CheezeDMG Blog

On Saturday, Google pressed the wrong button. This button flagged every website as ‘potentially harmful’ meaning any user clicking on a link (free or paid for) was met with a warning of a dangerous site. This warning had the impact of users clicking but not actually arriving to the site.

In fairness, Google were straight onto it, with Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience publishing a blog post outlining the problem and admitting it was their fault. The reason we blog about it, is the untold issue of click loss.

If for 40 minutes, on a Saturday afternoon, users were clicking on ad and not getting anywhere, will Google be keeping the money? Client campaigns could have been affected by this issue but there  has been strange silence from the Google ad support teams this morning.

The agency teams here at Cheeze are checking the reports and deciding on the necessary action. Have you checked your campaign performance?

Links are a strong part of SEO success and we have, in the past, discussed top ten tips for better linking in which we discussed the power of comment links. With most blogs the reader has an opportunity to add a comment which will be displayed along with a link to their own blog. So if I comment on a Hitwise article, Google sees a link from Hitwise to me. So, if I am actively reviewing and commenting on blogs not only will I benefit from continued discussion around topics but also an element of link building.

The other area that blogs can achieve great linking (over and above good content) is the method of linking back out. Working with clients we are always encouraging them to find reasons to link out of their site to benefit both the consumer and the search engines. External links add to Google’s picture of where the website or the blog sits in the world wide web.

A very strong example of this can be seen on Google’s official blog. At the end of each post, Google lists all the blog posts that link to the story, so yesterday’s story about Gmail tasks links to the Google blog, and this morning, our link sits at the top of the list. We have already seen visitors arriving at the site as a result of this link.

So this is one tangible benefit of external linking for SEO and traffic purposes.

Another benefit is that all good bloggers will be checking daily to see who links to them (good content is always the best source of achieving inbound links), so if we rate a story and link to it, there is a chance the blogger will come and see what we have to say. If our work is good, they may choose to link to us.

There is never a short cut to achieving quality inbound links, but with a blog (as the easiest and quickest platform) a great content article can be boosted through succesful external linking that enhances the post. Blogging can be an integral part of a succesful SEO strategy, however as we have demonstrated, good content needs amplification to further encourage links.

Adage.com publishes a list of the most infleuential blogs, the Top 150. This list of influential blogs contains major players including chrisbrogan.com and PSFK. We are delighted to see the Cheeze blog appearing in position, er 785 which is an awesome start. [hey we don't make the rules or the maths]. Naturally we are planning our assault on the real 150 in due course.

Thank you to our wonderful readers and agency contributors.

Thenextweb published an interview with the founders of Blog Upp! a new solution set to boost your blog visibility for free! As an agency always looking at new opportunities we read on… Blog Upp works by inviting you to their widget [seen here on the bottom right hand side of the page] which displays other blogs.

In turn this blog will be appearing on other people’s blogs as part of this exchange.

To be fair the set up and implementation was under three minutes and our first promotions on the Cheeze blog [of other bloggers] was ReadWriteWeb which is always useful and Blog Upp! themselves. On first load I found the page load time to be significantly reduced but I would welcome your experience on the site.

This type of promotion is free, its easy but will it actually deliver any value? The ratio of us showing ads blogs is 10:9 which is better than other exchanges so we shouldn’t have to wait for too long before we get displayed.

This exchange type of marketing has been around since the very early days of online, with banner exchanges offering similar methods of bartering traffic.  In the wonderful world of ‘2.0′ we are always intrigued to see things dusted off and presented as ‘new’. To be fair to the guys at Blog Upp! they aren’t neccesarily calling themselves new, but were featured in the nextweb which, as the title suggests, looks at new technologies and solutions.

One of the concerns we have about this and similar exchanges is the control. By signing up to this gig, we have no control over who is dispayed on our site, and where our content is displayed, so there is a small leap of faith if brands are going to embrace this.

So, we have some visibility - will it boost our traffic? I don’t expect it to. Will it help our natural linking? I don’t expect it to either. So, let’s see what it does do.

It is worth noting, before we leave on a negative note, that this is the ‘free’ version - naturally they are offering paid for packages which offer more opportunities for traffic so we’re off to look at those, and we will repot back later.

Comment spam is a real problem for blogs. Every day at Cheeze towers we must clear down 90 plus spam messages. As you would expect they are all trying to advertise the usual spam products but we’re good for fake Rolexes, Viagra and any other form of unmentionable. I did have to smile, however with this little comment,