Author Archives → Trevin

Curation > Creation

If you write something really wonderful online and it becomes popular, you are supposed to get a nice spike in traffic and all of the links, shares, emails and subscribers that go along with a high-quality piece that you have created. More or less, that’s how can build a following online.

For a long time, the Internet has given great power to the creators. You could be rewarded in a big way for creating something that people wanted. A nobody could become somebody with just a few blog posts.

That can still happen, but we’re entering an age where creators have less power than ever. The popular people online who are receiving all the acclaim aren’t creators anymore; they are the curators.

With sites like Upworthy, ViralNova and the like raking in piles of cash by “hacking” content curation, more and more people are shifting their focus towards republishing content with a clickbait title designed to optimize the amount of social traffic they are bringing in. The only real creation they are doing involves writing a few descriptive paragraphs. You see dozens of sites with engineered curation models coming across your Facebook feed all of the time.

There will always be leeches like this out there and, to be honest, I’m a bit envious of Upworthy’s success and business model. They found a weakness in Facebook’s algorithm and are exploiting it with great success. It’s genius.

But what’s frustrating is seeing bigger publications start to turn down the same path as the curators like Upworthy.

Take The Atlantic, for instance. This post on Facebook’s ability to determine if you are in a romantic relationship was at the top of Hacker News for much of today. It’s not an original piece by The Atlantic and all the interesting content comes from Facebook’s blog.

The only difference between the two? The title.

Facebook went with “The Formation Of Love.”

The Atlantic’s read “When You Fall In Love, This Is What Facebook Sees.”

Currently, Facebook’s original post with original research has 361 shares. The Atlantic’s reblog with a sexy title has over 27,000.

I’ve always said that the best skill to hone if you want to excel at marketing is your writing. Creating things people want is one of the most evergreen skills that you can have.

It turns out that really isn’t true anymore. The page views are going to the curators instead of the creators. And with the page views comes the money, the power and the glory.

The best writers really are the craftiest thieves.

SEO Maxim: Educate the ignorant

What we don’t know scares us. The dark. The bottom of the ocean. The future. SEO.

Part of the reason SEO has a poor reputation is from the prevalence of low-quality providers parading around like experts. But I think the biggest reason for our reputation issues is a lot less complex: people don’t understand SEO.

We don’t trust car mechanics because we don’t understand what they are working on. We’re not sure how time-consuming it is to rebuild a brake line or know how much a new brake rotor should cost.

We don’t trust financial advisors because retirement plans can be insanely complex and we don’t know how to tell if Stock A is more valuable over the long-term than Stock B.

People don’t trust SEOs because they don’t understand how Google works. They aren’t sure what ranking on page 1 means and have no idea about canonical domains, exact match anchor text or link networks.

Until people better grasp how search works, every SEO should also view themselves as an educator and teach people about the importance of search, data-driven marketing and attributable results. The more people understand about SEO, the more valuable we become.

You might have signed up to just “do” SEO but you also need to be a teacher to the less informed.

SEO Maxim: Content is your greatest asset

Your most valuable online asset is your website’s content. Links will get taken down, followers will unfollow and design will go out of fashion…but your content has staying power. Content is what actually gets people to convert into customers once they arrive on your site. Content is the engine that drives traffic, links and shares. Content is what defines you and your brand online.

Don’t take shortcuts or neglect your content. It’s easy to get caught up in other metrics and marketing efforts, but nothing can rival the long term value of your content.

The decay and fall of Google for search

Note: This is satire

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using Google as a way to search the web in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more self-serving platform, and if you’re doing a lot of searching then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, Google used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, trusted expert to find the answers to your queries. It’s not that way any more.

Here’s an example of a search results page that I recently received:

image via seobook.com

If you ignore the bad spacing and read the parts that I bolded, Google offered me a spam results page full of Google-owned properties. That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines. Moreover, we’ve been seeing more and more reports of “SERP crowding” that are really “GOOG hitting the quarterly numbers” or worse, “we’ll milk every dime out of you until we control the entire online ecosystem.”

Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the search space: a new company starts out as “Don’t be evil.” Then more and more changes pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate search results remain. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are creating “private search engines” and writing articles about “Google taking over the world.”

So stick a fork in it: Google is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend doing a Google search query unless you are willing to vouch for their shady advertising practices or know Matt Cutts personally. I wouldn’t recommend relying on Google, Google+, YouTube or Blogspot as a strategy for finding information online.

Being from Punxsutawney

Groundhog Day

“What’s your name and where are you from?”

They are two of the most boring questions, but they are how most conversations start when meeting people for the first time. While the answers are usually boring, my first few seconds with somebody new is usually much more entertaining.

“My name is Trevin and I’m from Punxsutawney.”

A lot different from the usual “Steve from Columbus, Ohio” that most people hear, a polite introduction with me usually ends up in a full-fledged Q and A session.

When I was younger I didn’t like my name and I didn’t like where I was from. I was a kid with a weird name nobody could pronounce from that weird town with the groundhog.

I’ve grown to love and embrace my name. People might mispronounce it, but nobody forgets it. Trevin is an awesome name.

My hometown was a different story. Like most kids who grow up in Punxsutawney (or any small town), I always thought that any place would be preferable over Punxsutawney. It was small, it was sleepy and once a year every February the entire world reported what Punxsutawney Phil said while thinking silently that we were all insane, Groundhog-worshiping folk. Being from Punxsutawney automatically made you a freak show to a lot of people from neighboring areas.

We were all famous because we were…strange.

At some point when I was in high school, though, my feelings towards my hometown started to change. It didn’t happen all at once, but the more I saw of the outside world the more I appreciated where I came from.

I remember going to track meets in Pittsburgh and getting strange looks from people we were running against. I suppose people were surprised to see real, living human beings from Punxsutawney out in the wild. In a strange way, though, I loved getting that extra look from people we were competing against. We used it as motivation. Yes, Punxsutawney is a real place. Yes, we live there. Yes, we are going to beat you to the finish line.

The first time I really “got out” of Punxsutawney was when I left headed for college in central Indiana. I was shocked initially to learn that the things everybody hated about Punxsutawney — gossip, close-mindedness, boredom — weren’t confined to the southeast corner of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania.

In fact, all the other places I’ve called home since high school have all been pretty similar. They have mostly good people and some bad people. Every town has gossip and drama. Every town has construction.

The difference, I’ve learned, was that Punxsutawney has an identity. It might be a weird one and we might not have liked it, but there was always something that united everybody who lived there. We all had one thing in common — Groundhog’s Day — and we all knew it. The population of the town might continue to shrink and our local economy might worsen but no matter what we still have Groundhog’s Day and we’re still going to get our moment in the spotlight whether we like it or not. If you have ever rooted for a terrible sports team for an extended period, the bond you feel with your fellow fans is a lot like the bond you feel with other people from Punxsutawney. No matter how bad last season was, THIS YEAR IS GOING TO BE OUR YEAR.

Plus, being from Punxsutawney has some other perks:

  • We never had school on February 2nd.
  • Tourism money
  • Laska’s Pizza
  • Sega debuted Sonic the Hedgehog  3 on Groundhog Day when I was five years old.


Other than being around to visit my folks, I haven’t lived in Punxsutawney since summers during my college days. While moving back doesn’t appeal to me, I appreciate it a lot more than I ever have.

I used to think of Punxsutawney as a strange, isolated place famous for a groundhog. I still think all of those things are true but now I think of it as a strange, isolated place famous for a Groundhog that has blessed me with wonderful friends and experiences that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Punxsutawney gave me both pride and a chip on my shoulder.

Nowadays when I meet people, I don’t mind at all talking about Gobbler’s Knob, Phil and Phyllis or weather prognostication. Most of the time, I can even recite some interesting Groundhog Day facts.

It took me 25 years to realize it, but being from Punxsutawney is more blessing than curse.

SEO Maxim: SEO will never die

SEO is not about keywords or guest blogging or links or Google or encrypted search or landing pages or conversions or Scrapebox or titles or any one thing at all.

SEO is about using search to grow businesses online.

Tactics die, SEO evolves.

SEO Maxim: Don’t believe everything you read

Every single day, there are 1000s of new pages written about SEO. People reveal hidden strategies guaranteed to get you to the top of the SERPs. Matt Cutts will tell you how to do well in Google. Anonymous tipsters will reveal their best link tactics. Industry leaders will push their content marketing agendas.

The challenge for SEOs isn’t finding content to read…it’s deciding what to believe.

True SEOs don’t rely on the written word of anybody, however. Just because a case study says that Google +1’s helped a site drastically increase search traffic doesn’t mean it is universally true and doesn’t mean it will work for your website. Just because a popular post suggests creating a certain type of content doesn’t mean you’ll see spectacular results following that same strategy.

Most content written by SEOs has an agenda. They want to attract links. They want you to subscribe to their newsletter. They want you to buy their software.

It’s important for SEOs to keep up with what people are sharing in the industry so you can use it to create new hypotheses that you can test for yourself.

Don’t mistake the value of one case study or one man’s opinion for hard data or experience.

Paying For PageRank

Earlier today, Matt Cutts published his magnum opus on guest blogging and why it is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It’s the same sad song that we’ve seen before with directory submissions, article submissions, blog commenting, etc. I’ve seen people “selling” guest blog posts on popular UGC sites and am getting tired of spammy requests from overseas vendors wanting to submit a unique article to my site. Guest blogging had a nice run but I agree with Matt’s broader point that it’s time to put it to rest.

So where do SEOs go from here? If you read between the lines at all, you can tell that Google is going to be taking some sort of action against networked guest blog posting in the near future. I’ve written before about the problem with just writing great content and hoping for links to start showing up and money to come trickling in. The works in the perfect world, not the real world.

The long term problem that will keep Google and SEOs at odds with each is that something of value is always going to be exchanged for links and promotion online. One of Matt’s biggest issues with guest blogging is that people are “paying for PageRank” by exchanging money or content for backlinks.

This is a complex issue. I’m sure Google is aware of this, but money is exchanging hands behind-the-scenes like crazy when it comes to online publications. Today’s journalists aren’t schooled in ethics like they used to be and people don’t mind taking handouts from brands to write about them. Microsoft, for example, has been paying people on YouTube to talk about the Xbox One. How much different is that from accepting 500 words for your blog in exchange for a link? Is one form of marketing worse than the other?

No matter what type of link/press you are acquiring online, you are paying for it one way or another. If content is a currency that constitutes “paying for PageRank,” are images, graphics, time, money, talent, et. al also in violation?

If Google really wants to stand tall against “paying for PageRank,” guest posting should probably be the least of their worries, but I can’t say I’m sad to see it go.

Exclusive look at the next generation of Google Analytics

I added rel=nofollow to all of my infographics the other day and unlocked exclusive access to a new version of Google Analytics. I’m not supposed to tell anybody about it, but I managed to get a quick screenshot before my testing period expired. Check it out below:

google-analytics-in-2016