Old-School Marketing and Optimization Vs New-School Optimization and Marketing

In Optimization and Influency, in case I haven’t been clear enough on the subject, cheating is a bad idea. Cheating is a bad idea in journalism and blogging. Cheating will catch up to you on social networks. Cheating is bad. Bad, bad, bad.

 
would you rather listen?

And if you believe this story, Google just said it’s time to boost your Search Engine Optimization efforts by … cheating.

Let’s recall that our search optimization overlords at Google have been clear that there’s no “penalty” for duplicate content. Of course, that leaves unanswered the question of what duplicate content “is”, but in the context of what we’re discussing today the issue is a lot simpler: duplicate content is judged on a lot of factors and the larger and more Influential (influence-y?) you are the better chance there is that Google will see your content as more important than that being created—or copied by—others.

No problem, right?

The most worrisome part of this is that it amounts to Google encouraging people who try to game ‘the system’ to practice what amounts to natural deselection. That’s right; Google has become Charles Darwin, but instead of merely observing and reporting on search optimization evolution Google is actively encouraging the various species under its microscope to act against self-interest.

Forget the scientific/ethical dilemma that represents; Google has. Ask yourself what to do about it.

In the simplest terms (speaking of self-selection), the best thing you can do to get ahead of Google’s mixed messages and boost your Influency is contact us. But self-promotion aside, the issue is simple: you can’t cheat in the content creation game, so you need to find a way to create content you can afford and that Google will see as worth elevating about the content your competitors are building. And while there’s a grain of truth to obtuse wording like If having 100% unique content is not possible, the webmaster should make sure to have elements in the pages that are unique and valuable for the users, give a good reason for them to visit the site, that strategy won’t work unless you’re churning out a huge amount of content.

Which, unless you’re in the media business, you probably can’t afford.

This is where the practice of Influency and the idea of doing a lot of small things right comes in. As more and more content is created, getting yours found becomes increasingly difficult—and that’s just the optimization part of things. Getting people to care about your content and act in a manner that helps your business is even harder, so … are you actually creating content that’s great enough to be worth the time you’re asking people to spend reading, watching, or listening to it?

Cheating isn’t the answer. And depending on the business you’re in and your goals, what the answer is will change (memo to self: write about a hundred a million books now).

Enough is enough. Let’s end on that little self-promotional nugget I dropped in earlier. It’s time to Contact The Answer Guy.