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  • Look for our latest article on Blogging in this month's issue of the IHRIM Journal. Email Us for more information on how we can help you setup a Blog or RSS feed for your business.

EMPLOYEE BLOGS: WHY YOUR COMPANY NEEDS A CORPORATE POLICY

Sean Mulholland, JWT Specialized Communications

The ‘Blogosphere’— the network of blogs around the world—is growing at a rate on par with e-mail adoption in the 1990’s. In July 2005, Blog Pulse identified over 14 million blogs, and at the time of this writing it had added over 50,000 blogs in the last 24 hours alone.

The surging popularity of blogs raises questions that employers must face: What to do when one’s employees start blogging? There have already been several high profile cases of employers terminating employees based on what was posted on the employee’s personal blog. At what point does an employee’s right to express a personal opinion cross the line and warrant action by the employer?

Blogging is already changing the way people communicate. Blogs have fulfilled the original promise of the Internet in that all users, no matter their level of technical expertise, can now post their thoughts with ease on the Web for all to see. Everyone from teenagers, housewives, politicians, and Fortune 100 executives are now blogging.

Despite the promise of blogs, they have led to unfortunate consequences for some. In January 2005, a man was fired from Google after less than a month with the company because of his posts regarding life within the Googleplex, even after he removed the posts in question at Google’s request. A flight attendant with Delta Airlines lost her job after posting photos of herself posing candidly while in uniform (for the record, there was no nudity or explicitness in her photos). She has since filed suit against Delta for discrimination.

Whether or not the terminations were justified, the firestorm that erupted in the Blogosphere was immediate and intense. Because there were no blog guidelines set by the companies, most bloggers thought the responses to these cases were harsh, ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to a new cultural phenomenon. Because blogs are by their nature highly connected, word of these cases spread far, wide and very quickly—to the point that they were picked up by traditional news organizations. And therein lies the main concern employers have with blogging.

An employee who intentionally or accidentally blogs about co-workers, company secrets or customers could not only jeopardize his or her career, but could seriously damage the company’s business or its brand image as word speeds around the Blogosphere.

Some companies may fear bloggers, considering them to be loose cannons. A company might feel that it is only a matter of time until a blogger says something he shouldn’t. The reality is an employee who doesn’t know enough to keep from posting company secrets will make that mistake with or without a blog.

Employees seeking to harm the company intentionally will find a way to do so even if the company strictly forbids blogging. The fact is, most people want to keep their jobs and will be conscious of the fact that if they cross the line, they will have to face consequences. A blogging policy helps to make clear where that line is and what the consequences will be.

The real issue employers should face is that many employees simply don’t understand the power of blogging well enough to consider the consequences of what they post. People often view their blogs as a personal communication, the way they would a diary or a conversation with a friend. When it comes to blogs, this is far from the truth. Telling a friend after work that the head of your department is a jerk might be viewed as venting. Posting it on a blog can be viewed as libel.

To avoid these problems, every company should define a corporate blogging policy. This helps to protect the company from employees inadvertently releasing sensitive information, and also protects employees by providing them with guidelines as to what is and isn’t acceptable.

Much like the informal nature of the blogosphere, many companies adopt rules in plain English. Some examples include:

  • “Don't tell secrets. Common sense at work here. It's perfectly OK to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it's not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces.” - Sun Microsystems
  • “You may not attack personally fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, or shareholders. You may respectfully disagree with company actions, policies, or management.” - Plaxo
  • “IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time—protect your privacy.” - IBM

Are there ever legitimate reasons to forbid or severely restrict employees from blogging about their jobs? If your company is involved in extremely sensitive work such as Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, a facility which develops military aircraft, then such a policy is justified. If your company has select employees who are privy to highly sensitive information, then an appropriately restrictive policy may be in order that applies to only these employees. Also situations such as a pre-IPO ‘quiet period’ might warrant a temporary restriction on employee blogging.

When drafting your company’s blog policy it’s best to appeal to employees’ common sense rather than trying to cover all bases. Remember, these blogs are created and used during an employee’s personal time. Any attempt to set hard rules an employee must follow after work hours are not likely to fly. A better approach would be to remind employees not to write anything they would be ashamed for mother to see. It’s probably a good idea to Involve a few of your employee bloggers when drafting your policies as well.

If your company isn’t facing the blogging issue, now is the time to act. Even if none of your employees currently blog it is likely that some will start soon. By drafting a company policy about blogging you can head off any problems before they arise.

About the Author:
Sean Mulholland (sean.mulholland@jwt.com) is a Cybernaut, Innovator, and Problem Solver at JWT Specialized Communications, where he has been developing strategies for marketing and recruiting through blogs since 2004. He also consults with agency clients on developing blog strategies and policies regarding corporate blogging. Please email him or visit http://www.jwtsc-seo.com/ for more information regarding blogs and blog policies.

THE STATE OF SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Chris Richardson, WebProNews

The state of the search engine marketing industry is alive, strong, and growing at an accelerated rate. Just ask Danny Sullivan. This particularly glowing endorsement came during Danny's keynote speech for the 2005 Chicago SES conference.

To be sure, these positives were not just the result of some excessive smoke-blowing. In order to justify his position, Sullivan pointed a number of positive examples during his keynote, which focused on the state and perception of search engine marketing and those who conduct such services.

For instance, the state of talent recruitment throughout the search industry, not just with Google and Yahoo, is extremely competitive. This indicates companies are, in a sense, scrambling to acquire these talented individuals before the next one does.

Normally, the computer industry operates in an opposite method: the hiring process for qualified individuals is still quite competitive. However, with the search industry, it's the other way around. Companies are scouring the globe in an effort to hire a talented staff.

From Sullivan's perspective, the reason for the search marketing industry rapid evolution is because search has become a legitimate, stand alone advertising medium. With search being available (or soon to be) on practically every media-playing device (cellphones, iPods, computers), the search industry has the potential to replace, or at least render redundant, traditional methods of advertising.

And as Internet search continues to grow, one of the most popular Internet activities as it is, so does the SEM/SEO segment.

Another area of emphasis during the keynote was how the search marketing community has grown, mirroring the growth of the industry itself. To reinforce this point, Sullivan pointed out the large number of search-related forums and blogs (WebProWorld, SearchEngineWatch, SitePoint, SearchEngineRoundtable).

Organizations such as SEMPO and the SES conferences were referenced as well. All of these examples further the point that Sullivan was illustrating: the state of SEM/SEO industry is thriving and from the looks of things, it will continue to do so. It's not as if the act of searching is going away anytime soon, if ever.

Reading into Danny's comments, it certainly seems as if the search engine industry is not facing the specter of an Internet bubble pop.

To continue his point about the state of SEM, Sullivan also discussed the Ian Turner episode. If you aren't familiar, Ian Turner was a noted SEM who came up missing after one of the WebmasterWorld conference sessions. Ian was subsequently located and issued a heartfelt thank you for the various efforts.

When word of Ian's disappearance surfaced, almost the entire SEM community rallied around a grassroots effort, launched by Nick Wilson at Threadwatch.org, to find Turner. This includes the likes of the Yahoo and Google's respective search blogs, who posted entries about Ian's disappearance.

To further substantiate his position, Sullivan also mentioned the Barry Schwartz (seroundtable.com) marriage proposal with the help of Ask.com. In one of the more unique "will you marry me" moves, Barry used Ask's Smart Answer service to assist with his proposal to his soon-to-be wife.

Again, these examples reinforce the growth and position of the SEM/SEO industry. I don't recall seeing any Google Blog entries about some random missing person, do you?

Sullivan also mentioned the benefits SEM/SEO providers have reaped since the acceptance of these services into the mainstream. For instance, search engines, especially Google and Yahoo, give frequent "weather reports" on the status of their search index and potential upcoming algorithm alterations.

This allows SEO/SEM types to effect necessary changes before these updates take hold. When you consider the work and constant tweaking necessary to be successful in search, having notification beforehand allows preventive/preliminary measures to be taken instead of having a group of SEOs running around like headless chickens trying to implement reactive alterations.

This can make a huge difference when Jagger-like updates occur.

The introduction of Google Sitemaps, Yahoo Site Explorer, the "nofollow" tag, and Google Base are other examples of these benefits. Danny also mentioned various publications and prime time television shows that have either focused or made mention of this growing industry.

However, as with most things, where there is good, there is also bad. To emphasize this point, Sullivan also mentioned some negative aspects of the SEM/SEO industry. In another time, one would probably call some of these tactics black hat SEO, but in the keynote, specifics were discussed.

One of the more troubling tactics involves blog/message board/guest book comment spam. Leaving the session, one was left with the notion that comment spam is almost at epidemic levels. To prove this point, Sullivan conducted a Google searched for memorial sites (for deceased people) with the keyword Viagra as part of the search.

What he found was entirely too many examples of this type of spam occurring. Not only is comment spam prevalent, it looks like it doesn't discriminate either. I mean come on, Viagra spam on site that eulogizes a person's life and death. What in world are these people thinking?

Unfortunately, thoughts on how this type of spam can be combated was not discussed, save the "nofollow" attribute. Admittedly, Sullivan's keynote was only 30 minutes, not nearly enough time to discuss something you could spend a whole conference talking about.

All in all, when the keynote was completed, there was definitely the feeling that despite some of the spam issues, the SEO/SEM industry is growing at an accelerated rate and will continue to do so. The industry has also found its way into the mainstream, something that will not cease, as long as search is a viable Internet activity.

GOOGLE OFFERS FREE URCHIN WEBSITE ANALYTICS

Google Press Release

Google Inc. has announced that its hosted web analytics service, Google Analytics, which previously cost up to $495 - is now being offered for free. Formerly known as Urchin from Google, Google Analytics helps businesses use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and websites.

Google Analytics is a tool to assist businesses in determining which keywords attract the most visitors, which email campaigns create more customers, and how to design web pages to hold people's attention.

Paul Muret, Google Engineering Director, stated, ''We want to give all online marketers and publishers access to powerful web analytics to help them better understand what their customers want. With this knowledge, businesses can create more accurate advertising and build better websites. By making this powerful service free, we aim to give all websites - large and small - the tools they need to better serve their customers, make more money, and improve the web experience for everyone.''

Google Analytics is designed to enhance most aspects of online marketing - from selecting and bidding on effective keywords, to determining the most relevant offers in email campaigns, to optimizing website design. By acting on this information, businesses of all sizes can attract more visitors, convert more prospects to customers, and improve the overall return on their marketing investment. Google Analytics is simple enough for businesses new to web analytics to get started quickly, and sophisticated enough for the most advanced online marketers.

In addition to being free, Google Analytics includes:

  • Integration with Google AdWords, and works with any online ad network: Users of Google AdWords can access web analytics from a new interface within their AdWords account. Google Analytics automatically tags keyword destination URLs (which saves time and reduces the potential for errors), and imports cost data for ROI reports (for fast set-up and ease-of-use). Google Analytics is also able to track the results of any online marketing campaign, including banner ads, referral links, email newsletters, and organic and paid search.
  • New reporting dashboards: Google Analytics executive summary reports for the three most common decision makers – executive, marketer, webmaster – will ease access to crucial information across departments.
  • Global reach: Immediately available in 16 international languages: UK English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian.

Google Analytics runs on the same computing infrastructure that powers Google.com so it can support the traffic demands of any site, from those with a few visitors a week to hundreds of millions. Google Analytics is already used by many of the top properties on the web, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Businesses such as The Financial Times, National Semiconductor, Ritz Interactive, Agency.com and Deckers Outdoor Corporation use Google Analytics to improve the user experience and marketing effectiveness of their websites.

Jeff Saville, Marketing Manager at Deckers Outdoor Corp. commented on the new developments, ''Much like it did with web search - Google is making web analytics simpler and more accessible for millions of sites on the web. With the new features, and the fact it is free, Google Analytics will give us a much clearer view of how we're serving our customers, and the information we need to make it better.''

Google Analytics is available immediately at no charge to existing customers of Urchin from Google, as well as all new customers. Free online support is also available. Businesses can obtain customization or advanced integration from Google representatives and select Google service partners.

GOOGLE WRAPS UP UPDATE JAGGER

Search Engine News

As you probably know, Google recently underwent a major index update—dubbed Jagger. Sites that have spent the past few years building content and developing an organic-looking link structure that included inbound links from authoritative sites are happy. In most cases they either moved up into, or remained in, high-ranking territory.

The sites that lost rankings, and the accompanying revenue-producing traffic they previously enjoyed, are looking for answers that will help them get back on Google's good side as quickly as possible. If you own one or more of these sites, then this is for you...

We've now analyzed dozens of sites that were hit hard by this update and consulted directly with the owners of several of them. Some consistent patterns have emerged. We can now draw some definite conclusions regarding update Jagger even if they don't strictly apply in every case.

For starters, the sites that lost rankings we're almost uniformly using strategies that were previously effective but disliked by Google. No surprise, Google just got better at identifying and filtering them out of the search engine results.

Most of the penalized sites were involved in link schemes designed to manipulate PageRank. The most notoriously penalized were mini-nets. This strategy involves creating numerous different sites and linking them together to give search engines the impression that the site is more popular than it really is.

There was a time when this strategy was very effective in garnering high rankings. However, now that Google is itself a domain registrar, they have access to detailed ownership and administrative information about a website. That makes it exceedingly easy for them to correlate all the sites a person or company owns.

Also, on a lesser note, competitors are becoming more savvy about recognizing mini-net structures. After all, anyone can easily do a reverse IP lookup to identify sites that share an IP address or check whois information on backlinks to see which linking sites are actually owned by the same party. This ease of information gathering makes it increasingly likely that a competitor might file a spam report whenever they detect a mini-net.

Mini-nets can still be used, but making them safe and effective is vastly more complicated than before. They can either be approached in a completely transparent way, where each site can stand on its own as a unique and legitimate resource, or much greater steps must be taken to conceal them from detection. Both methods are discussed in detail in the following SE Byte: What's the best way to implement a "Mini-Net" strategy? ...and, is it safe?

The other linking strategy that was aggressively penalized was link farms where, typically, a group of sites agree to each host an identical links page, each containing links to the other member sites within the link farm. This strategy clearly violates Google's Guidelines and it is easily detected. For more info, see this month's SE Byte: What's the difference between a link farm, a links page, and a directory?

There's also strong indication that sites with lots of reciprocal links have been penalized. While not so flagrantly objectionable as mini-nets and link farms, it's clear that sites relying on off-topic links pages to provide the bulk of their links also plummeted in the rankings. And, as is the case with mini-nets and link farms, Google has been gunning to rid their index of these sites for quite some time now. The fact is, their latest update just tightened the noose on all three strategies effectively moving the bulk of them out of the top positions.

However, reciprocal links are hardly the "kiss of death" some have painted them to be. Many sites with reciprocal links were unaffected. In these cases the reciprocal links were from good, topically-related sites and made up only a minority of the overall incoming links.

On the other hand, sites with off-topic reciprocal links, run-of-site links, mini-nets and links-pages style links have been fading in effectiveness for some time now. Google's latest update lowered the boom on most of the rest of them.

To succeed with Google going forward, you absolutely must structure your incoming links to appear as natural as possible: You should focus your efforts on having links from many different sites with a wide range of PageRank and spread across a large number of IP addresses; Your anchor text should not be identical on every link; Your site must have a reasonably high ratio of deep links—links to internal pages within your site; and, your incoming links should be embedded within the content of the linking page and not isolated somewhere obscure like a footer or sidebar.

Look at it this way: if your site sells blue widgets, and the bulk of your link popularity comes from a few high-PageRank newspaper sites that are linking to you from the footer of hundreds of their internal pages with the anchor text blue widgets, you're probably not going to rank as well as you did before the Jagger update. And, if you still do, you soon won't! The same is true if most of your link popularity comes from add your link free-for-all links pages on sites selling cheap cigarettes and online poker.

Senority Counts

The other aspect of this latest update that bears mention is the increasing ranking benefit Google is awarding to older sites. Currently, most competitive keyword markets are dominated by sites that are at least 2 years old. Many sites which lost ranking weren't actually penalized, just simply replaced by one of these older sites. It's long been the case that new sites had a very difficult time ranking well in Google, and that problem has just been exacerbated with this latest update.

Canonical issues; www vs. non-www

Canonical refers to the standard way of writing something—in this case a URL. There have been issues raised in this latest update about Google's tendency to confuse variations of the same URL. In particular, Google will occasionally treat the www and non-www versions of a URL as belonging to two different sites. For example:

http://www.searchenginenews.com

and

http://searchenginenews.com

...could be seen as two different sites.

Aside from the problem that PageRank is being split when people link to the (technically) two different URLs, update Jagger also revealed a duplicate content filter weakness in respects to this apparent URL conflict. At present, the problem seems fixed. But, previously, there were reports of Google treating the URLs as two different sites—after which their duplicate content filter applied, resulting in poor rankings.

Regardless, this conflict is easily fixed with a .htaccess file. Here's some code to use in the event that you need it:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.searchenginenews\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.searchenginenews.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

By adding the above code to your .htaccess file, anyone who attempts to access your site using the non-www version of your URL will be redirected to the www version. Of course, be sure to change our domain name (outlined in red above) to your own domain name when copying this code.

Update Jagger: Looking at the bright side...

Remember that for every site that lost ranking, there's one that gained ranking. And those sites gained because they better matched the current profile Google looks for when it comes to ranking web pages highly. If a site has replaced yours during this last update, do a backlink analysis and find out why. How is their incoming link structure different than yours?

In fact, while you're at it, do a backlink analysis on all the sites in the top 10 for your favorite keywords. There's something about these sites that Google likes. Chances are you'll find they have lots of natural-looking inbound links from topically-related sources—some of which are authoritative and few that are perhaps even whitelisted (like, say, Yahoo Directory or some similar level of link-trustworthyness).

It may be true that Google's classification of what is and isn't spam may be a bit too general. We agree that many legitimate sites have found themselves caught in the crossfire,but we also have to consider that Google is dealing with a hugely complicated set of billions of documents and, army of PhDs notwithstanding, the Google ranking algorithm is still only a computer program. As such, it's subject to inherent limitations and sometimes makes mistakes. Of course, once those limitations are discovered, they can be used to inform our strategies and mold them to comply with whatever Google's algorithm responds to.

So, now that the dust has mostly cleared on update Jagger, our feeling is that it's not really anything approaching a major shift in Google's ranking algorithm. Rather, it's a modest improvement in Google's ability to detect and filter out certain artificial link-building strategies. The fact remains that most sites that lost ranking actually could have been penalized long ago. For whatever reason, they just managed to somehow avoid the hangman's noose until now. Sure, many legitimate sites got painted as spam with the broad brush Google uses, but that's a fact of life when it comes to relying on free search engine traffic.

Virtually all of the penalized sites were relying on outmoded SEO strategies that are easily detected and penalized. Sites that have been following our advice for the past year or so have been largely unaffected and many are now ranking even better than before.