All right. 2017 is just right around the corner, and it’s time to do some projections. What do we see is coming in 2017? There’s going to be a lot of surprises, but here’s a couple things that I can tell you with a pretty good certainty you’ll see in 2017.

The first one I did in a previous video, artificial intelligence. It’s here. It’s here to stay. It’s going to be a big part of what consumers experience, particularly on the customer service side, and it’s something that you need to be looking into for your own business.

The next one is schema. Schema is not new in and of itself, but an emphasis on schema and a wider schema vocabulary is going to be an emphasis in 2017.

Just to take a step back, schema is a microformat, where I can markup my page with additional data and allow Google to learn more about it. So, you’ll see it in rich snippet searches, like recipe searches for instance. You’ll see an image and a rating and some of the top ingredients. You’ll see that in more and more categories. We’re already seeing it in some e‑commerce categories, restaurants and physical location categories. More categories you’re going to have schemas. That will be a 2017 addition.

Another one that people are seeing, and there’s some controversy, is native Google content. This is Google actually pulling content off of your website and not sending the user to you but rather giving user the answer on Google. So it’s native Google content, basically answering the question. If it’s a clear question, Google feels like they should be able to just answer the question. Now, this is good and bad. If you can figure out a way to game the system ‑‑ which, by the way, we’ve figured out some ways to game that system ‑‑ and get content to rank as native, you still are the top spot and you’ll get a good click‑through rate. Even though it’s controversial, we see it as a big boon.

The last one that I’ll talk about is site speed, particularly mobile. Mobile speed is huge and Google rolled out AMP earlier this year. This is a very big deal which stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”. I’ve talked about it in another video. Very, very important to be taking advantage of technologies like that so you have a very, very fast experience on your website.

That’s just a few things that are going to be critical in 2017, that need to be part of your strategy. If your marketing team isn’t talking about it already, you’re behind the times. Get in touch with us if you need help staying up with the times. That’s what we do. We would be glad to help you. Go to GlobeRunner.com, and I look forward hearing from you.

A is for Apple right? Well not according to Google, “A” is now for Amazon. Now using Google Instant search we can see the 26 most important search terms from A to Z. Today, we intend to revisit the subject of Google Instant Search since our first post when Instant was first announced by Google. In this article, we are going to discuss how Google Instant has affected the searcher and what that means for businesses working to improve their website’s search engine rankings. Through our research, we found that unlike a child’s random participation in the alphabet game, Google strives to purposefully deliver Instant Hints when a user begins typing the first letter. Businesses need to pay attention to this improvement in search, because Google Instant means potentially more impressions for your website especially if you are already ranking in the top three positions in the search results.

A = Amazon
B = Bank of America
C = Craigslist
D = Dictionary
E = Espn
F = Facebook
G = Google
H = Hotmail
I = iPhone 5
J = JC Penney
K = Kohls
L = Lowes
M = MapQuest
N = Netflix
O = Old Navy
P = Pandora
Q = Quotes
R = Redbox
S = Southwest Airlines
T = Target
U = USPS
V = Verizon Wireless
W = Walmart
X = X Factor
Y = YouTube
Z = Zillow

When Google introduced Instant Search, their goal was to deliver more relevant searches faster. This came in the form of autocomplete and instant hints which use both personal browsing data (what you’ve previously searched) and the browser’s physical location (IP address) to deliver search results. Autocomplete, as you may be already familiar, automatically completes your search phrase by delivering educated guesses in the search bar. Instant Hints appear in a short drop down list of phrases that relate (in theory) to your query. With this technology, Google has enabled the searcher to browse and click through results without having to finish typing a query or even clicking on the search button. Below is a list that I generated simply by typing in the following letters A-Z… this was more of a fun exercise rather than something we took seriously. However, as marketers who live, eat, breathe, sleep SEO, we couldn’t help but discover a few things…

It never hurts to be an established brand. If you already are attracting thousands of new visitors to your site every month, such as Amazon or Craigslist, Google may just include you as an Instant Hint automatically. This is perhaps the least actionable of my points, since Instant Hints are based primarily on the searcher’s history and recent trends, which brings me to my next point…

Online follows offline. For all you students of psychology, herd theory—the desire to be one with the crowd—does play out in the search engines. Google says that every Instant Hint is a term or phrase that someone (in your geographic area) has already typed in. Thus, Google assumes that what other people are searching is probably what you will likewise want to search. Ergo, herd theory, or the influence of “the crowd” on human decisions, is powerful for getting ranked well in search engines (especially Bing which has begun to exclusively use social media to deliver more relevant search results).

Trends are friends. Adding to my last point about Google displaying Instant Hints based on previous search behavior, trends or events that happen at a certain time of year can generate addition impressions (or better yet, traffic) for your business. Holidays and current events all can help to bolster your website or blog if you pick corresponding keywords and write great content. The higher quality content you have, the more likely you will be to actually generate traffic from these trending keywords and convert your site’s visitors.

It’s good to be Google or any of Google’s content networks: Wikipedia, YouTube, Plus, etc. This point is really more of a pun, since Google displayed itself under the letter “G” (actually displayed Google and Google News as the first two Hints). Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion.

We plan to discuss more about Google Instant in the days to come so keep in touch.

Once again, Overstock.com is suspected of playing dirty.

Last February, Overstock.com was penalized by Google for manipulating the search engines. The online retailer offered students and faculty discounts in exchange for posting links from college and university websites to Overstock.com. Their motivation? Ranking in search engines are, in large part determined by assessing the number of sites that link back to the site being ranked. In order to avoid artificial influence on search engines, Google forbids sites from paying other websites to embed links on their pages, and penalized Overstock.com for this unethical (“black hat”) practice. The Wall Street Journal quotes Patrick Byrne, Overstock’s chief executive, as saying, “We understand Google’s position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google’s guidelines.”

But they might be at it again.

I made this discovery while working on a competitive analysis for a client who wanted to rank for the keyword “kids’ bedding”.  The top organic position was held by Overstock.com with this page: www.overstock.com/Home-Garden/Kids-Bedding/5389/subcat.html. My browser tools indicated the page had a large number of backlinks, an unusually large number for even a large retailer. I looked further. Using Open Site Explorer I found they had some very suspicious backlinks, including:

• http://stevesloanmusic.com/3comp_.html
• http://essencenet.ca/mainp.html
• http://dvihome.com.au/wp-admin/includes/co_mma.html

All of the above pages follow the same basic format. They’re branded to look like part of Overstock.com and filled with anchor text links that guide users back to the Overstock site. The pages themselves, though, are hosted on sites that are unrelated to Overstock or its products, including the websites of a writer, a musical composer, and an Australian photography and printing service.

The pages listed above are not the only suspicious-looking ones. Many of Overstock.com’s top-ranking pages have similar backlink profiles. You can check them out yourself using keywords like “Egyptian cotton sheets”, “sateen sheets”, “bedspreads”, “kids’ bedding”, and “bathrobes.” You’ll find many more.

Based on my years of industry experience, this type of activity seems to be as “black hat” as it gets. I can imagine two scenarios that might explain these links:

1. These are paid links, and the sites’ webmasters allowed Overstock.com to post the pages.
2. The sites were hacked, and the pages were placed on the sites without the webmasters’ knowledge.

Either way, the Overstock pages on these sites appear very suspicious. Overstock.com, whether intentionally or not, is clearly violating Google’s webmaster guidelines again. Based on these guidelines, I am curious to see how long it will take Google to serve up another penalty.

Overstock.com may or may not be aware of these pages. The world of Internet Marketing is full of miscommunications, implementation errors, and newly developed techniques that might be considered “grey hat”. We don’t want to accuse Overstock of trying to manipulate search engines again, but only bring attention to these questionable SEM tactics.

What’s your take on this issue? I’d like to hear your viewpoint. Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

I spend most of my day signed into Twitter (I hate leaving it behind when I leave my desk) and have my Trending Topics set to Dallas-Fort Worth. Cody our Internet marketing specialist pointed out to me that #ZebraGirl was trending, and neither of us knew what that was, let alone how it ended up the third-most popular topic on Twitter for DFW.

It took awhile looking through the search results for #zebragirl to figure out why people were talking about it, but Cody and I quickly discovered people were talking about a girl on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton who was wearing a two piece black and white outfit in a psychedelic print, and they had nicknamed her Zebra Girl. People sent in “sightings” of Zebra Girl, and there seemed to be an unwritten rule that someone SHOULD tell her, but no one was going to.

In an hour or so since it began, it has become the second highest trending topic, second only to Promoted Trend #subwayfan. It’s trending higher than “Marvin’s Room”, the name of a new single by hip-hop artist Drake which was organically trending nationally. Someone was tweeting about this girl every ten seconds, and that’s not even at the peak of the trend.

The trick to this becoming an organic trend was that it was left alone, just like any other piece of bad PR. But in this case there was also a mystery- who was this girl? Where was she going? People were out on campus trying to spot her. If this were guerrilla marketing, she’d have some sort of reward for those who found her in the form of a promotion or free product. But the authenticity here is what’s keeping the trend going and why people have been talking about a pair of leggings all afternoon. This wouldn’t continue if people were trying to find the BRAND NAME Zebra Girl Spokesperson. It wouldn’t be fun OR funny to find her around campus. The allure is in the idea that her outfit looks insane and she ostensibly doesn’t know.

Authentic intrigue is the key to establishing a social media trend. Upset the ordinary and people will talk about you. Both Alamo Drafthouse and NYC restaurant Jo’s have figured this out recently by creating the best anti-texting PSA ever and writing a scathing rebuttal to a Yelp Review respectively. They threw out “business as usual” (some people might argue it flies in the face of “the customer is always right” to tell people their business isn’t welcome if they act up) and it got them serious attention. You’d think this would be an obvious proposition, but the common approach seems to be “sneak in the marketing and see if they notice” a la Virgin Mobile’s new “Sparah” campaign. You can’t tell me Ashton Kutcher was really excited about that.

No, the hardest thing to do in social media is simply to be interesting, and too many people afraid to be different. But go against the norm, and organic trends are yours.

One piece of online reputation management is removing defamatory content from Google. Kenton J. Hutcherson principal attorney Hutcherson Law talks about removing content form Google with a Court Order. Also you can report other types of content that you would like removed, copyright, personal information and the like.

Hutcherson Law specializes in Internet Law

Transcription
Eric: Hi, this is Eric with Globe Runner SEO and today I’m with Kenton Hutcherson with Hutchersonlaw.com. Kenton is fantastic. We just had the pleasure of listening to him speak at DFWSEM. He talked about a lot of really interesting things. He talked about how companies can be harmed by information that’s posted by anonymous users on websites like the Ripoff Report. It was really fascinating stuff. And as a company, sometimes we help clients manage their reputation. Kenton, can you give me a little more insight into that that my clients might be interested in on how they can protect their reputation online?

Kenton Hutcherson: Sure, absolutely. One of the key things, one of the most effective things that I’ve found out in terms of my work as an Internet attorney is if I can get a court judgment, a court order saying that a certain posting on a website is false and defamatory, I can take that judgment to Google, and Google now actually has a portal on their website where you can upload that court order. They will honor that, actually remove that link from their search index.

Eric: Wow, wow. That’s really big. But you can’t just go to Google and say, “This guy said something nasty about me.”
Kenton: Right. I’ve had a lot of clients that have tried to do that. And there’s a lot of frustration out there because people are like, “Look, it’s destroyed my business. These things are just blatant lies.”

Eric: Right.

Kenton: And Google’s position, I mean I can’t speak for Google but my impression is that they’re not the Internet police. They don’t want to get involved between a speech screen two people about what’s true and what’s not. And so they need something to hang their hat on for them to take action. And it seems to me that they’ve made the decision to defer to the courts, which is what we have to validate these types of issues in our society. And so as long as you have a court that’s already made that judgment for you, Google will honor that.

Eric: So another question that I think clients may have is how do I sue somebody, how do I get a court order when the Internet is such an anonymous place and I can’t put my finger on who it is that made that statement on some random website? I can’t sue the website, you know? I would like to sue the website but they didn’t say it. I’ve got to find that guy, right?

Kenton: A lot of times, yes. There are three options. Number one, a lot of people that have been defamed have a pretty good idea of who defamed them.

Eric: OK.

Kenton: They may have one client that was really unhappy and they’ve already complained. Maybe they have a disgruntled former employee. Maybe they know a competitor that’s doing some things that they shouldn’t be doing. In those cases, a lot of times we’ll file a lawsuit against who we think it is and then in the discovery we can ask them in a deposition under oath whether or not they’re the ones that posted it. We can get computer records about what their activity was. You can also issue a subpoena to the website to verify who it might be.

The second one is to file a John Doe lawsuit and then issue a subpoena to the website to obtain the identifying information and get the IP address, and get the name they used when they logged in. About 50 50, 50 percent of the time that will actually lead you to the actual person.

Eric: OK.

Kenton: A lot of times it doesn’t take you anywhere. Maybe they logged in at a Starbucks cafe.

Eric: Right.

Kenton: Right, where it’s impossible to trace who the actual IP address went to. The third thing you can do if none of those options work, you can file a lawsuit against the name that they used in the posting, the street name. And in that case what you need to do, depending on the local court rules, you can serve them by publication which is where the court gives you the authorization to post a legal notice in the newspaper where the court is located for a certain period of time. And then after a certain period of time in that publication, they are deemed to have been served in a lawsuit.

And so theoretically, they’re going to get notice, they’re going to file, they’re going to defend themselves and the lawsuit will go on as it should. In a lot of cases they don’t show up and so you then essentially win by default.

Eric: Right. So even if you never find the guy, it doesn’t matter. You can get a court order, file that with Google and get the…

Kenton: Well, potentially. Of course you have to have a good faith pleading, you have to prove to the court that you actually have a legitimate defamation claim. But there certainly are options out there if you can’t find the person who made the posting.

Eric: Wow, fantastic. Well, I think that’s some really great information. And you could get really hit hard. If somebody online complains about your company, it can really hurt your reputation. And once you lose it, it’s so hard to get back. It’s great that we have guys like Ken that can help us with these really challenging situations and potentially lose millions of dollars to businesses. And now we have a way that we could recover our reputation if something like that happened to one of our clients or to anybody that we knew. I really appreciate your time, Ken.

Kenton: My pleasure.

Eric: This has been great. Thank you very much.

Kenton: Thank you.

Is automation Black Hat SEO? well I will let you decide. But this is a great interview with social media expert Giovanni Gallucci and Dallas social media speaker J.R. Atkins. Just a FYI: Globe Runner SEO does not condone or employ black hat practices for their clients. Sites that employ black hat SEO techniques have been known to be penalized by Google, even de-listed, so proceed with caution.

Transcription
JR: Hey this is JR Atkins we’re at OpenCamp today and I’m with Giovanni Gallucci and Gio’s gonna give us a few tips that he mentioned in his talk this morning that were three sites that we might find useful in a black hat-oriented SEO
Gio: oh it’s so not black hat…..it’s blackhat.
JR: So tell us like…Tube Toolbox
Gio: Yeah so actually these are applications that, if you go to tubetoolbox.com you can download this application and basically tube toolbox is a swiss army knife for YouTube. It allows you to go in and find videos similar to the videos you have, find users who find those videos and comment on them, it allows you also to go in and do messaging in bulk instead of going in one at a time for messaging with people so there’s so much stuff that this thing does, I mean I literally use this tool every single day on several machines for different clients so like I said in there, if you’re not doing video, I don’t know why you’re not doing video and you can figure out a way to integrate video not matter what your business is, and you’ve gotta get out there and get smart and use tools like Tube Toolbox that make your life so much easier. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get through that learning curve it makes your life so much easier with online video.
JR: Next one was Bookmarking Demon.
Gio: Bookmarking Demon is similar to Tube toolbox but it’s for Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious and StumbleUpon, Mixx and things like that. You go and plug in all your usernames and passwords for yourself, if you have employees that are part of your social media campaign or other affiliates that you work with, you plug in all their authentication information and then you go in and create a list of your search engine optimized titles and descriptions and links for the things you want to promote, you click a button and walk away and bookmarking demon will randomly go through and bookmark these sites for you. The reason why this stuff is so important is that these let you stay within the terms of service of the platforms you’re working with, and it also looks more natural than if you just sat down for 40 minutes bookmarking all these sites. It looks spammy so it’s really important that you’re using something that runs in the background and waits three minutes and updates something then waits eight minutes then updates something because then the platforms don’t get angry with you for just overloading their system all at once and it sits there and does that work for you while you’re off doing other things so you’re billing here, billing there.
JR: OK, last one was TweetAdder.
Gio: same thing, guess what? for twitter! The biggest thing I use Tweetadder for is to look for local users on twitter- I work with a lot of hyperlocal businesses like onehere is youplusdallas.com and we really focus on people in the dallas/ft. worth area that’re looking for things like entertainment and nightlife and restaurants and things like that so I’ll go on TweetAdder, look for names and look for keywords I wanna search on but putting in a zip code to only find people within 50 miles of the central business district in dallas. Then I can take those people, add them to the company account instead of going out there and randomly following anyone on Twitter talking about sushi and then you find out that 90% of your users are in Canada or outside the state of Texas, where we’re at right now, TweetAdder is another one of those tools that allows you to be really efficient, really focused and a lot cleaner about the way you go and do marketing because before these tools were around you kinda went out there and you threw whatever you could against the wall and would walk away, and that’s not good for anybody, it’s a waste of time for your clients, a waste of time for you as a specialist and for the users that are getting messages that aren’t targeted so it’s a waste of their time. You need to go in there and invest in these tools so when someone in dallas mentions a restaurant in dallas and they get something from us they’re like “oh theres an association there, maybe i actually want to follow them” and not some mechanic up in canada who’s complaining about a bad hamburger that he just went and ate.
JR: Well thank you for your time I know all these are $100 or less and if you want more go to GlobeRunnerSEO.com we’ll keep the videos coming.