Big Daddy Update”. The big daddy update is when Google literally changed how it indexed the web. Sites who were #1 prior to December 2005 were catapulted to the low 200’s or worse, deindexed all together. It sent thousands of business owners, webmasters, and SEO’s into true hysterics (for those who were affected by it that is ) Sites found to be using heavy link exchanges were the kind of sites that were minutely targeted and hit by this massive update.

Fast Forward To Link Exchanges Today
Most SEO’s know the dangers of engaging their clients in link exchanges. Though I must admit we’ve recently run into a rash of clients who were currently working with SEO’s who were still to this day actively engaging and even installing link systems on these clients sites. With all of the information that Google and other search engines have made available to the public, and especially to the SEO community, engaging your clients in unethical search engine optimization practices (as defined by the major search engines) is really unacceptable in this day and age.

Now to the section that is the whole reason for this post
“Black hat SEOs” and just plain unethical webmasters are using linking schemes such as triangle link exchanges, Direct Link Exchanges, and several other forms of exchanges that you need to keep a watchful eye out for so that you can avoid endangering your own website and your current search engine ranking. You may receive an email like this:

We receive emails like this from link exchange spammers several times a day. In fact we get several different emails a week from the same link exchange company. The names of who is sending the email just changes. Sometimes its Annie, sometimes its Peter, and it’s even been Angela, but I think we all know that they are all just different names for the same person, SPAMMER.

Take special note of the subject of the link exchange email: “Following up on my Previous Email”. First we received no previous email. This is note worthy as link exchange spammers use this technique to try to create familiarity and to initially engage you. First by preying on the idea that most small business’ receive hundreds of emails per week. This gives the link exchange spammers a higher potential increase for you to open their email. With spam having such a low open rate it’s critical that they use a subject that will get you to open the email. “Following up” is an A typical way for many vendors to, quite literally, follow up with you their potential client. Link exchange spammers try to use the amount of other spam and legitimate business emails against you.

You will also take note that the link exchange email spam above does not follow the Can-Spam act of 2003 that requires commercial emails to include “A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.”

The Moral of the story? If you really want to achieve long term search engine ranking and visibility you will avoid harmful link exchanges requests like the example we give above. These exchanges could potentially cause immense damage to your website and domain. If you do receive an email similar to the above use these resources to report it:

1. Spam Cop
2. FTC - Spam (Government link)

BLATANT PROMOTION: If you want to ethically establish the link popularity of your site WE CAN HELP

The explosion of social networking and social media sites has been a very welcome addition to the marketing landscape. It has been especially welcomed by those marketers looking to take advantage of a tremendous wealth of (typically) targeted traffic that comes from a properly positioned social media campaign.

However, with every way of ethically working within a medium there is always going to be 2 or 3 ways of unethically abusing a system. Typically these abuses are used to either enhance the users position, brand, or traffic, or, and even more deceptively, and what were going to touch on here, attempt to tarnish, defame, or otherwise destroy the competition through inflammatory, insidious, and down right untruthful actions.

Knowing how certain individuals and companies are attempting to sabotage you and your marketing efforts gives you an edge to help potentially stem the onslaught that may come your way.

The Setup
Social networking sites by their very nature are based on the popularity principle. The more “votes” a topic or post receives the higher it is moved up the proverbial chain. The ultimate goal of course being to reach the home page of said social networking site. This is of course not news and of course abusing social mediums is not new. Think back not too long ago when every other post on many of the web development / seo forums were individuals / companies guaranteeing to get your post on the front page of DIGG, Reddit, etc…

While this has its own post written all over it (in regards to the ethics of marketing online) it is merely one of the potential vehicles being abused by unscrupulous marketers to try and defame their competition. Now imagine those same methods being used to promote and distribute defaming or even simply libelous information about you or your company and what impact they could ultimately have on you and your reputation.

A great example would be from CNN’s ireport website where someone using this social network site created a post in regards to Apple’s Steve Jobs having a heart attack. This information turned out to be completely false, but the damage was done to thousands when Apples stock took a huge hit. While the stock recovered, it was still down overall for the day. It is also under SEC investigation as some made a LOT of money with a crash of that sort.

Not everyone is as large as Apple and can have everything so easily corrected. Case in point one of my clients, a prominent fishing forum, who got caught in the cross fire, TWICE, by a very unscrupulous competitor.

The first time had to do with the site ILLEGALLY registering copyrighted domain names that were protected by not only cybersquatting laws, but intellectual property laws as well. After this was discovered and efforts were put under way to recover the domains, the first site we’ll call them the “unethical ones” started an anti social networking campaign that included getting this top ranked fishing forum (my client) listed as an adult site and not open to public on sites like aboutus.org. (See Screen Shot Below).

These are just a few of the different examples I have personally witnessed of the benefits of the social networking world being bent and abused by those who whose sense of ethics may not be so much on the up and up. It is also the first in many lessons of what to look out for when you’re marketing yourself or your company online.

Remember while it is critical to concentrate on building your good press, you need to keep an ever vigilant eye to the abuse of social networking that is now more than ever becoming ever so common.