digital-marketing-blog
Forbes Accused Of Link Spam, Plays Dumb, But Forgets To Delete All The Links
Ah, Forbes. They, along with eWeek, CIO Magazine and a whole lot of other sites, have long been in the business of selling links on their site. The links aren’t placed very prominently, but the buyers don’t care because all they want is the search juice. See, for example, the JC Penny paid links story from last weekend.
Starting Monday Forbes started to delete the links from their site. We’ve been watching these links come down, but they seem to have forgotten one page. See the bottom right of this page for paid links to Netsuite, AppRiver, Bluepay, SquareSpace and others, all with very nice descriptive keywords like “ecommerce,” “Create a Website,” etc. Previous links to Siemens and AT&T were prevalent, and those links still appear on eWeek and CIO Magazine.
As Barry Schwartz noticed today, Forbes received and posted a notice from Google “encouraging” Forbes to remove the links “that could be intended to manipulate PageRank.”
Denis Pinsky, Forbes Digital Marketing Manager, thinking that Forbes had now removed the links (oops), played dumb: “Can someone help figure out what Links are in violation?”
Happy to help, Forbes. Next time, try to get rid of all of the evidence before denying everything.
Go Figure
Washington DC-based SocialCode is the latest Facebook-focused marketing agency on the planet. The company helps brands advertise on the popular social networking site, monetize their respective fan bases and also develops custom applications for the platform, and much more.
Peculiarly, the agency was established by The Washington Post Company, the media company behind (evidently) The Washington Post, Slate, TheRoot and other publications.
The obvious link: Don Graham, CEO and chairman of the board of The Washington Post Company, sits on Facebook’s board.
According to their boiler plate, SocialCode actually has its roots within the media company, where it ran internal Facebook performance ad campaigns.
One thing led to another, apparently:
We realized that this was something that could be useful to brands everywhere and decided to take that skill set out to the marketplace. We have since expanded our expertise to include engagement and fan monetization strategies. Our skilled front-end creative team and performance-driven analytics team allow SocialCode to run faster and smarter on day one on any Facebook campaign.
Perhaps it’s just me, but a prominent media company setting up a Facebook-centered advertising agency just strikes me as a bit odd. Maybe I’m just getting old.
Not completely unrelated: The Washington Post really likes Facebook.
digital audit
a full digital audit of a brand’s marketing efforts in the digital space consists of assessments of their online advertising and search (paid and organic) activities. It also includes a competitive scan to reveal competitors they would not normally associate with their brand (the usual suspects). Their marketing activities are compared against social media benchmarks and other digital performance benchmarks like click rates of other advertisers in the same industry vertical or similar site size.
more details on digital audits are here…http://mktsci.com/digital_audit.html
more details on digital strategy courses are available here…. http://go-digital.net/blog/2011/01/digital-strategy-courses-dr-augustine-fou/
digital audit search results
brands can also assess their digital presence and how they compare to other brands in the same industry by using their Digital Footprint Score – DFS Score
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
http://twitter.com/acfou
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