Brand safety: Avoiding fake & hyperpartisan news on the Google Display Network

 

What does online brand safety mean in the age of hyperpartisan, sensationalized and fake news content?

With programmatic targeting and retargeting, brands can find themselves cozied up to content that may not match up with their values and messaging. That’s not new, but the proliferation of sites aimed at attracting clicks by appealing to humans’ basest need to have their viewpoints validated adds another layer of complexity for brands buying ads on open ad exchanges and ad networks like the Google Display Network.

Well over 1,000 advertisers have reportedly pulled out of Breitbart, and yet that site is part of the Google Display Network. So are hundreds of other hyperpartisan political sites — both left-wing and right-wing, with content that ranges from flirting with untruths to outright lies — on which brands might be surprised to find their ads appearing (more on that below). Here we are looking at websites only, but ads can also appear alongside YouTube and apps should also be considered.

“Fake news” definitions can vary widely, from misinformation to conspiracy theories, to hoaxes to blatantly false reports. Google’s take as it pertains to the GDN is different still. Google has no publisher policy against sites running false news stories, as long as they aren’t misrepresenting who they are or the intention of the content — i.e., sites can’t impersonate a news outlet, and news headlines can’t link to diet pill promotions. We’ve written about what exactly the policy covers and doesn’t in our companion piece, “Google isn’t actually tackling ‘fake news’ content on its ad network.”

This can be awkward. Here are some examples:

Smartfood “You deserve delight” ads appearing next to NSFW headlines.

Planned Parenthood “Give Now” ads showing up on a far right-wing website that hasn’t even bothered to fully update its “Sample Page” template.

Bergdorf Goodman and Alliance for Healthcare Security ads on shock-pundit AnnCoulter’s site.

How does this happen?

There are several ways ads can show up on sites in the Display Network. First, these placements could be intentional — with the sites chosen specifically as “managed” placements on the Display Network by the advertisers.  That’s not likely the case here, but it’s possible.

The other scenarios rely on automation. Google has added more targeting controls to AdWords, and even more in DoubleClick, for the Display Network from the original contextual targeting with keywords (e.g., ads for health insurance plans can appear alongside articles about the ACA). Other targeting options include demographics, interest and affinity audiences, topics, and of course, retargeting to customers and/or past site visitors.

Targeting options on the Google Display Network in AdWords

The ads in the examples above were not served as the result of retargeting campaigns. The Bergdorf Goodman ad shown above could be the result of interest targeting, which can include in-market (like “Women’s Apparel”) or affinity audience targeting (like “Fashionistas”) based on my previous browsing behaviors, including visits to other high-end retail sites. Google’s interest targeting is built on a mix of third-party data and browsing behavior on pages, apps, channels, videos and content on YouTube and the Google Display Network sites.

Topic targeting isn’t as simple as targeting websites that cover specific topics such as Right-Wing and Left-Wing Politics, which are both options. Topic targeting occurs at the time an impression becomes available and is based on the content on the page, not the overall political vantage, for example, of the site overall. That means advertisers targeting Right-Wing Politics can find their ads shown on sites that skew left-wing if the content includes keywords that signal a right-wing context, and vice versa. For that reason, the topics that are listed with websites in the Display Planner will not necessarily correlate to the types of content ads can display against with topic targeting.

 

Retargeting may be the trickiest decision for brands to weigh when considering where their ads should appear. Here are several examples of retargeted ads for retail brands appearing on far-left- and far-right-wing sites. These ads happen to be for retail brands, but Marketing Land also saw examples from CPG, telecommunications, automotive and financial services advertisers, among other verticals, while reporting this story.

Retargeted ads from Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, Nordstrom and Gap

The ad company you keep

Often, it may not be the content but the content recommendation ads and ads from other networks on a lot of the sites that are more unsettling to brands. Many of these sites are absolutely safe to visit, others less so.

Pop-ups, fake virus alerts and other low-quality ad content proliferate on many of the sites, particularly those that appear to exist solely to generate ad revenue. TheTrumpMedia.com example below is one of dozens of sites seen with large portions of real estate taken up with content recommendation blocks throughout its pages. That site also has no contact information available on the site. RedStateWatcher.com has 21 ad trackers on it, according to Ghostery, but the links to its Privacy Policy and Contact Us pages in the footer aren’t clickable. Others, like EagleRising.com, regale visitors with not one but two pop-ups before loading the Contact Us page, which has no contact information, just a submission form. 

Content recommendation blocks are used heavily on many of these sites, including full-screen pop-ups from Spoutable.

Some mobile experiences include pop-up ads and content recommendation ads that display between an article title and body.

One of the worst examples of ad loading I saw was on a site called LeftLiberal.com. The page below had 75 ad trackers on it. There is a Google-served banner at the top, a block of sponsored links from Content.ad, a virus alert ad in the bottom right, and a video ad served by Epom in the bottom left that is covering up another Google-served responsive text ad. This site was also one of the many using  popups Dingit.tv.

I should also offer a consumer warning here: some sites I visited while reporting this story automatically opened a new browser tab with phony virus protection alerts designed to be hard to close out of or had sketchy virus warning ads appear in the bottom right corner of the page. The worst of these scenarios opened up a new browser tab automatically with a “safety alert” that claimed my Facebook login, credit card number, email account login and photos had been compromised and that I needed to call support. (Do not

call or click on these kinds of ads.) Several sites also triggered background pop-up video ads.

A site called Prntly.com that dubs itself “America’s Top News Site” took nearly 30 seconds to load and had 66 ad trackers on the home page alone.

Marketing Land found and reported to Google several examples of apparent violations of the Misrepresentative content policy, and we have asked questions about violations of the Valuable content policy that covers ad-to-editorial content ratios. We have also asked about whether certain examples violate Google’s AdSense hate speech policy that prohibits content that advocates against an individual, group or organization. We will update here when we hear back.

Does environment matter?

Somehow, in the age or programmatic ad buying, context seems to have taken a back seat to audience reach for many brands. When aiming to reach certain audiences or retargeting, does it matter if a brand’s ads show on content it wouldn’t otherwise target if that’s where their site visitors and customers are going?

Different brands will have different answers to questions about context and environment. When brands set impression and audience quotas, they and their media buyers may be reluctant to cut of significant sources of reach.

But in this new landscape, marketers running campaigns on ad networks like the GDN need to be asking these questions for themselves, because Google won’t do it for them.

How to opt out

Many companies will have no problem with their ads appearing next to hyperpartisan content or on sites with fake news. And some may want to explicitly target audiences reading this type of content.

For AdWords users that want to opt out, there is no Site Category exclusion option for political content, but there are other options  — none quite perfect.

Placement exclusions are the primary way Google suggests addressing opt-outs. Advertisers can exclude individual sites and even individual pages on which they don’t want their ads to appear. This can be hard to manage when there are new sites coming into the GDN on a regular basis, and in many cases, advertisers won’t know to exclude a site until after their ads run and the sites show up in site placement reports. Another thing to note in terms of brand safety is that AdSense publishers have the option of making themselves anonymous to advertisers. These sites show up as anonymous.google in advertisers’ placement reports. It is possible to exclude all anonymous.google sites, though this can be a blunt instrument that excludes brand-appropriate sites and even converting sites.

Topics exclusions are also a blunt tool. There are several granular options under Topics, including Right-Wing and Left-Wing Politics, but as discussed above, this targets content not sites. Excluding Left-Wing Politics could mean ads won’t show next to right-wing content.

Topics exclusions can also cut off access to content that isn’t necessarily extreme, too. Similarly, interest exclusions can paint too broad a brush in many cases.

Advertisers can also add contextual exclusions by adding negative keywords to their display campaigns.

I’ve compiled a Google Sheet of some sites included in the right-wing and/or left-wing politics topics in Display Planner (reminder these topics don’t align to Topics targeting in campaigns and the list is always subject to change). There is a mix of mainstream, left-wing and right-wing sites. It’s meant to give advertisers a sense of the political content inventory in which their ads might appear on when running GDN campaigns.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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Google isn’t actually tackling ‘fake news’ content on its ad network

 

Why are my Google display campaigns running on “XYZ Hyperpartisan Site” with less-than-accurate or altogether false articles? That’s the polite version of a question I’ve heard in various forms over the past several weeks.

Isn’t Google taking steps against fake news on the Display Network? they ask. Why are sites that spread misinformation still able to earn ad revenue through Google’s AdSense publisher network? they wonder. I’ve heard these questions over and over again recently. In a nutshell, the answer comes down to semantics, namely the difference between “misrepresentation” and “misinformation.”

Last fall, Google earned a lot of press, including on this site, for updating its AdSense “Misrepresentative content” policy to ostensibly “take aim at fake news,” as The New York Times put it. In its most recent Bad Ads Report, Google said it kicked out 200 sites — out of some 2 million — from the network for violations including misrepresentation. There has been a trend to capitalize on hyperpartisanship — because people are clicking.

Google continues to profit from ads served on hundreds if not thousands of sites promoting propaganda, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and flat-out lies. Some are fairly well-known publishers; others popped up during the election cycle and appear to exist solely to earn money from ads.

Here’s what advertisers should understand about what Google’s “Misrepresentative content” policy means and doesn’t mean.

Expectations versus reality

The “Misrepresentative content” policy states:

“Users don’t want to be misled by the content they engage with online. For this reason, Google ads may not be placed on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about [the publisher], [its] content or the primary purpose of [the] web property.”

Last fall, the general interpretation was that, as part of this update, Google would stop allowing ads to be served alongside fake news stories (i.e., misinformation). That was largely because Google stated in one of the policy examples that sites that were “deceptively presenting fake news articles as real” would be in violation. Satire was safe, misinformation was not, went the thinking.

But that’s not what Google meant. And, as Media Matters reported in January, Google quietly removed its reference to fake news (underlined below) at some point in late December or early January.

 

Google lists some examples of violations with every policy; these are not all-encompassing and are intended to help publishers understand the spirit of the policy. It’s also not uncommon for Google to tweak policy examples. This is how the examples for the Misrepresentative content policy now read:

The part about addressing “fake news” confused the issue — leading the press, advertisers, and perhaps publishers to think it was going after fake news content — so Google removed it. After getting all that positive press it didn’t correct.

What the policy really means

Marketing Land has confirmed with Google that the policy was never intended to address editorial veracity. Google doesn’t look at whether an article is true or not; it looks at whether the publisher is misrepresenting itself.

Google says the information was meant to address the proliferation of deceptive information online and not to get into editorial decisions about facts. The Misrepresentative content policy and others are purposely designed to be narrow. This is in part because its ad policies need to be defensible and enforcement intentional.

Some examples

Let’s take two of the most well-known fake news cases of last fall to better understand how this policy is applied: Macedonians who built sites filled with false hyper-partisan articles to rake in money from ads; and Pizzagate, the bizarre fake story involving the Clintons that proliferated across far right-wing sites and culminated in a real-life incident. Would these violate the policy?

YES: The Macedonian sites would be in violation, but not because the content was made up. Those sites would have fallen under the policy for concealing information about who the publishers really were.

NO: The Pizzagate stories wouldn’t fall under the policy just for being fake.

The policy hinges on the publisher, not the content itself. Google says the change provides the ability to go after bad sites that were impersonating or pretending to be affiliated with national and local news outlets. Many of these sites use a bait and switch to lure users in with sensationalized headlines that lead to content that’s actually promoting diet pills or some other product. As with the Macedonian example, a news site that presents itself as operating out of New York City but is in fact based in Europe would be in violation.

The policy has no bearing on whether publishers known to have extreme bias and publish hoaxes, conspiracy theories, overt propaganda or disinformation can carry Google-sold and served ads on their pages.

That’s, in part, why you’ll find hundreds of far-left-wing and far-right-wing sites like Breitbart.com, AnnCoulter.com, ClashDaily.com, TruthRevolt.org, LeftLiberal.com, LiberalMountain.com, LiberalPlug.com, Milo.Yiannopoulos.net, TheProudLiberal.og, and TruthDivision.com on Google’s Display Network.

Some of these sites have been around for years. Many others, like “DonaldTrumpPotus45,” popped up during the election season.

The review process

Google has hundreds of manual reviewers for AdSense. When publishers sign up for AdSense, the sites undergo a manual review. In most cases, bad actors present sites that adhere to the policies in order to evade detection and then pivot after the sites have been approved.

For the Misrepresentation policy, there is a human review process. Teams are aided by technology that lets reviewers do things like look at an entire site’s domain, identify rings of sites operated by one owner, and evaluate multiple sites using similar tactics. Red flags are double-checked manually.

Do these sites violate other policies?

Many of theses sites are chock-full of ads, from Google and other networks, and most rely heavily on content recommendation networks. Content recommendation ads do count as ads under Google’s Valuable content policy that covers ad-to-edit ratios. It’s not clear if Google also counts ads from other ad networks under this policy. We have asked and will update here when we hear back.

The most hyperpartisan of these sites are usually very clever and careful not to violate Google’s AdSense hate speech policy that prohibits content that advocates against an individual or group or organization — often walking right up to the line between free speech and hate speech. Google says it keeps a close eye on many of these sites.

With the sheer volume of sites, videos and ads, the company also relies on users and advertisers to report policy violations. This is partiularly true of content on YouTube where the volume of new content being uploaded everyday is massive.

Brand safety questions

The argument over whether Google should be an arbiter of content is obviously a thorny one. Policing fake news is far from easy, as Danny Sullivan covered in “Why Google might not be able to stop ‘fake news.” For now, it is profiting from and providing a revenue source for publishers of this type of content. Google’s Misrepresentation policy is aimed at scammers, not ideologues and not opportunists who pedal propaganda and fake news for ad clicks.

From interest targeting to retargeting, there are many ways brands running campaigns on the Google Display Network can find their ads running on hyperpartisan sites without realizing it. For more, see our companion piece, “Brand safety: Avoiding fake & hyperpartisan news on the Google Display Network.”

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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The new customer marketing lifecycle in the Engagement Economy

In my last post, I expanded on the concept of the “Engagement Economy,” today’s world where everything and everyone is connected. This world presents a new playing field for marketers trying to engage people within their organization, as well as partners and customers.

I frequently cite the statistic that only 13 percent of marketing leaders are working to retain and grow customer relationships through improved customer experiences. But in the Engagement Economy, keeping a customer becomes more important than acquiring them.

This is because the Engagement Economy is rife with business models where customer switching costs are low. Think of ride-sharing apps: Lyft and Uber must constantly compete for attention and brand affinity, as users can switch between them with virtually no headaches.

Although it’s on a larger scale, the same paradigm applies to the B2B world, where an organization can switch out Cloud-based applications with minimal long-term commitment.

So, what can you do? Smart brands must understand that in order to compete in the Engagement Economy, they must rethink their approach to engaging with their customers. This begins with getting rid of the phrase “retention marketing.” It’s a complete misnomer. Instead, think of retention as an outcome of smart marketing across the entire customer life cycle.

Getting to this outcome starts with acquisition — the kind of outreach that a majority of marketers are already comfortable with — but from there encompasses adoption, cross-sell and advocacy. Marketing leaders must allocate people and program dollars to each of these stages in order to execute them effectively.

Let’s take a closer look.

Adoption marketing

After a person buys a product or service, the marketer of that product or service can make two major missteps: either immediately try to market additional products or services to that person, or cease marketing to this person entirely. Either of these errors is a classic case of a brand forgetting that it needs to put the customer first.

The happy medium between these two extremes is the art of adoption marketing, i.e., continuing to market to customers in a way that ensures their success. As I remind my revenue team, we are not in the business of creating revenue; we are in the business of creating value! And this starts with each customer getting the most value out of what they have already purchased.

Marketing teams need to understand the current state of adoption for every major capability that a customer has purchased (usually done through technology) and then design a programmatic way — via direct communications, customer communities, education programs and more — to provide personalized tips, best practices and case studies regarding how to maximize their value. Not only is it a nice thing to do, it’s just smart business; the more your product becomes indispensable to someone, the less likely they are to replace you with the competition. And it costs far less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones.

Without some form of adoption marketing, attempting to sell a customer anything else — be it another product or the renewal of a service — is a fruitless pursuit.

Cross-sell

Once a customer is fully yours (and happy), this is when you can begin to think about selling additional products or services. The beautiful thing here is that you can also be programmatic about how you approach cross-sell marketing, but it’s a matter of putting the manpower and funding behind it.

Cross-sell marketing shouldn’t be something you think of only when you have a new feature or product to announce. This is another subset of the customer journey and needs to be thought of with the same importance as the initial move from prospect to customer. Cross-sell is even more important in the Engagement Economy because the likelihood of retention increases when a customer has adopted multiple products.

At its core, the act of cross-selling is rooted in behavior marketing: you need to listen to what your customer does with a product or service, learn what else they need to do their job more effectively, and engage with them by offering them complementary products or services that will provide further value. A great example of this is Kaspersky Lab, a multi-billion dollar enterprise security software provider (and a Marketo customer). Kasperky created a Loyalty Behavior Score for each of their customers in order to understand the health of every customer at every stage of their life cycle based on their adoption. They then use this score to measure their cross-sell and upsell opportunities, engaging with the best customers at the best times to offer new products and services. The net result: increased cross-sell revenue and increased customer retention.

Advocacy

So you’ve gotten your customer to successfully adopt your product. Happy customers are the ones who are most likely to advocate on behalf of your brand.

There are two important criteria for determining the best advocates for brand:

• Never confuse customer loyalty with advocacy. We can be loyal to a brand without advocating for it, and this can be due to “locked in” loyalty through airlines, cable providers, software providers and so on.
• Never assume a strong correlation between the most lucrative customers and your best brand advocates. The brand advocate who goes “over the top” to showcase passion for the brand may not be making the big dollar investment, but nonetheless is providing huge value in other ways.

The average company has a very small pool of advocates to choose from. I think of it like the “1 Percent Rule” that applies to content consumption on the internet. In terms of brands with established or fast-growing customer bases, 90 percent of customers are lurkers, 9 percent of customers are likers, and 1 percent of customer are lovers.

Lurkers use a brand’s product or services — period. Organizations have little insight into how the lurkers truly feel about the product because their engagement with the brand is low. These are the customers who are most likely to drop your product for a different one. You’re also not going to get much value out of these customers because it will be difficult to sell them on new products or services.

Then there are the likers. This 9 percent generally enjoy using your product but do little to advocate on your behalf. Likers provide value to your brand in that they are a more reliable source of revenue, but they provide untapped potential in the ways in which they could be advocating for you.

The trick is to convert these likers into the final group, the “1 percent” of customers, which are the lovers. Lovers are your all-star brand advocates. Not only are they happy using your product, they’re ready to shout it from the rooftops and engage in advocacy activities, be they customer references, media opportunities, case studies or online reviews.

In an age where review sites like Yelp carry significant weight, having someone willing to sing your praises is invaluable to your business. If you can move even 1 percent of your likers over to the lover category, that’s a 100 percent advocacy increase!

Customers for life

In the Engagement Economy, keeping the customer for life is essential, but that means that you must engage with your customers at every step of their journey — and do it in the ways they most prefer. By approaching customer marketing in the right way, you have a chance to build lasting relationships and win the ongoing battle for the heart and mind of the customer.

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

As CMO, Chandar is in charge of positioning Marketo as the marketing industry’s innovation leader and best solution for high-growth and enterprise businesses. Previously as a group vice president of marketing, Chandar built Marketo’s product, solution, and corporate marketing teams. A seasoned enterprise executive, he was previously with Badgeville where he oversaw the company’s worldwide marketing efforts including product and corporate marketing and demand generation. Prior to that he served as vice president of product and channel marketing for IBM Cast Iron. Chandar also spent time at Andersen Consulting as an advisor to Fortune 500 companies in the high-tech, retail, and oil and gas industries. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from PSG College of Technology in India and a master of science in management from the University of Texas.

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YouTube viewers now consuming 1B hours of video content a day

YouTube says people around the world are now consuming a billion hours of video content per day on the site. According to the announcement, the milestone was reached last year, but YouTube only shared the news yesterday.

“If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years,” writes YouTube’s VP of engineering, Cristos Goodrow, on the Official YouTube Blog, offering a frame of reference for the billion-hour statistic.

YouTube says its focus on time spent watching a video, versus video views, helps drive the number of hours users spend watching videos on the site.

“A few years back, we made a big decision at YouTube,” writes Goodrow, “While everyone seemed focused on how many views a video got, we thought the amount of time someone spent watching a video was a better way to understand whether a viewer really enjoyed it.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of hours spent watching videos on YouTube has increased tenfold since 2012 when the site retooled its algorithm for video recommendations – aiming to increase user engagement and retention.

A former Google manager told the Wall Street Journal that before 2012 video recommendations were mostly based on what other users clicked to watch after viewing a specific video; but, after the retool in 2012, machine learning applications allowed the site to, “…parse massive databases of user history to improve video recommendations.”

The Wall Street Journal says YouTube’s global viewership is on track to surpass U.S. television viewership based on Nielsen’s numbers that 1.25 billion hours of TV is watched everyday in America.

YouTube’s press page reports the site has over a billion users – “almost one-third of all people on the Internet” – and more than half of YouTube views happen on mobile devices.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including

MarketingProfs.com

,

SoftwareCEO.com

, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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Link free or die

Why are we so afraid of links?

Back in the old days of SEO, we loved any link if it was free, even if it was from a spammy scraper site or the lowest-quality directory you’ve ever seen. If we did nothing to get that link, it was a great link. People assumed that all links were beneficial — and that even “bad” links were completely harmless, with no potential to cause damage.

Then we started to get scared… and we nofollowed links. We performed loads of link analysis and reached out to sites that we thought were spammy and asked to have our links removed. Oh, and let’s not forget that time period where we were terrified of exact-match anchors and then built 50 links that all said “Click here.”

I’m surely leaving out other critical changes, but the bottom line is that links freak most of us out, whether we’re building them or they’re being built for our site.

Let’s break down five of the biggest fears and discuss how healthy or unhealthy they truly are.

1. Fear of actively pursuing links

I’m including begging and buying here. Some have the viewpoint that any link that was not editorially given is a bad link. In my opinion, if you waited to only get editorially given links, you’d be waiting a very long time to see any results. It’s an ideal, in my opinion.

People can claim that a successful link-building campaign is not based on money, but in my opinion, it absolutely is. You cannot create an utterly amazing and far-reaching content campaign without a healthy budget unless you just happen to have talented people on your staff who can do it themselves. Even if you create this awesome content that will naturally attract links, you have to promote it — and I don’t just mean tweeting about it.

Plenty of content gets pimped via email outreach, for example. Content is sent to parties who might find it valuable, along with a nice, gentle suggestion that you link. To me, that’s not much different from just asking for a link; but to those who preach that all you need is great content to attract links naturally, it’s a whole different ballgame.

I kind of dump this approach into the begging category. You may consider it an editorially given link, though. Are they really that different? Not in my mind; at the end of the day, you saw content and you linked to it.

Do you think Google can tell what your reasoning was for linking? Can they distinguish between whether you came across that content on Facebook and included a link to it in a new post, or whether the agency who created it emailed you about it and said that if you like it, link to it? Nope.

So, is this fear healthy or not? I’d go with not healthy, but with a caveat: you have to really know what you’re doing.

2. Fear of the links you get naturally

This one is also wise in my opinion, as so many people think they cannot possibly be hurt by free links that were just handed to them.

However, this fear can go too far. People will see a link come in from a brand new site where the Domain Authority is 11, and they freak out. Is this going to hurt me? Should I disavow it?

I may be crazy for saying this, but I don’t really worry much about those kinds of links unless they’re coming to me in great numbers and from some spammy niches. If some new blogger who is just starting out decides to link to my site in an article about link building, I’m not going to flip out and ask for the link to be removed, nor am I going to disavow it.

Still, it’s good to audit your backlink profile and ensure that you are disavowing any spammy links. Even if you didn’t pay for them or ask for them, they could still be coming from low-quality sites that could ultimately harm your rankings if not dealt with.

Healthy fear or not? Pretty healthy.

3. Fear of linking out to other sites

I’ve only really encountered this one when we do outreach for clients (and not all that often, luckily). Webmasters will say that linking out is illegal, or that Google will penalize them for it.

Recently, while doing a link review for a client, I was looking at a page from which we secured a great link for a client last year. I remembered that page well because of all the great resources it linked to and how thorough it was. I’d been thrilled to secure a link there.

Today, there are zero outgoing links on that article. Zero. All the info is still there, but you’d have to look up each site on your own. To me, that is absolutely dreadful to do to your users. Some of the most beneficial content out there links out to other resources. This is one fear that I think is completely unsubstantiated.

Healthy? Not in my mind.

4. Fear of linking out without a nofollow

This one is tricky. In Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, they advise doing the following for links that may violate their guidelines:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google has added many types of “manipulative” links to their guidelines over the years, though — and I suspect they will continue to add more. As a result, many webmasters now slap a nofollow on automatically.

I have no problem with nofollowed links; if they’re good to send traffic, I’m happy. My main issue is that this sculpting of the web is being done by people who don’t really have much understanding of how the web works. Some of these people are nofollowing links that should not be nofollowed. How is that going to impact rankings when it becomes a common thing to do? Oh, right… we’ll just find another way to manipulate the web.

With paid links and affiliate links, most webmasters do nofollow them. If you’re just editorially linking out to an article on someone else’s site to help make your content better, you don’t need a nofollow.

Healthy fear? Not unless you really do have a good reason that is something other than “it’s the only legal option.”

5. Fear of Google in general

Is anyone terrified of Bing or Duck Duck Go? If so, I’ve never heard about it. They’re all scared of Google. Google will penalize me for building links. Someone will turn me in for building links. Google will take down my site and I will starve to death. People still say these things.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason for that. I’ve seen too many sites get unfairly penalized to think it’s not a possibility, no matter how clean your backlink profile is. And hey, there are more than just link-related penalties!

Healthy fear? YES. I mean, I think people need to do what is right for their own businesses. Maybe you wouldn’t lose your shirt if Google did penalize you. Maybe you really love risk. That’s fine with me. But I do think you have nothing to lose by being at least a tiny bit afraid — or, at minimum, aware — of their power.

Some might take this all to mean that I don’t like Google or that I’m advocating violating their guidelines. My position is that they have their own rules and if you break them, they have the right to penalize you.

My biggest problem is that by attempting to curb all the link spam, they’ve issued broad guidelines that can penalize sites for doing things that used to be okay, and they will probably add something new that might penalize sites for something that is currently all the rage.

We all need to have some fear. What we don’t need is ignorant terror that makes us ruin the web needlessly.

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Julie Joyce owns the link development firm

Link Fish Media

and is one of the founding members of the

SEO Chicks

blog. Julie began working in search marketing in 2002 and soon became head of search for a small IT firm. Eventually, she started Link Fish Media, where she now serves as Director Of Operations, focusing on working with clients in ultra-competitive niches all over the world.

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Google and others expand initiative launching new RCS messaging platform

SMS text messaging is undergoing a major renovation, with the announcement late last week of an expansion in the initiative by Google, carriers and manufacturers to launch a new standard, Rich Communications Services (RCS) for Android. The initiative itself was announced a year ago.

A new Android Messages application — which supports SMS and MMS, as well as RCS — will replace the current Android native messaging app, Messenger for Android.

It’s a direct response to the capabilities offered by such messaging apps as Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, third-party products like Line and others. These offerings are quickly moving beyond messaging, becoming full-fledged communications platforms, and now Android has one built in.

RCS enables group chats, higher quality images in messages, location sharing, video calls, appointment scheduling, prescription refilling and the ability to read receipts or get directions, all within the new Messages.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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Using social media to jump-start your content marketing strategy

Content marketing and social media seem like they were made for each other. There are currently over 2 billion social media users worldwide. Quality content is what makes social media tick. Unfortunately, most brands have a social media voice that is mostly detached from their content marketing strategy.

If content marketing is a high priority for you, squeezing the last drop out of social media is critical. Ultimately, the goal is to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible, and for that, social media is perhaps the best way to expand your reach and generate more traffic.

That said, it’s much more than just a tool to help gain exposure. Along with a myriad of business benefits, it serves as a direct channel for your brand where you can incorporate offers, live updates and customer service.

The key to using social media to boost awareness for your website is by engaging viewers with useful, relevant material — when they need it, as opposed to when you create it. This task is a lot harder than it seems.

Keep in mind, the stream of information on social media moves very, very quickly. The last thing you want is for your message to get buried and lost before anyone has had a chance to see it.

Let’s take a look at how you can take your content marketing efforts to the next level.

Social monitoring leads to better content

The best social media marketers don’t start by posting. They start by listening. Social monitoring (or listening) is a great way to gauge how your target audience feels about a particular subject or industry.

Did you know that Facebook users collectively generate around 3.2 billion likes and comments every day? Monitoring what people are liking and commenting on is crucial to finding out what’s currently trending.

Sure, manually checking up on your industry across all the social media platforms can be tedious. Luckily, plenty of tools are out there that enable you to track what the masses are saying so that you can learn about their interests, perceptions and concerns.

Brandwatch is one that will give you data-driven insights as to what your customers and influencers in your industry are talking about — including the competition. Identifying the most pressing questions or concerns can help gear your messaging to popular demand.

With that knowledge, you can create content that provides true value to your target audience. For instance, if you run an industry blog, you can use these social insights to determine relevant topics to write about and to create catchy headlines to draw in visitors.

BuzzFeed is the quintessential example of this. Their casual, yet informative platform is constantly producing high-quality content that touches on an array of relevant topics in the field of news, entertainment and general interest. As of this writing, they’ve had over 550 million global visits in the last 30 days.

To use social monitoring to find topics to gear your content toward, you’ll want to brainstorm a list of key terms and phrases relevant to your brand and industry. This will work to pinpoint the interests of your target community so you can design content to fit their needs.

Content built around these terms can then go to multiple channels in multiple formats and eventually be routed back to social media for sharing.

While your usual social media management tools like Hootsuite and Twitter’s own TweetDeck offer good collaboration opportunities for the purpose of posting and scheduling, companies with cross-channel marketing departments can look toward objective-focused task management tools. WorkZone or Brightpod, for instance, can help you manage interdepartmental communications or track the effectiveness of integrated marketing campaigns.

Social sharing means more eyeballs

The ultimate purpose of content creation is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. The beauty of social media is that once your content is out there, there are few limits to where it can reach.

Encouraging users to share content can be done in many ways. First off, the overall look of a piece matters a lot. As a general rule of thumb, think visually with each post. Visual content gets more views, clicks, shares and likes than text-based material. For instance, on Facebook and Twitter, photos get 53 percent more likes, 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs.

If you produce blog content, you need to go beyond just placing “easy-to-find” social share buttons all over your page. Try things like Click to Tweet in your next article. Choose the tweet the way you’d choose a headline; embed things like interesting quotes, facts or images within your content in a compelling way so the reader is inclined to post it.

Content is meant to be shared. Social media is the perfect vehicle to get your material noticed with a chance to go viral.

Make influencers your workhorses

Finding the perfect influencer on social media can be a game-changer that skyrockets your content marketing efforts. The right influencer can generate more than double the sales of paid advertising and increase client retention.

A simple retweet or share by an individual with a large social following can do wonders for your content as it is exposed to a vastly wider audience than usual. Why do you think companies pay celebrities tons of money to tweet about brands or products? The math goes beyond just how many followers they have. It’s about the level of engagement they have with their fans.

One of my favorite influencer marketing campaigns was Adidas’s #MyNeoShoot, where they recruited Selena Gomez to promote their Neo line. Gomez invited users to take pictures of themselves and apply to be the next Adidas model. By the time the campaign ended, Adidas had gained 12,000 entries, 71,000 brand mentions and 41,000 new Instagram followers.

Locating influencers on social media can take a bit of digging. Look into your industry and identify the key figures. This could be anyone like a blogger, a journalist, a political figure, or even another business owner.

Tools like Klout allow you to measure influencer scores to determine the best ones to pursue in your field. While you shouldn’t take such scores by their face value, they offer a good place to start your identification and outreach process.

Forming a relationship with a good influencer could be the best business move you ever make.

Conclusion

Social media should be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Chances are, you’re already spending hours of your time researching and crafting awesome content. All of your hard work deserves to get as much attention as possible.

Tweaking your social media presence with a purpose is the key to effectively distributing your content and increasing the reach of your brand messaging.

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Jordan Kasteler

is a freelance marketing consultant, entrepreneur. Passionately innovating status quo. He has a history of entrepreneurship co-founding and serving positions in such companies as BlueGlass Interactive, an Internet marketing agency and SteelCast, a tech incubator housing several other self-started companies. His work experience ranges from in-house SEO at Overstock.com, marketing strategy at PETA, and to agency-level SEO. Jordan is also an international conference speaker, blogger, and book author of

A to Z: Social Media Marketing

.

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