Ground Round Up: Week of March 12, 2007. Cheers!

March 16, 2007 – 6:54 pm

It’s been a tough year but we made – it’s finally St. Patrick’s Day. Can’t wait to drink myself Irish.

The Ground Round Up is designed to be a weekly post to allow me to give thanks to those who have linked/mentioned to my blog, notice those individuals who have helped in my learning of search marketing, and any post that I found interesting/unique over the past week.

First off is a great post over at Bruce Clay by Lisa Barone. The post spoke about linkbaiting on an unsavory subject matter that could potentially be unethical. Specifically, it was a question around Brittany Spears and linkbaiting (for the mental institution). It was a great post and the only thing I found disappointing was the lack of debate. It really seemed one sided – everyone just agreed with the post. Personally, I get a little freaked out when there isn’t heavy debate around ethical issues furthermore when we are discussing the ethics around creating exposure using a celebrity that has continually chosen to advance her career by being whorish.

SEO by the SEA pointed out a great use of viral marketing by none other than Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. It’s actually pretty damned cool… but I couldn’t help from asking myself if they had done the same marketing campaign when I was a kid (I listened to them in middle school and high school) would I have enjoyed it? I think my answer is NO. I would have felt cheap for falling into their marketing trap. Meh… but now that I am older, I love it for its creative and effectiveness.

Search Engine Land wrote about duplicate content. Not a new subject but one that I have had debates with people over and over about. For me it’s a touchy subject and one that I still do not 100% opinion either way. In the post, Jill Whalen makes her case logically but I constantly stuck by this one point - About 3 years ago, a site I was working on www.webradiator.com was kicked out of Google’s index. When we spoke to their organic team (they actually came to our office) we were instructed that the site contained duplicate content and was considered spammy – thus removed from the index. The duplicate content (of course) was purely accidental as we had moved over our site to new URLs and our programmers didn’t properly redirect the old URLs. Now, whether or not the information we gained from Google’s team was true – the scaredity cat mentality over duplicate content and being blacklisted remains.

Marketing Hipster (Cord Silverstein) posted (awhile ago) on Ann Coulter’s grasp of the English language as interpreted by complete A-holes. It’s a funny post – very much worth the read. What Cord points to and I am continually amazing by is the lack of accountability and how completely unapologetic Ann Coulter and her constituents are for the type of language she uses. Furthermore, why do people insist that just because the woman is a loud-mouth bigot that she is in anyway intelligent? I read some of GodLess and you know what? Her points are sophomoric, baseless, lack intellectual depth or critical thinking… but then again, what could you expect some someone who has made living on shouting generalized opinions (hype) with a virginous passion?

Last – SugarRae. Some posts speak for themselves. Read the whole thing (don’t quit half-way through. Read it and digest it b/c it’s a hearty meal with lots of nutrients.

Cheers!