Ü Oughta Know is a combination of digital crib notes and marketers’ cheat sheet, bringing you important – and occasionally weird — stories and trends from digital marketing news.
Each week our hope is to help keep your knowledge sharp while providing a delightful craving of classic Alanis Morissette. Here’s what you oughta know:
PR pros get a little link love
Good news for PR last week: Google’s patent for what may be the Panda algorithm revealed a really important thing and it is this:“An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.”Huh? I know what you’re thinking: Was that English? Yes it’s pretty brain-numbingly complicated out of the box. Fortunately digital marketing pro Christopher Penn – who clearly has a better attention span than I do – turned this into plain English. The simple explanation is that even if there isn’t an actual link to your site, each mention of your brand, company, website or product in a story is an “implied link” – or a “non-linking citation” – and that affects your SEO and everything your SEO affects, including your position in SERPs. Says Penn. “In short, PR is SEO (or part of it).” PR professionals rejoice. That means all of your painstaking work to get your brand mentioned makes a difference – even if you didn’t get an actual hyperlink (now known as an explicit link). How awesome is that? If you’re doing quality content and are providing something of value to your audience you will fare better (finally) than those using keyword stuffing, link-bait, algorithm manipulation, and free puppies. Scratch that. Free puppies will probably still work. This new information is, as Simon Penson says on the Moz Blog (and I quote him because I couldn’t write it any different without plagiarizing), “black-and-white evidence that Google is looking at mentions as a measure of authority.”