Offbeat

People in the search marketing industry are so obsessed with search engines.  All they can seem to talk about is how to please the search engines, get on their good sides, and kiss up to Matt Cutts in some way shape or form.  But so many people never talk about the different reasons you might want to break off a relationship.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few ways you can break up with a search engine and manage your relationships.

Breaking the Heart of Your Favorite Search Robot

Time to call it quits.  Maybe you have a private member website, want privacy, or simply don’t want your site to be in the search engine results.

To cut off all communication and break the heart of that poor search engine robot, insert the following into the header section of your pages:

“Let’s Just be Friends”

“It’s nothing personal, I still really like you, but we make better friends than lovers.”  Maybe you don’t want the search engines to index your pages (maybe you’re trying to combat duplicate content?), but you still want them to follow your links and find other pages of your site.

Use this in the header section of your pages:

The Messy Break Up

The search robot found out you were cheating and decided to pull your rankings.  There’s nothing worse than a messy break up.  Better make up as soon as possible.  Leave behind your unfaithful ways and beg for forgiveness.

“Let’s Agree To See Other People”

Sometimes it’s ok to see other people for a while.  Maybe you have a reason to want to include Googlebot, but exclude Yahoo Slurp from your website.  Or maybe you want to exclude a specialized bot like Linkscape, image search, etc.

The best way to allow and disallow certain robots is through robots.txt.  Here is a link to a very thourough tutorial on the subject of creating and using a robots.txt file.

Don’t Be a Stalker

Let’s face it, you know you are in love.  You’ve become obsessed with this relationship.  All your friends tell you that you need to break it off.  This confined intimacy is killing you, and you don’t even know it.  You’ve become so dependent upon approval that your entire livelihood is wrapped up in it.  You sit around at home wondering why she doesn’t call (err, crawl)  as often as she used to.

Don’t get too obsessed with the search engines.  You want a steady long lasting relationship, not a one night stand.

• Don’t spam the engines
• Don’t become over obsessed and forget that SEO is about marketing
• Focus on metrics that matter like traffic, conversions, and business  (not just rankings)

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Yes, this was more of a fun post, and I didn’t include alot of “details” about how to disallow certain robots, proper use of robots.txt, excluding certain directories, using webmaster tools, etc…  so if you have any questions, please comment and I’ll answer any specific questions you have…

continue

You heard it here folks.  Damion Foxworthy is now the proud new owner of my ActiveRain profile.  The story behind the sale follows…I’m sure many of you have heard the controversy about the sale of MMORPG characters and goods.  It is quite an industry actually, complete with overseas sweatshops where workers will spend hours mining for gold in World of Warcraft, or building up an Everquest Character for resale.  You can even buy 50,000 “Linden” dollars on ebay for only $199.99, in the popular online universe known as second life.  I even wrote a post about it a while back that discussed the implications of a lady that became the first millionaire from selling virtual goods.

It’s an interesting topic… and it got me thinking.  If people can sell virtual goods and money, why not ActiveRain points? ActiveRain isn’t a game or an online virtual world, but it does deal with a potential commodity called: points.

In the early days of ActiveRain, it was pretty common to see people gaming the system for points.  Writing 10 junk posts a day, or commenting 50 times a day just to build their points.  But as AR has evolved there have been measures put in to make sure that in order for people to get ahead, they have to actually work at it.  Which makes the points that much more valuable.

Let’s discuss the value of points for a moment…  As most of you know, points can help you get ahead of your competition in any given market.  You can see here that I am currently listed in Colorado.  Ranked 7th in Colorado, 2nd in Douglas County, and 1st in the town of Castle Rock.  Not Bad!

But, lets say I decided to sell my profile to a real estate agent in Virginia… it’s a hugely populated state, and represents a huge real estate market segment.  But, there is very little competition for points.  Meaning if I were to switch my profile to Virginia…

I suddenly catapult to the number 2 position in Virginia, 1st in Arlington County, and 1st in Arlington.  Pretty amazing!

Not only does the profile now catapult me to the top of the Virginia members, but it also gets me to the home page of activerain for all the people from Virginia viewing the site!

It struck me like a ton of bricks the other day that my AR profile is valuable!!!  And somebody might pay some serious dough to get an instant high placement in the state they work in.  So, I went ahead and sold it to the highest bidder.  I considered the fact that many of the AR member would be angry, frustrated, or even hostile. And if you happen to have read this far into the paragraph you’ll be happy to know that none of this is actually true.  I haven’t sold my profile, I just wanted to see what kind of reaction it would get from the AR community.  What if tomorrow you woke up and saw a profile selling for $6,000 on ebay?  Would you be mad, upset, surprised, frustrated?  What?  Points are important to alot of people… whether you are trying to beat your competitor to the home page or AR, or trying to get to that coveted first spot on localsim.  Points on AR are the underlying thing that drive the community.

The other issue to selling an AR profile is the content.  What do you do with it?  Let the person have it for free?  Place a CC license on it so they can’t duplicate it?  You have to ask yourself, are you willing to let all that content slip away… how valuable is it to you?

Points rule activerain… and I plan to make a fortune from selling AR profiles.  Who’s with me???

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Here’s a perfect example of why I don’t put Google ads on my site. I found this on the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog this morning as I was browsing. The big pink toilet just stuck out like a sore thumb while I was reading about Zolve.com!

Joel has one of the best RE.net blogs out there, so it’s nothing against him… I just couldn’t resist sharing.