BlackWaterOps

Social Media is making for a lot of pages which Google will never index, or will only index for a short period of time.

Diz explains the difference between using blog farms, and getting good inbound links from sites with authority.

In my house Bing, is the sound of something that is done.  Bing! Time to take the Pizza, laundry, TV Dinner, what ever out, it’s done.  For Microsoft Bing has a lot of growing to do.

Microsoft has unintentionally built the ultimate tool for finding videos of naked people, and even in the strict setting, nudity abounds.

Google’s “Safe” search works pretty well, and even when you search for racy pictures you won’t get them for the most part.

For the purpose of demonstration.  Take a look at “Upskirt”.  In Google Image Search if you search for just this word you get 0 results with safe search on strict.  “The Upskirt” returns the following images.

Nothing that would offend your mother from across the room.

Try the same “The Upskirt” on Bing.com’s Video search…

That’s quite a bit of butt going on there.  and if you hover over the images you get more than just butt.

Microsoft’s Bing will warn you if you put in a “Naughty” word, but if you attach a word it ignores like “the” your query goes through uninterrupted.

Worse you get some pretty raunchy results with out really trying.

Doing a search for Sharks? You see the suggest for “Sharking” (that’s fishing for sharks right?).

So what does Sharking return?  Videos of girls having their tops pulled down. These video have full on nudity in them.

These aren’t even the worst of the results I was able to find.  I opted not to post any thing that would actually return things which might be illegal.  But with the right query, even with safe search on you can find the infamous “2 Girl 1 Cup” video.  All sorts of violent videos, plenty of young likely underage girls on web cams.  And because Microsoft is creating their own “mini” versions of these clips even when YouTube has pulled an offending video the mini video may play. 

And you can’t filter the results with a proxy or firewall with out filtering all of Bing.com.  I’m recommending to schools, that they block Bing.com for the time being because of this. The site actually works better than most “proxy sites” like proxy.org for Unblocking your access to adult content, if you don’t mind that the video is small.  The blazingly loud audio can often be fun if your mouse is in the center of the screen when a NSFW video comes on the screen.

Microsoft may get this right at some point, but until they learn that MySpace, and YouTube aren’t “safe” results, or that the word “tits” anywhere in my search should be blocked, they will have issues.  It seems like they just asked everyone in the office to name 20 dirty words and they filtered those.  There are a LOT of holes in their search filter.  I’ll leave you with some BIG ones.  “torbehighclass”, “kissmyflix” are porn sites, they only have adult results.

Oh, and Christopher Dawson is off his rocker.

Chloe is the glue of BlackWaterOps, or the Grease?  She keeps us stuck together but also ensures we move smoothly.  Chloe is breather of fire, and knitter of things.  It would seem her life revolves around all things warm and wondrous.

Chloe manages the day to day operations of BlackWaterOps, and makes sure that the staff remembers to eat, shower, and get some sunshine from time to time.  She also organizes, arranges, schedules, and serves as Brandon’s personal Mary Poppins.

Brandon has been using SEO for fun and profit for nearly 10 years.  Brandon was an early adopter of blogging and social media.  He was one of the pioneers of Internet Video, and was part of several IPTV start-ups.  Through all of it he continued to make money online through monetizing his content and helping other with monetizing theirs.

In May of 2007 while working at Microsoft, Brandon tested his SEO metal for the first time against other SEO’s.  Jonah Stein created a race to be the Greatest Living American while visiting the Colbert Show.  Brandon quickly rose to the top and beat out 100’s of other SEO’s competing to make themselves, a client, or Steven Colbert the top hit for the term.

Brandon was a voting member on the SMPTE committee to ratify H.264 and VC-1. He was Microsoft’s first and only Windows Media Server MVP/User Evangelist. His background is varied by technology but has always been at the fore front of new media.

Brandon was also a Teacher at Stone Hebrew Academy, and a Director at Kimball Camp YMCA, these positions gave him strong background in education, and story telling.  This has made him a strong speaker, and an excellent presenter.

Charlize Kang brings her international marketing experience to BlackWaterOps. Charlize  is focused on helping clients understand and expand their business in Asia, and helping Asian business expand their business in to the West. She specializes in market research and competitor analysis, strategic entry planning, marketing plan development and implementation. 

She has worked with a number of international companies such as Heineken and most recently worked with Haworth and Meridiani to enter the Hawaii market.  In these roles she was in charge of event planning, target market identification, business development, sales forecasting and budgeting. While completing her MBA (concentrated in Marketing) at Hawaii Pacific University she developing market entry and business plans for clients that were presented to venture capital firms. 

Experience and strengths that Ms. Charlize offers her clients:

• Fluent in Mandarin and Taiwanese, with a working knowledge of Cantonese
• Market research, and business development for Asia market
• Customer profile research, identification and targeting
• Product, and service line analysis
• Competitor identification, analysis and positioning
• Working with clients to develop new products, and services, price distribution, sales force development, and communication strategies.
• Budget planning, plan implementation and evaluation
• Customer relationship management

Diz is the face of BlackWaterOps with a  soft voice, and bright smile she manages our relationship with the online world.  Diz is BlackWaterOps connection to the newest generation of Internet Users, she works to help us understand what the 20 something crowd’s are looking for, and helps us tune our messaging to reach this audience.  Diz also works with our partners and clients to understand what we can do for them.  Taking the complex and making it obtainable for the masses, she uses analogy, and her keen art of storytelling to make our messaging “work”.

BlackWaterOps is proud to have Jake Ludington as our EVP of Strategic Partner Relationships.  Jake brings his years of managing affiliates, affiliate aggregators, ad brokers, and PR Firms to BlackWaterOps.

Jake Ludington helps over 1,000,000 people answer their video and audio questions every month. From detailed tutorials on complicated video editing scenarios to finding useful tools for isolated problems, Jake provides ongoing research on the best methods for making Internet delivered video. A reasonably comprehensive list of Jake’s writing can be found by searching Google for Jake Ludington. Jake continues in the tradition of providing users with useful digital media focused content in his Digital Lifestyle publication, which is available for free subscription here.

Publisher and principle creative force behind Jake Ludington’s MediaBlab.
Reach over 1 million unique reader’s monthly through a combination of Web searches, email, and RSS.
Annual software sales in excess of $1 million
Industry expert on video compression, video editing, and consumer video cameras.
Consultant on live streaming and on demand audio and video delivery.

Google has put less emphasis on “Blog Roll” links.  Links which are the same on every page of your website, linking to another website.  As a result more and more people are looking for other ways to get lots of inbound links.  Links which they control the “Title Text” for, and the exact landing page for.

Several of my clients prior to me starting to work with them engaged in both buying and selling links via LinkExperts.com in order to solve this need, or monetize others need to solve this need.  A well ranking site with hundred thousand pages can easily make an extra $250k a year selling links.  In some cases they can make more than they would have selling actual ads.

Why was this only Prior to working with me?  Because Link buying and selling is In the words of Matt Cutts "Very high-risk behavior.”

Despite what Conductor.com has said in its FAQ:

Every Conductor ad is search-friendly, meaning that it works behind the scenes to positively impact your rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo. The link acts as a signal to search engines, helping strengthen your position as a provider of products or services relevant to the content of the page the link appears on. For example, a site with content about coffee makers, which then links to a manufacturer of coffee makers, helps reinforce and confirm that the manufacturer’s site is indeed about coffee makers. This association is taken into account when search engine users look for providers of coffee makers – the manufacturer’s site is now more likely to appear.

But Matt Cutts of Google has said publicly:

As the head of Google’s webspam team, I would just like to point out that paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google’s quality guidelines, and we do take action on those violations. You can read more about our official policy on paid links here:

These two statements are clearly in opposition to each other. If Google will penalize you for buying or selling, then the ads can’t be “Search-Friendly”. 

BlackWaterOps never engages in link buying and selling.  If we work with a client to build links it is through PR, and through engaging netizens.

There are some “Greyer” areas of link building that may not be good journalism, but won’t get you banned from Google either.  Sending product to bloggers to write about gets you good high quality inbound links that will last a life time.  Which can be a lot cheaper than paying for inbound links on a monthly basis.  While one could argue that in both cases you “paid” for the link so they should be equally bad, in the second case the author stakes his reputation on the endorsement, and provided education to the users.

This is also more acceptable because the link is relevant, so the Page Rank “Flow” as Google is calling it these days, is in fact related to the link, as opposed to a link for Herbal Viagra on a high ranking page about the latest Microsoft Search Engine.

Are there instances where Conductor.com’s LinkExperts make sense to use? Yes.  If you have already managed to get delisted for Google.  Paid links may help you with Microsoft Rankings. 

Paid Links Generally take time to detect so if you have a “Fly by Night” domain, you have little to lose, and a lot to gain.  This is a BlackHat/Calculated Risk Game to play if you want to capitalize on a trend that is only likely going to last a few months.  Like being the top hit for the “Toy of the Year” at Christmas time on a site that only sells that toy. 

I wouldn’t personally do this, but there are those of you who will, and I didn’t want to leave you with the impression buying an link never has its usefulness, because then some other SEO would write the “When to use Paid links” and I’d look like a stooge.

Also be aware one method BlackWaterOps uses to help our customers is to detect and report paid links by competitors to Google, and others.