We definitely do not tolerate any kind of SPAM at all

Unfortunately the evidence available to me at the time not just on my own blog but elsewhere, was in stark contrast.

Washington Post Spammed – great way to encourage press coverage

Any legitimate service, if they wanted to get press coverage from an international news publication, might issue a press release, and contact a newspaper through legitimate channels directly, or maybe through their public relations company.

Wide Circles seem to have a different approach that might gain them coverage, but for totally different reasons…

First of all we need to look at the Washington Post Discussion Guidelines

3. You understand and agree that the discussion forums are to be used only for non-commercial purposes. You may not solicit funds, promote commercial entities or otherwise engage in commercial activity in our discussion forums.

The first spam is on an article about parental filtering by OpenDNS

The second is on an April Fools Day security warning

Wide Circles Spamming Wikia

I am sure Jimmy Wales will love this example of “Viral Marketing” – for obvious reasons I don’t quite trust the content, so I am nofollowing the link, and didn’t give it any suitable anchor text.

More Wide Circles Spam Examples

Note: I am nofollowing links where they might not get cleared up.

Chris Dockery seems to have been spammed in just the same way I was.

Scott seems to have been spammed by Wide Circles, but he really should nofollow the link to them, both on his blog, and on the sites that syndicate his content, such as Gooruze.

Gobala seems to have had his forums spammed by Wide Circles.

The Blog Herald seems to be a very soft target for comment spam these days, just look at this post as an example.
But amongst the junk, is a very familiar comment
Just curious if anyone ever heard of WideCircles internet viral marketing service ? I was referred to it by another webmaster. Apparently they work by injecting viral messages into various forums, blogs, wiki’s, classifieds and so on. These messages then contain backlinks which help with SEO, as well attract lot of referral traffic. They bill around 0.40c per each post that’s been active for 5 days and say a single post can easily attract 100 or more hits a day, I am going to give them a try today and see how it goes. http://wide circles.com?imt=2

The BizInformer – spammed

Another example of Wide Circles forum spam over on Angelfire.

FastCompany isn’t immune to this kind of junk, though it is in the form of junk blog posts – again the wonderful claims

Here is an interesting comment on Andrew’s blog post, on companies looking to increase email marketing spend.

its ok.. but i have a different opinion as most of the people now days dont even try to open the mails that comes from unknown senders because simply it might be a spam so i guess the majority that opens such mails are the new users of the internet and i agree that they are growing but they are not the majority of the internet users.

——–
franko.

Put The Message Where It Matters! WideCircles aka Wide Circles represents relevant, distributed, highly targeted and efficient internet word of mouth marketing using entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion using social network mediums such as blogs, forums, wikis and so on.
http://wide circles.com

My personal interpretation: The comment intent is to drop the link, and possibly to suggest that their “viral marketing” is a better alternative. Just because there might be some relevance to the comment doesn’t make this legitimate as a form of marketing.
This is a borderline case, but I would have spammed it.

WebProWorld Spammed

This example is actually very sad

WebProNews like many forums allow you to use a sig which has followed links – all you have to do is take part in the conversation, and you can get a link back to whatever sites you like, though probably best to link back to sites you own.

We have a thread asking for an alternative video hosting service for use with WordPress

The first comment was totally off topic, just spamming a link

The second message is highly generic with the link in the sig – but the person doing it doesn’t even know how to format an HTML hyperlink correctly. As well as running male beauty contests, Jaan just happens to be a moderator at WebProWorld. I am sure he will be interested.

Wide Circles Spamming Sphinn

This last example is a little more personal, because it involves a blog post that is about me, and calls into question my initial evaluation of Wide Circles.

I would like to state for the record I have no objection to open dialogue, and even criticism, but I much prefer criticism from real people rather than sock puppets.

There is a thread on Sphinn that has appeared and as others have noted, it is a little on the dubious side… to say the least.

Despite the extremely dubious comments, I actually hope the Sphinn moderators leave this example of Wide Circles comment spam online, though they should probably prevent the sock puppet accounts from voting on any more stories. IP addresses might not be much value, as some people working with Wide Circles are known to use proxys.

Do you also see how they are down voting comments made by legitimate members of the Sphinn community?

A quick shout out to thank Jonathan and Bob – I am not sure who Sleuth1 is.

The is a little history behind Bob’s comment, I once wrote a highly negative review of one of his services. I didn’t know him at the time, and it wasn’t actually obvious that he was involved. It would have taken a little detective work, and I found out quite by chance many months later when doing some other research.
So having written negative things about him, he now includes me on his blogroll.

Bob Massa also offers SEO linkbuilding and content generation services. Even though I have corresponded with Bob a little now by email, if his guys were blatantly spamming in the same way as Wide Circles, I would probably write a similar post to this one.

The Sphinn Sock Puppets

Just for the record…

JustinLang1

Jacklassape

Nancyd91

Jdanston

The Sphinn Story Itself

First of all, Jackie Nerito is a pseudonym

It was in some way a response to my coverage of Widecircles, but they didn’t deem it worthy of a link, even if nofollowed, or even provide a reference that could be copy / pasted.

I am not going to link through to the post, because they could just flag me as spam in Akisment, and I wouldn’t link to them with a followed link anyway, as I have no trust in the content.

http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

I have added a space in the URL – I wouldn’t want the post being linked to automatically by splogs.

This is actually one of two highly questionable blogs on the topic of Wide Circles, here is the other one

http://widecircles world.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/wide-circles-releases-new-version-of-the-system/

There is a high chance that they are both on the same WP.com account.

The points raised in the post?

• I did mention other services, such as forum posting and wiki spam – I didn’t concentrate on them – based upon the comments I have seen, if they have moved into also providing a blog post service, I really would stay far far away from it, unless your target market wouldn’t know the difference between literate and illiterate English. That is based upon what I have seen. I spent a fair amount of time on the first post, and again on this one – I also left comments with opposing views, even though they were anonymous with fake email address, and left using a proxy
• “Comments when done properly and by trained staff are not dangerous, they can increase your rank, help you with seo and allow you receive lot of referral traffic” – just look at the junk examples that Wide Circles have excreted over the internet to promote their own brand
• Referral traffic – the only referral traffic woulld be from people wondering “Where the hell did this junk comment come from” – once the domain starts being trashed in spam filters, and being talked about in negative light, the comment spam just increases the damage already caused.
• Comment spam as paid links – it appears the writer doesn’t pay careful attention to the Google webmaster groups, for instance this thread on penalties for one site, and in particular this comment by John Mu
  

  Similar to how you have removed spammy links in your own forum, you
  may want to consider what you can do to help clean up similar links on
  other people’s sites. Blogs and newspaper sites such as
  http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com sometimes receive short
  comments such as “dont agree”, apparently only for a link back to a
  site. These comments often use keywords from that site instead of a
  user name, perhaps “tree bench” for a furniture site or “sexy shoes”
  for a footwear site. If this kind of behavior might have taken place
  for your site, you may want to work on rectifying it and include some
  information on it in your reconsideration request. Given your
  situation, the person considering your reconsideration request might
  be curious about links like that, so the more you can explain about
  that, that may help as well.

  John

  Thus Google can look on spam comments as a factor for ranking penalties.

• Legitimate Paid Comments – I get the instinct impression that the author was working from a print out of my previous Wide Circles post, because the paragraph regarding legitimate paid comments contained a clear, obvious link to a previous blog post on paid blog comments. I have just included a link to it again.
  This would include for instance Tamar, who is paid to write articles for Mashable, Lifehacker and is the Associate Editor of Search Engine Round Table. If I link to an article she wrote on Mashable, and she came to my blog and left a comment, in many ways she is being paid to write that comment.
  If you were using an outsourcing company such as Bob’s to create your blog content, then in theory it would be legitimate for the person writing content for your blog to also respond to comments, but as themselves or their personal pseudonym, not as “you”.

As for being a “SEO expert” I let other people judge – I don’t sell any kind of consulting or work for any 3rd party clients.

I have a screenshot of the post itself for my records, but this page is already quite heavy with graphics, so in the interests of page load time, here is that broken URL again
http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

The whole article is better than 99% of Sphinn content

I wonder how many people on Sphinn have even heard of Gary Halbert?

It seems like the Sphinn moderators were having another hissy fit – they see an article written intended to promote a product or service and just delete it in some kind of knee-jerk reaction based upon the title.

I don’t think it was some kind of collective decision based upon community desphinns, I only saw one visitor in my stats from Sphinn/Upcoming before it was removed.

I am not going to claim that the remainder of my review/promotion was amazing content, it might have sparked a few thoughts, but honestly how many SMX related posts, or book reviews, or even announcements about various products being launched by Sphinn users really contain anything insightful that the majority of Sphinn users have never read before?

Maybe I should write about Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninjas again but include an affiliate link? I guarantee such a post wouldn’t be flagged as spam, because it is Jim Boykin’s and not Alex Goad’s product.

I am not saying I would have Sphunn my post, but then I have read the works of the late Gary Halbert multiple times, but for anyone unfamiliar, his words can have a profound effect on your business.

On a personal note, I still received 3 email requests for Sphinns yesterday, and one Twitter message asking me to comment. I haven’t logged into Sphinn since I left 3 months ago.

Whoever decided to submit my article and thought it would be interesting to the Sphinn community, thanks, but it seems the moderators at Sphinn don’t like Internet Marketing submissions.

Sphinn Is Not Internet Marketing

I suppose the ultimate proof that Sphinn is not relevant to Internet Marketing is the following screenshot

Update: published with the wrong screenshot for 5 minutes

I wrote about Product Launch Formula twice because I knew people in the online marketing community could benefit from it, and that includes Jim, probably Rand, it could even help with the promotion of SMX.
The second time I wrote about it I even included a link through to someone compiling a list of links through to all the special offers available (there were some crackers) if gaining extra value was important.

Just little things, for instance how much difference in sales would it make releasing full video footage from last year’s SMX Advanced for free? I haven’t attended… are people going to be impressed with the material?

I just looked at a couple of Jim’s Internet Marketing Ninja’s demo videos.
Which ones contain some of the very best material?
You know, the golden nuggets that are going to convince me that the remainder are going to be worthwhile?

I know that people involved in Internet Marketing need to learn a lot about Social Media, and lots of crap gets submitted to Sphinn around the time of big launches within Internet Marketing circles, but at the same time Sphinn users in my opinion could benefit from even just the free content that is provided during most Internet Marketing launches.

I don’t intend to return to Sphinn, but does Sphinn really want to alienate such a huge segment of the online marketing community, and deprive their users of news about valuable products to help their online business.

Moderation sucks on Digg, in many ways it is worse on Sphinn, you can’t even see the stuff that has been autoburied or removed.

Gary Halbert & The Significance of Timing

I know Alex Goad reasonably well, and I am sure it hasn’t escaped him that Gary Halbert passed away almost exactly a year ago. Sunday April 8th 2007. I first heard about it from Michel Fortin.
I am not sure if things were planned that way, and if there will be some kind of additional tribute other than Gary’s words being immortalized as part of yet another product launch, but that in itself is tribute to the man, and his teaching.

Question 1: Had you personally heard of Gary Halbert before I mentioned him in either this article, or my previous one?
Question 2: Had you read any of his previous letters?

Any comments which don’t first of all answer those 2 questions will be deleted (unless it is painfully obvious – e.g. you commented on previous posts mentioned above)

But that would be gaming the system based upon whatever level of popularity I have achieved within the Online Marketing community and it seems that popularity of whatever kind isn’t necessarily a good thing, because the masses or individuals start accusing you of gaming the system for your own benefit.

So I have just deleted an article I spent 2 or 3 hours writing yesterday…

Instead I am going to cover something possibly a little more controversial, that has been gnawing at me for a number of months.

I Am Hanging Up The Towel @ Sphinn

The reason I am writing this post is to inform my readers as to the reasons why a Sphinn button will no longer be on this blog, and also why even if you submit my content there, I am not going to respond to any comments that might occur on Sphinn.

Parallels will no doubt be drawn with the recent Digg fiasco

I suppose the difference is that I really am hanging up the towel rather than creating a storm in a teacup

This is between me and my readers, so I would actually prefer this not to be submitted to social media sites and for no one to link to it.

This isn’t linkbait or an attempt to make changes – the writing has been on the wall for a while already.

The Sphinn Launch

Sphinn has now been around for 6 months, so I don’t think this is too early to pass my personal judgement.

When Launched, Sphinn was described as “Sphinn: Our Social Site For Search & Internet Marketing Professionals”

I first wrote about Sphinn 6 months ago, almost to the day, and my emphasis was on attention, market segmentation and building bridges within the industry.

In my personal opinion, Sphinn has totally and utterly failed to achieve that, and in some ways it has helped widening the gap between different online marketing professionals.

I would even question the word “professional” because some of the defamatory remarks I have read and bitten my tongue over have certainly not been professional conduct.

Anti-Internet Marketing Sentiment

Whilst the Sphinn logo proclaims Sphinn as a site suitable to submit “Internet marketing” related content, and as such Internet Marketers in general, not just the audience catered for by Search Engine Land would or at least should feel welcome.

I am not going to list specific examples as I am not trying to convince anyone, but at times, in fact with increasing frequency I have felt insulted in much the same way SEOs get insulted by people claiming that they don’t like 95% of SEO Experts, or that they are all Snake Oil Salesman.

Some people might look on me as an SEO Expert, I feel I just question preconceived ideas and a lot of what I write is just writing down my thought process. At heart, I am an “Internet Marketer”, and an “Affiliate Marketer”.

I would love for the divisions in the industry to somehow be bridged, but that isn’t going to happen on Sphinn.

Social Bias

It is interesting how many articles on Sphinn proclaim the advantages of getting involved with the community, making yourself visible with an avatar for personal branding, gaining a reputation for submitting only good content and various other social media strategies.

Unfortunately, unless you have some kind of special commercial immunity, if user popularity begins to have a noticeable effect on which submissions appear on the front page, no matter how large your contribution to a particular social media site, a negative reaction can take place.

You could liken this to:-

• Don’t Make Google Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Digg Look Stupid
• Don’t Make Sphinn Look Stupid

It doesn’t matter whether you are doing anything wrong, it is the perception that something is underhand, or you are gaining some kind of edge that creates an imbalance.

The Evil Green Monkey highlighted this perfectly on Sphinn

You won’t be able to read this comment online, the story is still hidden in moderation, but the tone makes me livid

It isn’t a full comment, I happened to still have the global comments page open in a tab that hadn’t been refreshed when I noticed the post had been pulled. The comment continued on to mention something about the post being reviewed by moderators.

There is actually a bug in Sphinn, even when a post is manually moderated, it still appears on the list of posts that you have sphunn, so I was able to grab this screenshot.

Maki submitting a post to sphinn is never a guarantee that it is going to reach the front page. In fact Maki has the lowest “hot” percentage within the top 15 Sphinn users.

You can certainly draw parallels with Digg, top users do dominate the front page on Sphinn, but it is generally because they are more active and submit more content.
I have multiple screenshots where I have had 6 of the 30 front page stories being ones I have submitted, and I have seen the same from Maki – that doesn’t mean that everything we submit goes hot.

It could also be attributed to the story being from my domain – I have been promoting Sphinn fairly heavily among my readers, and I display a Sphinn button on every post by default. I have a “cultivated” Sphinn audience, and many are very active Sphinners – it is possible you now get penalised for that, unless it would in some way upset the existing social fabric of Search Engine Marketing.

The story itself wasn’t promoted through any other channels, I hadn’t been on instant messenger for a couple of weeks due to connection difficulties, I didn’t mention it on Twitter or Pownce, and as far as I am aware Maki didn’t either.

I should point out I haven’t discussed this post with Maki, and in fact the only communication I had with Maki regarding the post was on Sphinn, when I questioned the category choice – I think the last time I discussed any form of social media submission with Maki was during the October PageRank update/drama/scandal when Maki offered to submit my first “Digg Favorites” post to Digg – it got buried at 70 votes, but still received 140 Diggs that day.

At least when Digg buries a story the submission and comments are still available. You will notice on the screenshot that there are 6 comments. the comment order was me, maki, me, evilgreenmonkey

I have no idea who the remaining 2 comments were from, but I will never have a chance to read them.

I wasn’t informed about the submission being removed, but then why would I? I wasn’t the one who submitted the post to Sphinn in the first place.

Commercial Bias

The post in question was my offer to provide exclusive content for membership sites. It is commercial, but at the same time I believe it also raises some interesting questions, suggests a way to monetize your status as an “authority blogger” in a way not often discussed, and I even included a teaser at the end that I know at least one very smart person worked out.

Sphinn already had some level of commercial bias that I had recently challenged, though it seemed things had been cleared up.

Unfortunately excluding my story based upon the current Sphinn rules or even what was discussed in that thread falls down on almost every front.

1. The submitter is the top user on Sphinn
2. The article was written by a regular Sphinn contributor
3. The article had some value other than the commercial message
4. Other regular Sphinn users or “Sphinn friends” who have released products, or are promoting a new service get Sphunn all the time, reaching the front page and staying there without any negative comments. It is looked on as News which just happens to be included right next to “Internet Marketing” in the Sphinn Logo
5. The story had only 10 votes by the time I went to bed in the early hours of the morning here in Europe – it was already on the 3rd page of new submissions – 6 hours later it was on the front page – those votes probably didn’t come from Sphinn, or some kind of gaming, they came from my subscribers
6. I saw who voted for the story a while before it was pulled, when it was on about 23 or 24 votes – there were no ugly green default icons among the voters, in fact most of the votes came from very active Sphinn members including at least one moderator
7. The people who I actively talk to on instant messenger, e.g. some of the guys on Collective Thoughts, actually hadn’t voted for the story. Some had, Shana, Tad and Glen, but no votes from Tim, Brian, Marty or Mark, and Rose hasn’t been around for a while. I should note also that Shana, Tad, Marty and Glen are less frequently on IM

It is also quite possible that many people read the original post made by EvilGreenMonkey and thought they were now expected to flag every post with some level of commercial intent as spam, without following up on the remainder of the comments. A separate retraction of that statement, or a change in the rules was not made.

At the end of the day, I honestly can’t see any substantial difference between the post I have somehow had moderated, and say this one, Jim launching Internet Marketing Ninjas – one of many recent examples, but I chose it because it is the closest match being an information product launch. I voted for that one too, because I found the post entertaining, and it added a little bit to the sales letter, with some useful social proof.

Comments

I love comments on blogs, I hate when the most important discussions happen on social media and social news sites. Following comments on Sphinn isn’t an efficient use of my time, and to be honest, in many ways is harmful to the conversation as it can’t be seen by all users.

Target Audience

Having evaluated Sphinn over the last 6 months, I have come to the conclusion that Sphinn is not my target audience. In many ways it is an “unfriendly environment” for many of my target audience, thus encouraging my readers to use Sphinn isn’t proactive.

The bias is there in the moderation, quite possibly because the bias is there within the users, and moderators take action based at least partially on user requests.

I am sure that many of the people who were already reading my blog before I became active on Sphinn will continue to do so, and those who discovered my blog through Sphinn are more than welcome to hang around.

I just won’t be taking an active roll on Sphinn, and will be exploring other communities

Why I am Even Writing This?

• Readers would have asked questions
• I get requests for submissions all the time
• I have had a number of reactions such as

I did hear someone shafted you !! I fully understand..

At the end of the day, this isn’t about me being shafted – it is more about other internet marketers being shafted, and if it can happen to me, it will continue to happen to them.

Moving on

As already noted, this is my explanation to my readers. To avoid any hint of bias I have now removed myself from judging in the Semmys for what was to be a “Judges Choice Award” in each category.

Again, this isn’t an attempt at linkbait, I don’t want it promoted on social media and I have even switched off comments for the first time, and won’t be responding to emails or instant messages regarding this.

I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.

If This Content Is So Good, Why Hasn’t It Been Submitted Before?

There are a number of reasons why my old post on WordPress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have been submitted by anyone in the past, and I think it is important to elaborate.

• The post in question was originally written in June, thus it pre-dates Sphinn – Danny doesn’t mind older content being submitted as long as it adds something of value.
• It was written as a Paid Post – I am sure some people are shuddering already, and others might just have a little gleam in their eyes – after all what better way to emphasise a point about some paid content and links being of high value than to have it highly rated on Sphinn
• Sphinn Might Not Accept a Paid Post – This is one reason I personally didn’t submit it sooner, because I respect the wishes of the admins, as well as the community. I asked Danny in a comment on Sphinn and I have taken his reply to mean that this submission would be acceptable.
• I was unsure of the “current climate” regarding paid links – I think in part SES San Jose has brought even some of the most white hat SEOs to question Google’s stance, and whilst Google’s stance is like a rock against a storm tide, hopefully… eventually… we will have some clarification on some of the more grey areas.
• The article was a load of junk? – no one has given me that reaction so far in the comments, or the other correspondence I have had about the article – the article also generated a lot of consulting enquiries which I turned down or have yet to progress to the next stage
• The content wasn’t original – whilst I reference other people fairly often, it is never without my own opinion, and in this case I think most SEOs think “siloing” is advanced linking structures – this article goes well beyond siloing

Gaming Sphinn?

Of course not…

I am just making my readers aware that I have submitted an article they might have enjoyed or even been tempted themselves to submit to Sphinn, if it wasn’t for the “stigma” of it being a paid post that might damage their reputation in some way.

Want to Make A Statement?

This might be one way of doing it…

Matt Cutts reads Sphinn, at least occasionally.

So do a lot of people who don’t fully understand the arguments frequently raised by SEOs about paid links, and services such as ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and PayPerPost

This post in particular I feel highlights something wrong with Google’s arguments and I am quite happy to provide it as an example (many people would be scared to do so)

Won’t Google Discount The Links?

All links within the site review were given editorially. The PPP interface doesn’t really provide for this, but it was negotiated before acceptance and I have documentary proof though it is private communication.

It Looks Like Google Have Already Discounted The Links

Google Backlink check on Emonetized

I should note at this time that the review was a one off “contract” and thus I am not receiving any monetary compensation for the links in this article.

That also proves that Tim’s blog is in the same area of topical authority, it is natural for me to be linking to him, and all the links are relevant.

Tim was honestly giving me a little compensation for the time I spent on a review.

Unfortunately it is impossible to prove whether my links to Tim really pass some Google Juice or not, because Google’s link: command doesn’t provide all the results, and might even skip some of the most relevant.
SEO Round Table highlighted today a few ways to check if links pass value – I have checked a number of my other links to other people and have seen my links credited. My WordPress SEO article has received a fair number of incoming links, and I have linked to it multiple times from pages that received links.

It was also syndicated in full and listed as the feature article on Searchnewz.com (note – I didn’t give a followed link to my syndicated article, although it is syndicated with my blessing)

Using Nofollow To Control Juice?

Matt seems to say that using nofollow to control Google Juice is ok, as long as you don’t orphan content.

Voting

I really don’t want this post submitted, despite the fact it might have evidence (though inconclusive) that Google are discounting some links they probably shouldn’t.

However if you liked my old post “WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches” I would appreciate a vote on Sphinn, whether you thought it was great content, or because you want to highlight to Google that some paid content can be great, and the links editorial.

If you think it is junk, tell me so in the comments on that post, and give me some better examples.

Obviously I could just change the permalink to bring it to the front page and give it a little more attention, but I am saving that for a future test on Google’s algorithms

As the Sphinn user base increases, finding the wheat among the chaff becomes more time consuming.

In the future Sphinn will allow some sort of filtering based upon your friends, but what can you do now to maximise the signal to noise ratio?

The Front Page Of Sphinn

This is an obvious stop, and hopefully it won’t be filled with “made For Sphinn” articles every day.

Sphinn Greatest Hits

Eventually this will contain a superb overview of the online marketing industry, though as Sphinn is still very new, a lot of the current top posts are related to Sphinn.

Sphinn Upcoming Most Popular

I found a gem from Danny Sullivan in a comment and wanted to highlight how much time this can save.

… I strongly recommend scanning What’s New and then resorting it by Most Sphinns So Far:

http://sphinn.com/upcoming/mostpopular/

You’ll quickly find some gems that have been spotted by others over time but yet to pop. Plenty of traction there.

Find An Active Friend

Find a friend who is highly active on Sphinn, and whose judgement of good stories meets your own tastes. For me an ideal choice is Maki from DoshDosh who seems to have taken a liking to Sphinn and visits every day.

Maki’s Latest Sphinns is a great place to find hot upcoming stories that haven’t made the previously mentioned lists.

Top Posts By Category

This is a great way to find the very best content related to your interests, and much more useful than the greatest hits currently.

My favourite haunts are actually in some of the subcategories that are easily missed.

Other Online Marketing – lots of hidden gems
Affiliate Marketing – currently a bit of a ghost town

For social media, I tend to look at the parent group, because I am interested in all the topics which include Blogging and various social bookmarking and news sites.

Categories are also available for latest hits, such as the Google Category that might be of great interest for search industry watchers and pundits. You will find lots of things here that never reach the major news channels, for better or worse.

The Newest Of The New

If you have some time available to sift through the latest submissions, you can find some good content worthy of your attention. I rarely have time to click beyond the first page.

Example Great Stories From 5 Minutes Browsing

What Not To Do With Your Business Blog – Lee Odden on things that annoy him about business blogs. This is something I have been meaning to write about, and Lee saved me lots of time. I agree with every single point he raised.

11 Tips to Enhance Your Digg User Experience (and Hopefully Bring You Front Page Fame) – Tamar is on my Digg friends list, but also on Pownce and Twitter – the strategies she discussses I know she uses, and it has brought her success. It is a shame she didn’t go into more detail on Digg Friends.

Google; “You can put 50+ words in your title tag, we’ll read it” – real unique research is popular on Sphinn and Shawn proves it. This Ethical SEO experiment is also worthy of attention.

Google Wants Feedback on Removing PageRank Score – Tamar gets 2 links in one post but this highlights the fact that Google get involved a lot in online forums, though quite often not their own ([cough] Toolbar Buttons) and this is in relation to the Google Toolbar showing Pagerank.
My suggestion is a gradient scale, maybe involving more than one colour.

I can just imagine someone using a colour picker and saying “My Google rating is somewhere between #FE3 and #d71”

For those unfamiliar with Antisocial, these are the differences

• All links have nofollow added – this might sound strange coming from someone who strongly supports the removal of nofollow from comments, but there is no logical purpose having a followable link to a social bookmark site that just points to a submission form
• TwitThis Support – for those that like Tweeting
• StumbleUpon Fix – The original has a bug in the StumbleUpon link
• New support for Sphinn – lots of people are going to use it, so I am sure it is a welcome addition

I am aware that Eyefall previously posted a modified version of the original to include Sphinn, but it doesn’t include the other necessary changes, and who really wants to use a plugin that sucks for SEO, especially the primary users of Sphinn, most likely SEOs.

Another valuable note, very few people will actually take action and use patched files, or even files presented as phps which you have to copy and paste.
If you don’t distribute plugins in an idiot proof zip file, very few people will use it.

I learnt this from experience by offering initially instructions on how to patch Sociable, and how many of my readers didn’t take action.

If you are still unsure about why you might want to use my version of Sociable, you might appreciate this “blast from the past” about how many blogs can retain as much as 50% more link juice internally.

For more information on the plugin itself, please visit the main download page.

For those that know all about it, here is a quick download link for Antisocial

Note: As always, no version number change though I have updated the notes within it – I still look on this as not being a branch of the original, just a hack for SEO minded individuals.
It still contains the sociable bug with WordPress 2.2.1 as I recently mentioned

SEM Isn’t a Neglected Niche

PlugIM has been going reasonably well for quite a while
Bumpzee has lots of communities that are SEO / SEM / Marketing related

There are also a number of other marketing and blogging bookmarking and news sites that I have seen though didn’t seem to have quite as much traction.

Sure, SEO, SEM etc isn’t very popular on sites like Digg unless you have a very cultivated audience, and even then you have to have an insane amount of credibility in the the eyes of the general Digg population to stand a chance of not being buried.

So if it is not availability of suitable social networks for the topic maybe it is…

Sphinn is a Better Technology Platform?

Sphinn is running on Pligg

Well at least Sphinn is sometimes running on Pligg…

PlugIM is also running on Pligg, but from what I can see, other than cosmetic differences such as adding all your other social networks, and possibly “stalking” (I haven’t looked at that closely), the version of Pligg used by PlugIM is much more heavily customised.

This includes:-

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (though this isn’t collected from the content)

Categorization of content just doesn’t work – there is a big difference in SMO with the purpose of gaining links, and SMO with the aim to gather email or RSS subscribers for Direct Marketing.

Bumpzee on the other hand is a custom platform – it still has a few bugs, and quite a few features missing. If it received a similar amount of attention as Sphinn seems to be getting, I am sure the guys at Bumpzee would spend a huge amount more time on it rounding off the features.

Ultimately Bumpzee currently blows Pligg out of the water for features unless Pligg is heavily customised.

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (picked up automatically)
• Lots of Widgets
• Multiple interlinked communities

Sphinn has no technological advantage, in fact it might be looked on as inferior

Attention Wars

Lots of people in the SEM community have attacked Jason Calacanis for Mahalo his (in his own words) “viable Google co-exister”, and Guy Kawasaki for Truemors.

Danny Sullivan was one of the heavy detractors.

The only reason Sphinn might be successful is Danny Sullivan & Attention

Deja Vu anyone?

Hardly anyone in the SEM community would give a damn about Sphinn if it wasn’t launched by Danny. I have seen Pligg sites heavily criticised by many SEO/SEM specialists.

When Danny Sullivan announced Sphinn, he stated:-

By no means do we envision Sphinn as replacing general news sites like Digg. We just think the story submission model can work and be powerful in a specialized area such as search, as well.

By the way, we’re not the first to try this for search. In February 2006, The Search Engine Press was launched, then John Battelle kicked off SearchMob in September of that year. Since then, we’ve had others appear, including BUMPzee and ISEdb Scoop. We’re happy to join them!

That was actually only the second time Bumpzee had been mentioned on Search Engine Land.

I can only assume that Bumpzee wasn’t gaining exposure on influential SEO / SEM blogs because of some kind of disclosure problem, or not wanting to promote a future competitor, or a future competitor owned by a strategic business partner.

PlugIM has never been mentioned, though it does pick up Danny’s content from Search Engine Land.

At least Sphinn can’t be accused of copying some of the better features on PlugIM.

Critical Mass

Sphinn now exists, and will likely capture the attention of a large proportion of the SEM / SEO community, because ultimately most people involved in SEO / SEM in one way or another are attention and link whores.
Danny certainly has a fair amount of attention, and a lot of other people in the industry with attention are also promoting the site, at least a little.

It will continue to grow as long as Danny keeps driving traffic to it, but he is not even doing a very good job of that.
Guy Kawasaki leverages his own traffic to drive people to Truemors with an RSS feed above the fold on the front page.
Search Engine Land currently only has a link in the top right corner, and no voting buttons as standard.

I also noted that SEL has MyBlogLog removed. Does this mean they are going to try to make Sphinn more “social” with widgets as well?

Unfortunately Sphinn is a very category centric niche voting site – I don’t see it’s population growing beyond the aggregate subscriber base of Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

Market Segmentation

With Sphinn, the guys from Search Engine Land are effectively claiming their own little kingdom in social news, unfortunately whilst it might be good for Danny to enhance his own attention, and maybe drive traffic to a number of sites that deserve some limelight (I have noticed Meg, Lyndon & Maki doing well), I am not sure this is such an ideal situation.

There are various groups of people involved in SEO / SEM who don’t even acknowledge that the others exist. The same is true of internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

Building Bridges

What was really needed was for existing services to be given some attention, which would have the effect of building bridges between communities.
A service promoted significantly by the SEO / SEM and affiliate / internet marketing community could gain critical mass for a news network that allowed content that was more commercially flavoured, and such a community would also attract casual users, linkerati, press and ultimately drive more traffic to good content.

The best option possible would have been to adopt something that already existed.

Not the Same As Blog Social Networks

In my opinion this is not the same as blog social networks, within which Bumpzee also fall, competing against Mybloglog and Blogcatalog.
In theory there are 75M bloggers, and I doubt there are many more than 200K actively interested in SEO / SEM enough to be involved with a social news site on the topics. It is only when you start merging with internet marketing, affiliate marketing and “make money online” that you start hitting the 1M+ audience that is easily possible.

Spinn Exists – Have to Use It

I am already giving Spinn as much promotion as Danny is himself, with a voting link on every page. I want the attention, but hopefully I can also divert some of that attention towards other services that are equally deserving.

The Alexa data is more for future reference as Sphinn has just plummeted after its launch and will take a while to gain traction.

Including 4 voting buttons on a page is dividing attention, although I have removed StumbleUpon because providing a button was reducing any “thumbs up” I might receive.
Ultimately, if I was to remove one of the 4, it would currently be Sphinn.

Giving Attention

It is honestly a shame that Danny and Search Engine Land took this direction. It would have been much better to promote the existing services extensively 4 months ago. By this time they would be booming, and drawing a much wider audience – such strategies have much stronger long term effects.

Of course it is not just Danny – Rand for instance didn’t even mention competing services in his post, and the first mention of the fact that it was running on Pligg rather than “the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality” was by Carsten in the comments

When you share your audience with others, quite often you get it back in spades. Two posts in a row touching on reciprocity.

I would honestly much rather be bumping or plugging everyone’s posts than using Sphinn, because that would suggest growing cohesion within the industry, and not more splintering.

With that said, everyone interested in SEO and SEM should sign up with Sphinn, and also grab Michelle’s Sphinn plugin