What is Link Buying?

This SEOmoz article on Link Buying and its... believe it or not... benefits got me thinking about what exactly Link Buying is. First off, let me highly recommend you read the article, watch the video and view the comments. There is a ton of interesting information in there. Moving on now.

If you discard everything about the article and boil it down to the most basic issue, you are left with the question of "what is link buying?" No one really bothers to define this and we all have our own ideas. The following are my thoughts on the subject.

Link Buying is often used as a catch-all phrase for any link that you pay to receive. Within that realm you have the spam link buys and the gray hat link buys -- I call them that because I don't believe that kind is necessarily wrong and I will explain why later.

1) Spam Link Buys - these are links people buy from directories, in the footers, the sidebars, etc etc etc. These links are from not-so-reputable sites and are generally not cool. They are not based on relevance, content or much of anything other than trying to prop one's site up in the rankings. These are the kinds of links that Google will devalue or send your site back to the stoneage over.

2) Gray Hat Link Buys - Everyone talks about white hat and black hat SEO practices. Spam Link Buys = black hat and so on. We all know what that is about. I call these gray hat because, obviously, they fall in something of a gray area. These are the sort of links where you find a site with relevant content and use an incentive (money) to get them to link to you. Relevant content is the key there because the content must be relevant to your site. This is the sort of link that everyone wants; the only difference between this sort of link and a standard white hat link is that this is paid for.

So why am I not against the second sort of link buy? Simple, I don't believe it pollutes Google, Bing, or anyone else's index. If you are paying for a relevant link then it is still a relevant link. So long as the link is linking to and from relevant, quality content, I don't see an issue.

Promoted Tweets

I made a fun post about a book a love so now it is time to do a more serious; work related post. Buckle up! As you might have guessed from the title, I wanted to talk a bit about promoted Tweets. Most everyone knows by now that Twitter is experimenting with these ads and has offered a beta to a handful of companies -- most notably Pixar.

So what are these promoted Tweets? I must confess that I had no idea what exactly they were going to look like. Now we know. It is interesting that they chose to put a promotional notice in the "trending topics" section because this doesn't seem to scale well at all. What happens when this ad program is opened to everyone? Will Santa's naughty and nice list be running down the side of everyone's Twitter page? I certainly hope not.

The ad doesn't stop there though. It moves on to the below image. This part of the ad is literally a tweet with special status. It is a manufactured "top tweet." Great idea, but again, I have to question the scalability and the targeting of these ads.
Twitter could choose to only allow say 3-4 promoted ads to appear on any given page or search result, but how would it decide which ads to display where?

The search result page ads are simple enough. The searches would run as normal and relevant ads would display for the corresponding search. Allow a few of the ads to appear at the top and voila!

The trending topic ads are trickier. How do they know where to appear? Are they targeted? If so, what are the targeting options? Targeting by geolocation certainly seems viable; but you cant really know what you are getting with that. What other options are possible? Twitter asks for neither age nor gender so those are out. There is the info on your bio... hmm... intriguing! After browsing around Twitter for a while you will quickly realize that peoples' bios range from the official @mattcutts to the random @nathanfillion (sorry to Nathan Fillion for that one). There is, in fact, so little to target, targeting at all is impractical.

In conclusion, I really don't see Twitter ads continuing on exactly like the above Pixar ad. The trending topic part of the ad hits a snag that I just cant reconcile with a working model. Unless Twitter wants to have a bidding war for trending topic ads, but that would be a lot of competition for a very small space. We will see how this plays out. Personally, I can't wait to get in there and see some data!

The Desert Spear by Peter Brett

Reading is one of my passions and I have to admit that I mostly read fantasy novels. I am an amateur author myself (I swear I will bother to get something published one day!) so I often try to find first works to read.

I can't recall how many first works I have read to this date but there have been a lot! There have been good ones and some pretty awful ones. Books that weren't great but entertaining and books that made me wonder why someone bothered to print them. Of these first works, Peter Brett's "The Warded Man" was by far the best. In fact, it was better than most experienced authors' works. But this isn't a post about that book. This is a post about the much more recent sequel "The Desert Spear."

To this day I cannot decide which of the two I like better. I loved The Warded Man and I love The Desert Spear. Someone flip a coin for me and tell me which is better. The Desert Spear tells the story of some of the first book's minor characters and Brett does a great job of making us care about these characters almost as much as Arlen and Leesha from the first book. Don't worry! All the old faces are there too.

Overall, the story telling is extremely well done. You (or at least I) couldn't wait to turn the page. The pace is good, if not as intense as the first book. Though the last 100 pages move at a furious and much more intense pace.

What really made this book for me is how Brett brings to life the emotional exchanges between characters -- particularly Arlen. The action in this book is extremely well written; but action is easy. Bringing to life the emotions and encounters between characters is hard and Brett does it masterfully.

This book is without doubt worth the price of admission. It will find itself in a place of honor on my shelf, second only to George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (my all time favorite).

I hope those who read this will find it helpful and give these books a shot. I look forward to Brett's next book.

The Beginning

Here goes nothing...

I have been contemplating starting a blog for a good long while. Though I always ran into the perplexing question: "what to write about?" To be honest, I still haven't come up with a good answer!

Instead of trying to write about one topic in which I am an expert (I wouldn't claim to be an expert in much of anything). I will write about whatever is handy at the time -- be it movies, books, search engine marketing (what I do for a living) or social media marketing (also part of my job).

And now, to quote Captain Picard: "Engage."