For those of use who watch the web search industry develop, the recent transformations within it have created excitement to say the least. Everything has changed. Or at least that is the current buzz. Major changes have been made to how Google does search over the last year. That is true. Search is always evolving, so do not panic and simply inform yourself about what is happening to the information process that bloggers count on to fairly index and refer to their blogs.
I remember being heavily penalized by a subject area reviewer volunteering for DMOZ for having a page on one of my earliest websites that had a list of books of particular interest to Late Boomers that linked to Amazon.com. The editor trashed the whole site because of the page. I was livid. I saw many other sites that were far more commercial than mine do well. Links were where it was at way back in the early adolescence of the internet. If you didn’t link properly, properly according to whom I never did figure out, your site could nose dive. Even though it was a directory and not a search engine with which I had trouble, that is when I started paying some attention to what came to be known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Google rose to prominence and finally dominated the market a couple of years into the new millennium. Checking your page rank on Google became as common place for individuals with web pages as checking the number of hits your website received. Almost immediately search engine “professionals” emerged from the primordial info slime and the 21st Century’s first group of snake oil sales persons integrated themselves in amongst the few real SEO professionals. Lots of people who pass themselves off as experts are con artists, but most SEO sellers are just well-intentioned people who do not know as much as they think they know. Real SEO requires staying on top of what are essentially trade secrets – the proprietary algorithms that are used to fuel web search.
What are called ink farms and content farms were some of the major problems for the search engine companies. Link farming attempted to create higher rank or search page result listings by trading or selling links that would increase a site’s supposed credibility or authority as at one time incoming links were treated as valid reflections of the authority and influence of the site. Linking just to increase links inflated the number of links while decreasing the worth of a link.
Search engines, such as Google, began to do battle with link farms mid-decade into the ’00s. Link farming slowly withered as search engines began to cut the weight links had in search, and content was declared king. Then sites had to have content or articles or blog posts to rank highly in search results. Content rather than links then began to be farmed, or more accurately ranched, as major content farms used two main strategies to produce content for sites that would fake out the search engines.
One type of farm hired individuals to write lots of stuff for very little money, so the quality was not that great, but the quantity of the content was enough to feed lots of sites, many actually used regurgitated content. The content farms then sold to sites so that the sites would have lots of fiber for the search engines to digest.
Another type of farm hired people to write posts and articles that seeded keywords at just the right frequency in pieces that did not even have to make much sense. This was done because keywords are used in meta tags and should be reflected in the content that the meta-tags describe. This was the juncture at which content became confused with key words.
Now we seems to be entering a new focus phase for search engines. I like to think that while content is still king but the but the power behind the thrown has been recognized and is queen in all of her contextual glory. It is good to be the queen, in the Mary Englebreit sense of the word., because all those cherries and patterns, color, attitude and relationships are what matter in the process of getting the searcher connected to the information he or she wants. Social authority is the new buzzword for search. To rank well in the brave new world of search you need have quality content and that translates, according to the word on the street, to often updated, non-keyword seeded content that is accessed by important people.
The “important people” aspect of the new search is reflects the increasing awareness of the heavy hitting nature of social media. The recommendations of people you trust, as measured by your info stream with them more than whether you actually know them or not, is the “new” and secret ingredient of Google search.
Some folks, such as the women who started the BlogHer network, Lisa, Elise, and Jory, were paying attention long before Google began to pay attention and these savvy women had launched conferences and networks based on a feminized understanding of information in the digital age. Sites that foreshadowed the coming changes, which some people are only now “getting,” and all the concomitant changes to search that have resulted reflect what I like to think of as the feminization of the internet. (I am writing more about this topic this week in what may or may not become a series of articles.)
To restate this succinctly, what has happened recently with Google stems from search engine companies trying to outmaneuver scam artists whose sole purpose in life is to get you to look at stuff in which you have absolutely no interest. Deceptive ads, promises of free prizes, and manipulation of search engine results are three of the most common ways such “marketers” do this. This practice gives real marketers who work to deliver a good product a bad name, but be that as it may, everyone does want your attention on the web. So while some of us may be expressing concern as we mull over the whole Google privacy hoo-haa, at the very same time, some things Google is doing are very much in our interest as women, household managers, content creators, and savvy private and public consumers of information. Google appears to be using relationships and networks (of both creators and consumers) in the algorithms that determine what the authority is of individual chunks of information on the web. And women are the mavens of communication and relationship networks.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that build most our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
Re-post (from BlogHer.com) of My Day 3 Nablopomo Post
I’ve been having a Dickens of a time… (I just love that phrase! Pardon me while I digress: The phrase always conjures up an image for me of a little match girl wandering the streets of a cold harsh reality in a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens — in this case imagine a little match girl wearing an insubstancial “BlogHer Blue” cape and a tattered hat of the same color that she has adorned with a Nablopomo imprinted ribbon. She is wandering in and out of tabs and pages posts looking for something she knows it somewhere close by but which she cannot find….)
Any way, I’ve been having a Dickens of a time trying to navigate the new Nablopomo section of BlogHer. I was having difficulty navigating this new feature on BlogHer not because anything is wrong with how the site and section are set up, but rather because I am accustomed to the old Nablopomo site that Melissa ran for a good long while before coming over to BlogHer (which I think is a very good move, by the by and by…) and once I have a tree structure (threw that in for you techy types reading this), a taxonomy, or a procedure created in my central nervous system I have a devil of a time restructuring it.
I started to post this procedure on how to get to the daily posts for Nablopomo as a comment after Victoria’s comment to my comment on Victoria’s post when I realized it was far more than a comment. So if you have come here from the comment on the comment on the post… you can skip down to the procedure. It is clearly listed further down in this post.
But to get to the point beyond my digressions, and I do love a good digression, I figured out how to read non-featured Nablopomo posts by reg. old bloghers who choose to share beyond the point of just listing themselves on a blogroll. Now there isn’t a thing in the world wrong with reading the featured, hot, or syndicated posts that are the easiest posts to find. But BlogHer is huge both in size and importance, and it isn’t easy to find all the best stuff that is available here because we all have different ideas about what makes up the “best” of anything.
And, pardon another digression, but… I talked to a blogher at BlogHer ’11 in San Diego who considers herself to be a blogher and not just a blogger (just like I consider myself) who never posts anything on the actual BlogHer site as a member post! Can you imagine not taking full advantage of this great network of amazing women (and men) writers and everything they all have to offer? She went so far as to say she didn’t even come to the site to read stuff here very often. Can you imagine? Poor thing.
I thought of her when my inner Little Match Girl was wandering around the site trying to figure out how everything worked for Nablopomo this month. I understand that something as big and complex and important as a Women’s Network can be a bit daunnting at first. As an information addict I just dig in and slither around in all the tantalizing bits and bytes of information and experience that are collectively offered to all here for the simple price of reading (taking the time to read is an investment like any other…at thus has a cost, but I digress AGAIN) here.
Anyway, I’ve been on BlogHer since at least 2006 and I still get lost! So I thought I would write this post about how to use some of the features of this National Blog Posting Month celebration that is welcoming the monthly writing challenge, that is Nablopomo, to BlogHer this month. And Melissa m’dear I hope I am not stepping on your toes by writing this as you have done a great job explaining the intricacies of all this on your post that I have bookmarked and still refer to several times a day. It is just that no one person can write all the instructions needed in the world and when I find myself needing to figure out a procedure I like to share it if there is a good chance someone else might find it to be useful.
Last evening I figured out how to get to the section where I can subscribe to various types of Nablopomo feeds. So I decided to whip up this little post that is my Nablopomo post for the day that spells out a step by step procedure on how to get to where I wanted to be on this site in this section, that might also be where others want to be but not know how to get there. So you can click on the above link or follow this procedure:
HOW TO GET TO THE COLLECTIVE DAILY NABLOPOMO POSTS
of people participating in BlogHer’s National Blog Posting Month
- Once you are on the BlogHer site go to the BLOGGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA TAB at the top of the page,
- then to the LEFT SIDEBAR WIDGET BOX that is labeled CATEGORIES
- then click on the NABLOPOMO LINK under the CATEGORIES header,
- then in the center column under the prompt of the day where it says “What’s Hot,” just look to the right on the same line and click the more posts > link.
- at the top of the center column on this page you are offered options for RSS feeds to which you may subscribe, with whatever feedreader you choose to use, by clicking on the icon next to the feed you want, or you may click on the word itself and be taken to the posts on BlogHer rather than through the feedreader. The options are: Editors’ Picks| Member Posts| Network Posts| All Posts and I’m not sure what all the differences are between these options, maybe Melissa has covered this and I missed it, but I don’t get anything under Network Posts, and I’m not immediately clear on what the difference between the “Member Posts” and “All Posts” feeds are, maybe someone can share their knowledge.
But I was pleased as punch to find out that I can shovel all the member posts into my Feedly feed or read them on the BlogHer site.
Maybe this is way too much information, but if you are still reading, then you must have had an experience somewhat related to mine in trying to find something.
I find out more and more things about BlogHer all the time and I’ve been using this site for over 5 years! I figure there are others who might also have missed a nifty feature, so I like to share my discoveries and Nablopomo helped me figure out so much about what it takes to be a regularly schedule blogger that I really wanted to share this in particular.
Thanks to BlogHer and Melissa!
Booming BlogHer Batman!
Hey Folks,
I was at #BlogHer11 in Sandiego (yes, this is a hashtag to use on Twitter) from August 4 thru 6 then took a week off to figure out a stay sane plan for the coming semester. No, I have not gone back to school. My husband is taking a sabbatical this semester and will be around the old homestead the rest of this year when he isn’t on short investigatory trips related to his research area. And (shudder) love my daughter though I do, I do not know how I am going to survive her moving back in with us for last last semester of college with her healthy ego that sees no problem asking that her needs be met and her 100 plus pounds of Dogue de Bordeaux buddy.
Before I get too far off course, which I am wont to do, let me clue you in to a great source of information.
BlogHer11 Virtual Conference is accessible via this link. Not all the Birds of a Feather – BOAF – sessions were live blogged. BUT I was at the Boomer BOAF session at the conference and it was great. I attended a Booming session at BlogHer 2008 hosted by Virginia DeBolt but this one topped even that one. It was hosted by Judi Boomer.
She had a hard time getting us to settle down and “begin” the session of introductions to who we were and what we were doing. We were so happy to see other kindred spirits! (Sigh, I cannot use that phrase, kindred spirits, without thinking of my Mom and her absolute devotion to the notion that life was simpler and actually pastoral at the beginning of the last century. At times I admit to suspending my own disbelief and reveling in the just and bucolic world of Anne and Marilla.) At a conference where one could easily be bowled over by Mommy Bloggers, who probably never heard of Anne of Green Gables or The Girl of the Limberlost, it was refreshing to meet people close to my age and the sentiment seemed reciprocal as business cards were ricocheting around the room almost as fast as the banter.
I will be checking out all the blogs of participants in the session (Judi graciously compiled and distributed the contact information for attendees) and creating a link list for BlogHer Boomers (who buy the way are NOT all women!) that are appropriate for this blog to link to. Stay tuned. I will be following up on this with much more information created by neuronal firings when something said at BlogHer makes a difference to a topic I am moved to write about. BlogHer helps my neurons fire.
ASIDE: Gregory Bateson said “information is any difference that makes a difference.” And did you know there is a documentary about this amazing philosopher and seminal (isn’t there a word like ovonal or something) thought connecter.
Hasta,
Nancy/Nerthus/…
BlogHer Business Enterprise Technology Conference
WOW. The 1st BlogHer|bet conference was a whirl wind affair consisting of a Thursday night gathering at Cisco Tele-presence Suites in Santa Clara and Friday at Microsoft in Mountain View for speakers and panel sessions.
A tech conference in Silicon Valley, how novel… well actually it was. Women supporting each other as entrepreneurs, sharing scoops and best practices is not the norm. Absolutely freaking amazing and wonderful! The conference challenged me to think in new ways, to think positively, to think strategically, and to continue to believe in the power of cooperative networks.
While I personally am not a big fan of large corporations, I was pleased to have the opportunity to see what both Cisco and Microsoft had to offer us individually through products and collectively by physically hosting us. It was conference sponsorship that went beyond swag.
The ability to coordinate soundly focused information rich and fun conferences is one of the most important aspects of BlogHer networking for me. As an uprooted academic, intellectual type person, I appreciate the learning environment that has obviously been nurtured and interwoven into the conference experience by the very savvy women who founded and run the successful business of BlogHer: Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins.
The conference was small enough to create a real sense of group cohesiveness. 100 conference attendees and 50 mentors is almost intimate in the vast impersonal business world. And there was a shared purpose that united participants as well; women need to help each other succeed so we can make the world a better place, and we can make money while doing it.
I cannot list all the great people I met right now as I have to finish up an application for grant funding that I found out about at the conference, but I do want to give a special thanks to my mentor, Marnie Webb, co-CEO of Tech Soup Global, the person who patiently listened to my less than polished pitch and gave me useful, concrete and direct feedback while managing to motivate rather than devastate my sensitive ego.