Virante’s Software List Grows Again

I am proud to announce today the launch of AuthorRank Pro, the first and only tool that allows you to track your AuthorRank, AuthorTrust and other metrics over time. The tool also helps you find great authors for your own site and great opportunities for writing on other sites. But what I am most proud of is the growing corpus of great software owned and operated by Virante. Remove’em: We’ve removed over 1,000,000 bad backlinks from the web as the most comprehensive tool for penalty recovery online. nTopic: Statistically proven to increase organic traffic when recommended language is applied across your site. Penguin Analysis: The Machine Learned Penguin Risk Detector. Know just how vulnerable you are to the next Penguin update! AuthorRank Pro: The...

Strong Correlation between Facebook Likes and PageRank

First, let me say that everyone should take this study with a huge grain of salt. While I believe the data is intriguing, it does not implicate anything specifically. So, here goes. I have long guffawed at the social graph and, in particular, it’s relationship to search engine optimization. I am quick to argue about anything that would imply that Google search results are meaningfully influenced by social activities. One of my most common points is that in the majority of open social websites, the social graph is closely patterned by the link graph. Take Digg for example. If you submit a story on Digg, it gets a link from your profile. If someone votes on that story, it receives a link from their vote history page. As more and more votes are tallied, more...

Once Again, it is about the links, not the tweets…

SEOMoz has posted another piece of anecdotal evidence linking tweets to rankings that must be taken with a grain of salt. I hate to continue to harp on this issue because I am still a big fan of SEOMoz, but the reality is that a tweet generating links is not a social signal. The issue in question was that smashingmagazine.com tweeted out a recommendation for SEOMoz’s excellent beginner’s guide to SEO. I highly recommend you check it out. After the tweet, their guide shot to the front page for the keyword “Beginner’s Guide”. Unfortunately, it is far too easy to jump to the conclusion that the retweets and social weight of smashing magazine’s twitter profile were responsible for the jump. What is the more likely culprit? A...

Using Real-Time Analytics to Enhance Viral Campaigns

One of the greatest shortcomings of most analytics software is that it is non real time. With Google Analytics, you can easily expect to wait 18 to 24 hours for data to begin to pull in from the previous day. Most server-side analytics runs daily, processing the archived logs of the previous 24 hours. However, when performing a social media / viral marketing campaign, it is imperative that you watch your traffic sources closely so that you can extend the legs of your viral campaign. There are a handful of real-time analytics softwares available on the web including Chartbeat and Visistat, for our purposes here we are going to use Clicky, the real time analytics software used by Virante when running viral campaigns. Giving Your Campaign Legs via Forums One of the...

The Virgin’s Guide to Viral Marketing

Since its public boom in 1996, the Internet and social media has mirrored human development in one important manner: we’re now in the middle of the awkward, hormone-ridden age of middle school. As sites like Digg, Propeller, and Reddit begin to blossom from niche political communities and into girls sought after by acne-ridden social media marketers such as ourselves, we must keep a few things in mind.             Like middle school, there will always be the “jock” marketers with epic mustaches always getting laid first and bullying you around. If you find yourself to be one of these 13 year olds admiring the upper lip fur of sites such as Cracked, College Humor, the Huffington Post, or the Onion as you stare at the social networks beauties from...

The Tedious but Effective Way to Use Digg “Recommended”

The Digg “Recommended” engine has changed the effectiveness of submissions on Digg quite substantially. However, there are certainly ways that you can take advantage of this measurement to your own good. First, what exactly do we want to do? We want to find people who… Vote on stories that are like the content we are trying to promote Vote on stories that are still in the Upcoming section Vote on stories regularly So, let’s go to work finding exactly those types of people. Let’s assume that you are promoting health products, so your target would be the /health topic. Point your browser to http://digg.com/all/health/upcoming and click on “Most Diggs”. Click into the comments of each story (at least 5), and then into...