Hegemony (from Wikipedia): is a concept that has been used to describe and explain the dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or hegemon acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

–

So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an (more…)

• social traffic
• 19 Comments

If you weren’t already aware, Alexa just instituted an update to their rankings – with pretty dramatic changes for many websites out there.

A case in point: My blog’s 3 month ranking had been 70,655  (still captured at Mark Wielgus’ Top 100 blog rankings)  – it’s now 157,638.

How an update can revise your website position by 80,000 positions is beyond me.

But that’s not the end of the goodness in store.

Mark’s 45n5 website has gone from 27,961 to  89,002 (a difference of 61,000 places)

The blogosphere’s most recognized ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s rating has been revised from 3,797  to 12,917 .

Which makes you wonder (more…)

• web analytics
• 7 Comments

Starting this week, I’m kicking off a series of answers to readers questions which will appear every Monday (hence…the “Monday Question”).

Here’s this weeks question: “I’m a new Internet Marketer, which Internet Marketing product do you suggest I start promoting as an affiliate”

My answer: You should pick the area in which you have the greatest affinity.

Note that the most successful Internet Marketers will brand themself in a specific manner, with one identity, for example, you might have:

• Joel “AdSense” Comm
• Mike “Viral Marketing” Filsaime
• Chris “Super Affiliate” McNeeley
• John Carlton “The Marketing Rebel”
• Michel Fortin “The Copywriting Doctor”
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse
• Gary Ambrose “Viral Listbuilder”

You hardly come across someone who brands themself as a adsense/PPC/eBay/super affiliate/seo/product creator for a reason. You lose credibility because most will not believe you can master so many specializations just a couple of months into the industry.

You might have a few (more…)

• Internet Marketing
• 5 Comments

On some level, all of us crave some form of recognition, and awards and prizes confer a degree of recognition. Even though you might get some plastic trophy covered with gold paint, or maybe a dinky award graphic in GIF format, it’s not so much the trophy itself, but the symbolic value of the prize.

So here comes the Blogger’s Choice Awards.

By a process of peer voting, bloggers stand to receive recognition by their peers and display badges on their blogs.

And yes, expect to see bloggers nominate themselves (and likely that will be the only vote many of them will get.)

Still, any exposure is better than none.

Looking at the current rankings is quite revealing:

Leading the “Best Blogs About Blogging” category, we have:

Notables like ProBlogger Darren Rowse, Lorelle, and I’m not familiar with bloggingbasics101.com (PR5, Alexa 821,000), so I’ll be check it out.

Leaping ahead of the “Best Blog About Blogging” bloggers, we have the celebrity bloggers:

With 4,865 votes, Rosie O’Donnell is clearly ahead of mainstream bloggers and other celebrity bloggers.

The fact is that if you want to do well in blogging (or in any area of Internet Marketing for that matter), you will need to (more…)

• blogging
• 4 Comments

Newer Internet Marketers continue to be confounded, bewildered and frustrated by RSS.

Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.

But what does it all mean?

And is it a new technology.

Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.

RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.

While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.

The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.

Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.

Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.

My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.

Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.

If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining (more…)

• blogging
• 10 Comments

Since it’s launch, Elite Retreat has evoked a firestorm of debate among online marketers.

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that (more…)

• Internet Marketing events
• 11 Comments