September 6, 2007

How viral marketing could kill your Google presence

by Brian Turner

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The Dangers of Social Media manipulation

Google

Over the past year, SEO has increasingly turned its attention to social media, looking for ways to manipulate sites like Digg in order to bring in surges of traffic.

The aim is to present content that appeals to discussion, hoping for a wave of natural links to point to the content as it is discussed.

The trouble is, this very method could be doing far more harm than good to a site.

It’s not the traffic itself that’s particularly damaging.

Let’s face it, social media traffic, in majority, is utterly useless and only good for burning up your bandwidth and server CPU.

This is traffic that doesn’t click ads or buy your products. They are information hungry visitors interested only in a fleeting visit for that information, then are gone.

However, many SEO’s see viral marketing as a great way to develop natural organic links as the content provided is discussed, and so have focused on this technique - unaware of the dangers they may be creating.

Too much too quick

The Google Sandbox is a concept first reported around Easter 2004. The basic effect was that links in volume no longer impacted as quickly as expected, as if Google had applied some kind of new filter on links.

Since then the term has come to describe a range of filters, not least that newer domains will not receive full benefits from extensive link development. In fact, too many links can have the reverse effect, sinking a website so that it doesn’t even rank for its own name.

The danger of unleashing a viral marketing campaign for a new site is clear - too many links from indiscriminate sources can reduce its visibility in the long term on Google.

However, it’s no longer newer websites that may have that problem. After all, newer domains have little link profile.

Link Profiles

Eric Ward is the SEO industry’s chief evangelical when it comes to link profiles.

In short, a website that has a reasonably natural looking profile of links sources is more likely to rank successfully for its keywords on search engines in the long term.

It’s this boosted natural link profile that many SEO’s are trying to deliver via viral campaigns.

While at first the idea of a viral campaign for links may sound attractive - and certainly there has been a booming industry in “viral marketing” for link development purposes - the problem is that the persons engaging in such activities are only looking at half the picture.

After all, a link profile isn’t simply a snapshot of the site’s links now - it’s an historical record of it’s links. And Google are already well ahead on that.

Temporal Link Analysis

In March 2005 Google’s patent on application on historical information was released publically, which showed Google was looking at ways to leverage a huge number of pattern indicators on the web.

The key difference to previous patent applications is that this one specifically addressed historical behaviour.

Rand Fishkin has already posted an excellent summary of how this can be applied to determine a website’s relevance - through analysis of temporal link and content growth information.

Rand’s summary was startling, because the ranking of a site for targeted keywords becomes dependent not simply on what sort of links are developed for it in the present - but also how they were developed in the past.

Inconsistency in the patterns can result in a website losing search presence on Google, as he dramatically illustrates using Wikipedia and DMOZ as examples.

The dangers of poor link profiles

As we’ve seen above, though, temporal analysis of link patterns means that any dramatic influx of links to a site is going to have a very visible impact on the site’s temporal link profile.

While that means that an established site could receive a significant boost in the short term, the real danger is that if this link development activity falls away, there is already a pattern that Google can algorithmically interpret as declining relevancy.

The danger is that in order to fight off that perception, the site will have to continue generating links at a relatively similar volume.

That means having to engage in a continuous process of viral marketing for link development purposes - or else killer content that is so good that once users are made aware of it, they will keep linking to the newer pages developed on the site.

But as most viral marketing campaigns are aimed at content-light sales websites, the lack of further viral content could cause serious problems with ranking on Google in the long run.

Some SEO’s will retort that many links from a single viral marketing campaign confer an “authority” status on the target site - but as Google’s patent indicates, and Rand’s analysis suggests, “authority” is entirely temporal.

Conclusion

The concepts of Link Profile and Temporal Analysis paint a very clear warning - that viral marketing is not for every type of website, and that it is likely to suit established content-rich websites in the longer term.

Unfortunately, too many business owners will be looking at potential benefits in the shorter-term, as well as poor indicators such as traffic volume rather than quality to determine their success.

In doing so, they may end up not simply burning up their server CPU - but also their website’s long-term prospects on Google.

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