What Google can learn from Buddhism

Buddhist Love

Having been brought up in a very Catholic / Roman Catholic surrounding being Italian and all I initially found it very difficult to understand how other cultures / religions could fit into society. In fact I never understood how people (non Italians) could do things other than:

• Watch the Pope give sermons at the Vatican
• Support Ferrari
• Eat Pasta

As an Italian catholic boy that's what I was lead to believe was the essence of living.

As i started growing up I started becoming interested in more and more of life's GREAT cultures and religions and started realising that there was more to life then being Italian... This brings me to my story for the day, "What Google can learn from Buddhism". To be more specific what Google and their linking algorithm's can learn from the Buddhist way of life...

The Yin and Yang of Love

The Way of Love and Affection

(This is an extract from Humanistic Buddhism, a Blueprint for Life)

 "In terms of marriage, the marriage of man and woman is the elevation, perfection, and unity of love. However, love is not a one-way street; love means that people should try to understand one another and to take the love they feel for a person and broaden it to include all sentient beings..." furthermore it states, "Love is reciprocal. True love means helping and blessing the beloved. Love is not owning, but rather offering. Small love means loving that which is related to oneself; great love means loving that which is related to others. Love others as thyself; lead thyself by following others".

What can Buddhism teach Google?

Well, for those who are newcomers to SEO, companies/websites that would like to rank well in search engines rely heavily on something called a link building. For those who want to read more on this, check out SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011.

Back when SEO was still all about on page optimisation and sharing links with other people, Google relied heavily on something called "Reciprocal link building". Things changed, and over time Google realised that people were using this method of linking to boost their rankings. Quite easily. The method people used was to build a relationship with another website owner. Tell them they loved their site added a link to their website and asked the website owner if they would return the favour.

This is a mutual agreement and something I would refer to as link love. I love your site, you love my site, let's link up.

Google thought better of this and decided that this was way too easy for people to cheat the system and then told everyone that reciprocal links no longer worked. They were crap and that everyone had to now go an get one way links if they wanted to rank well.

The problem with one way links

With this great update that Google brought upon the SEO world along with it came SPAM. Web spam of a form that not even Google predicted would happen.

• Massive link networks started popping up
• Social media sites were spammed into oblivion to the point that some of the BIG social media, bookmarking sites are only used for link spam these days
• PR sites were spammed beyond belief, some of the PR sites i worked with were recieving on average 2000 PR articles an hour (for links)
• Big corporates started realising that their business models could change and began selling links on their sites for REDICULOUS amounts (Ask news24.com what is costs for a banner on the home page). In fact better yet, ask Forbes.com what it costs for a link in the footer of their site.
• Small SEO companies offering link building services popped up quicker than Jamie Oliver could could a plate a pasta.
• Every company on the WEB started hiring link building companies to buy 1 way links

This lead to such a massive increase in web SPAM, rubbish sites ranking for irrelevant terms, and worst of all a REALLY REALLY bad user experience on Google.

Ultimately this lead to the Google PANDA & PENGUIN updates! This I believe all could have been prevented with SOME RECIPROCAL LOVE!

Conclusion

Google, read this, read the passage that the Buddhists so brilliant put forward. Love is reciprocal, love is not a one way street. As a webmaster of many many sites, we ALL know that irrelevant links to irrelevant sites is bad not only for SEO but for user experience. Myself as a webmaster would never link to someones sites if it wasn't relevant to my readers and my viewers.

If someone links to me and I link back to him, that's reciprocal love and a mutual agreement that says, "Your site is great man, thank you for linking to me". That is good for EVERYONE.

Yes, filter out the SPAM. Yes filter out the irrelevant content. Yes drop all the crappy sites out there.
BUT, bring back reciprocal link love with a more advanced algorithm, you have all those engineers, maybe you should look at hiring some monks...

Adobe Creative Cloud - Adobe Now On the Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud

So in a very exciting move it looks like Adobe has decided to hit the CLOUD. Cloud based computing has recently taken the world by storm and it appears as though more and more businesses are starting to move not only their internal it infrastructures onto the cloud but businesses are moving entire product solutions and offering onto the cloud.

The $75 per month Creative Cloud offering (or $50 per month with an annual membership), serves up all the CS6 applications as well as Adobe Muse and Edge Preview, two new HTML5 products.

Originally introduced last year the subscription service not only lets you download and install the Adobe desktop applications to your PC, but it also includes connectivity to Adobe Touch apps and provides 20GB of cloud-based storage so you can access your files from any web browser, and view, synchronize, and share your files across multiple computing devices (e.g., tablet and desktop PCs).

Existing users of Adobe suite products such as CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5 are being offered a discounted introductory price of $30 per month and there’s also a free membership with only 2GB of storage space that lets you synchronize and share files across devices, and includes 30-day free trials of all the desktop applications included in the paid membership.

It's a bold move and a great one, but what about us poor AFRICANS? Once again we get left in the dark with crappy bandwidth offerings and slow internet speeds. TELKOM SAVE US!

Anyway, it's a great solution, I'm pretty sure all businesses are going to start going this route soon.

Link Building for Google.co.za Guide - Part 1

I think I've been working in this industry for too long. When I first started reading BLOGS and doing my research on SEO and how to best optimise your site for Google (in fact my very first search terms was something on the lines of "how to get website visitors to my blogger blog) I read an article that said something on the lines of .... "you know you've been working in SEO for too long when Google updates have made a full 360 degree turn and come back to the point that you started learning about SEO..."

WELL, I'm kinda sad, but happy to say that I think I'm there.

Link Building circle of life

1. Always have a well balanced link strategy (according to every guy who does whitehat seo), this way you'll never have a problem
2. 2008, Competition heats up, people start sharing links with each other (reciprocal links become the thing)
3. 2009, reciprocal links no longer play a big role (Google update)
4. 2009, everyone starts building links using BLOG comments, WORDPRESS and BLOGGER become the biggest sites on the web because of this
6. Directories the biggest thing since sliced cheese.
7. Google slaps directories accepting money from submissions. Probably slapped all directories.
8. 2010 Wordpress and Blogger add "nofollows" to their BLOG comments
9. Social bookmark links, FREE one way links, FREE and easy!!!
10. Google stops relying so heavily on these links unless they actually have a bit of weight behind them
11. Panic stations nobody knows where to get links, so they start paying for them. Indian companies offering free links
12. In fact these companies get so clever they start getting people to pay for subscriptions and you can get as many one way links as you like. FOR FREE. See Build my rank closes it's doors.
13. CIRCLE OF LIFE - if only we had stuck to the well balanced link building strategy, none of these would have affected us and we'd be ok.

Google over the couple of months have released more updates to their search algorithms than God has sheep and it's about time that the experts, especially in South Africa start sharing this information with those out there who are starting off with their first BLOG, website, whatever it is you're trying to do in an attempt to gain traffic for your website.

I am going to skip all the boring juicy bits about, meta data and on-page optimisation, I'll go back to that at some point but let's be honest folks.... RANKING is alot about links. The problem is if you follow the trends and reply to every link builder from New Delhi that says he can get you links for $15 a pop, you're going to end up regretting it at some point..... WELL, this is not to say that these links don't work, but there's a very methodical process to link building that you should follow.

A very famous and well known "link Jesus" actually follows a process of link building. A process that works DARN well or he wouldn't be the guest speaker at every conference on link building.

What's my current issue

I'm pissed off that's it's taken Google so long to figure out who the hell is buying shit quality links and who is not. It's pathetic and it should not be allowed. I do alot of work in the insurance industry and I can tell you now that sites like Carinsurance.co.za should not be ranking 1st for "car insurance". Cheapcarinsurance.co.za should not be ranking 5th for car insurance and so on. Google team, if you want a list let me know...

So in an attempt to share some of my knowledge and input I would like to point out what I believe is a good process or starting point for link building...

This is the end of part 1... stay tuned for more!

Part two...

Starting Your Link Building Process...

Google Ranking Fluctuations

Not sure if anyone else is noticing this but the rankings in Google for some highly competitive keywords are changing on a daily basis and I'm not sure why...

I know that Google Panda and the new updates were meant to bring more relevant data to Google and users searching but I've noticed some big keywords moving from positions: 14th to 6th within 6 days of each other and then moving back again.

Other things I've noticed as well is that Google maps is popping in and out of the South African listings. There is absolutely no stability in the Google.co.za rankings nor their search results and to be honest is freaking annoying.

Anybody got some insights here?