Why do reconsideration requests fail?

Here are the most common reasons for a site to fail a reconsideration request:

• Not properly identifying which links need to be removed.  It is really hard to identify what is a natural link and what is not.  Remove too many links and you’ll harm your site’s rankings even more.  But if you don’t address enough of your links then Google will not reconsider your site.
• Not making a big enough effort to get links removed. It is not enough to just disavow your bad links.  Google wants to see that you have gone to great efforts to get links involved.  This means contacting webmasters via available email addresses, whois addresses and contact forms, documenting those attempts at contact and then communicating this to Google.
• Improper use of the disavow tool. Once you’ve gotten all the bad links that you can removed, then it is very helpful to use the disavow tool to ask Google to disavow the rest of the bad links.  If you don’t format your disavow.txt file correctly then it won’t work. Google doesn’t tell you whether or not your file is correctly formatted. They simply ignore it if it is not created properly.

No automated tools are used in the process of deciding whether links should be removed. Each domain is visited and each link is manually evaluated. This is the best way to ensure that all of your GOOD links are kept which gives you the best chance at regaining rankings once the penalty is removed.

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Traditional vs. Social Media Marketing

Traditional Marketing 101

Most everyone thinks of marketing as the business of promoting and selling products or services.

Marketers commonly refer to a “funnel” to describe the way they attract new prospects and convert them into customers.
What Do We Mean By Funnel?

Traditionally, we've prioritized our limited resources and time on trying to find and convert new prospects (the top of the funnel).

Keeping those hard-earned customers (the bottom of the funnel) has often been an afterthought.

That’s because, until recently, there was little we could do to keep existing customers that was drastically different from the tactics used to attract new ones.

Historically, the best you could do after turning a prospect into a customer was to provide a great customer experience and just hope they come back to buy more—and bring their friends with them.

But technology, namely social media and email, has changed the game.

There’s little doubt that technology has changed our lives, the way we are influenced and how we influence others. But for marketing, it’s more than just doing the same old thing using new tools. Social media marketing isn't your grandmother's marketing—it's different from what most of us have traditionally learned about marketing.


Social Media Marketing — Flip that Funnel
Social Media Marketing is about recognizing that your existing customers are your best assets.

And technology now enables us to influence consumer behavior both before and after the sale.

With low-cost and easy-to-use tools like social media and email, you no longer have to hope that customers come back and bring their friends with them.

Now you can reach out to your existing customers to remind them to come back, and make word-of-mouth as easy as clicking the share, like, or tweet buttons.

Bottom line: successful businesses understand that marketing does not end with the sale, but rather it begins after the first sale (the bottom of the traditional sales funnel).

Joseph Jaffe, one of our favorite authors, calls this "Flipping the Funnel." (We just call it smart.)

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Facebook’s Graph Search: the Ultimate Personalized Discovery Engine?

Facebook Graph Search is a social search feature the company announced Jan. 15. The feature is currently in private beta with a waitlist for individuals and businesses. You can join the waitlist here (scroll down to the bottom).

Facebook’s announced plan is to roll it out gradually to hundreds of thousands of individuals first (English only), then more broadly for PC-based users, then for non-English languages, and then on mobile.

It isn't clear how quickly this expansion will occur, but several Facebook product people are on record saying they still have work to do to figure out how to scale the computationally intensive searches across millions of concurrent users. (Think of crawling a user’s social and open graph connections across hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of nodes for every search.) Non-trivial engineering challenges stand in the way of mass availability of this feature set.

The potential for Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is huge. Brands, digital marketers, and publishers can and should be doing a number of things right now to benefit from it as it reaches critical mass.

A simple rule of thumb is that the more content that gets shared, liked, or commented on through Facebook, the greater the chances of discovery of that content through Graph Search.

What is Facebook Graph Search?

What Does it Do?

It's a very cool feature. When I type in a query, such as “friends who have been to Rome, Italy,” Graph Search traverses all of my relationships and those of my friends to find people who have visited Rome. It then pulls back these people and displays them alongside relevant content. This is a simple example that illustrates the difference between the kinds of results Graph Search returns and how search results from Google (or Bing) would appear.

Another key aspect of this feature is how it appears to include implicit affinities and experiences, in addition to explicit likes and shares people have done through Facebook. When you think about the significance of that, it’s pretty impressive.

Based on the content I’ve shared, as well as the check-ins, posts, and comments I’ve made, plus the images I’ve tagged, etc., Graph Search can infer what I like, where I’ve traveled to, and so forth. The inclusion of implicit affinities is only possible due to Facebook’s massive scale and could ultimately be the component of Graph Search that makes the results valuable enough to get people to use the feature.

What is it Good for?

• People Search – Finding people you’re connected to who have specific interests and experiences
• Local (and Vertical) Search – Finding a business and/or events that friends have visited and/or liked
• Media and Entertainment Search – Finding TV shows, movies, music, and games liked, watched, etc. by your friends

How Will Facebook Monetize it?
Facebook hasn’t announced how they will monetize the feature. The obvious opportunity is to charge for sponsored listings much like AdWords. There are a few other options as well, including:

• Syndicate aggregated data to advertisers. Data would show what people are searching for, who/what they’re finding, etc.
• Creation of premium audience segments for targeting across the network via the FBX.

Find more for Facebook Graph Search

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