Recently a local business owner (who I won’t identify because it would make things worse) was referred to me about how to remove an autocomplete result in reference to his business. eg. ‘Long Island Tennis Tournament Referee Bribed’

How does autocomplete work? Google claims that it is mostly driven by actual user searches but may have a combination of actual user searches, past search history and rising popular searches. We have evidence that it combines terms that are not necessarily adjacent and does filter out terms like ‘scam’. For more information on how autocomplete works, see this Search Engine Land article.

Some factors:

1. Volume of searches
2. Click through rate (CTR)
3. Volume of results of nearby searches

First of all, be honest. Is the autocomplete actually referencing the truth? eg. Was a referee for the Long Island actually bribed? If not, then go find out what the sites that are showing up for that term are actually using for content. Is it computer generated garbage? Is it a forum of disgruntled customers that you need to deal with? If so, then it is a bit tougher.

Can I manipulate Autcomplete results? Yes. But it will cost you. Last year Brent Payne, former Chicago Tribune SEO, used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to manipulate a search term of his own and got himself banned from autcomplete mostly because he pissed off Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) for good reason.

Reputation management firms are quick to fix the problem by burying the bad term with artificially boosting a nicer term by using similar methods and writing content for it. The problem is that (much like Rogaine) you have to keep paying to keep the bad term away.

Sometimes the term is replaced by a more recent or popular term naturally. Other ways to accelerate this effect can be publicity stunts or viral marketing.

What is Google doing to help?

Despite some legal requirements in various countries, Google has apparently had enough of business owners freaking out over suggestions and has removed ‘scam’ in some autocomplete results and has removed piracy related terms like ‘bittorrent’. For a time the term ‘lesbians’ was blocked too.

Second, ask yourself what you are willing to do. If you have the resources to write multiple versions of content about a replacement phrase and distribute it cleverly across multiple domains that have pagerank and actually have ‘dofollow’ links, then maybe it is worth the time. It could be the online marketing kick start you should have done years ago.

If you don’t have those crazy resources, hire them out, but ask important questions. Reputation management firms will most likely have a two prong approach 1) They will tell you, or hopefully write themselves, a lot of content for the web that creates a new phrase that will hypothetically (and temporarily) bump the bad phrase down with a bunch of innocuous phrases that don’t alarm prospective customers. 2) They will get these phrases popular on the user side by making various users and robots (like Brent Payne did above) do the preferred search term that will be corroborated with the content they wrote. This simulates a ‘trend’ and will hopefully replace the nasty suffix. This will not be permanent as they need to keep the search volume up and the content fresh by continuing to write about this artificial trend to keep ahead of the offending theme.

Be sure to get complete answers to the following questions:

1. What happens after the campaign is complete? Are the effects permanent and why or why not?
2. Does this run a risk of having my site penalized by Google?

Third, deal with it head on. This is more of a PR strategy than an SEO straegy, but time and time again we see that SEO and PR cross paths at the worst times. If the suggestion has a drop of truth to it, you may wish to work on the SEO for that term. Get to the top of the results for the high CTR nasty term and do your best to control the message, explain what happened, how you fixed it (hopefully you did), and why it isn’t an issue any longer.

Other reading: http://www.beattheautocomplete.com/

How have you dealt with Google Autocomplete?

Comment below!

Nothing drives people up the wall than having to watch a poorly targeted video ad prior to the real video they were linked to, let alone a 30 second one. 30 seconds online is like 30 minutes on TV. That’s why the future of web advertising in the video sphere will be micro length ads like this Adidas ad for the New Zealand All Blacks.

It’s brilliant because it loads quickly, gets to the point and is on-brand. First there were books, then there were magazines, then there were blog posts, and now there’s Twitter. Video works the same way and making your point in 5 seconds or less is probably the future.

I’m not alone:

MTV Finds Most Effective Video Ad Unit is 5 Second Pre-roll

What is your favorite short ad?

The ever-updating Twitter board at AJ Bombers

So why would I bother to write about a bar/restaurant? Especially since I despised this neighborhood when growing up here.

AJ Bombers is the mecca of social media. They get it. The owner says that their popularity was built almost entirely on Twitter and Facebook, a fact that the employees love to tout. Plus, they’re unusually friendly and upbeat, which is rare in this neighborhood considering how friendly Wisconsinites are reported to be.

If the World War II bomber theme doesn’t hit you right away, it might be the elaborate peanut dispensing flying bombs with targets along the wall. Or it could be the stenciled phrases on the walls and doors. Or the beer bottles hanging from parachutes above the submarine periscope-like silos of peanuts (spelled p-nuts on the sign.)

The 40″ flat screen displaying the latest tweets and retweets from the owner (@AJBombers) is pretty neat too. But before I even got my award winning (Travel Channel) cheeseburger, the Milwaukee Burger, I found out that I was already second degree friends with half the staff. By the time my drink arrived, I had 3 new followers, all of whom happened to be standing in front of me.

The P-Nut delivery system at AJ Bombers via WWII era bombs

Just take a look at the activity and prowess that AJ Bombers has on social and you can quickly dismiss the more uptight naysayers of social media, if there are any left.

Steve, an employee at AJ Bombers says that they are different because they interact with locals in a personal way before, during and after they come in for burgers and beers. It is well exhibited too, I knew of the place well before moving back to Milwaukee via the Tweetup notifications all being held at the bar/restaurant. It’s not just mantra, it is the way these people operate. Even the bartender is a PR graduate and stated openly she was quite happy working at such a PR savvy place.

Even the wifi network SSID is “DontForgetToCheckInOnFoursquare”. Brilliant.

Most restaurants just blast out specials like ASCII diarrhea but in the parallel universe of social, it seems that being more human, not less, builds business relationships. Not anything new to people on Twitter at all, but it is still rare in the restaurant business.

Congrats, AJ Bombers, you get it.  And yes, the Milwaukee burger is worthy of the hype.

For those of you that do not follow such nerd-dom, it is worth restating that  in mid September Google changed the way the Adwords Keyword Tool compiled data. Simply put, the end result of your PPC campaigns did not change, but the estimate of the data from the Keyword Tool will now be significantly reduced. This is because the search volume estimate is  now coming from google.com results only, not the included partners like ask.com and aol.com.

This is significant because certain people use certain search engines. I have noticed for  years that Yahoo is used by older generations and depending on your keywords, and ad copy, your click through rate will show that.

It is always important to get a second opinion with other tools like wordtracker and using your own analytics. At the least, update your projections based on the new data.

Overzealous lawsuits are common in the US, especially by those with cash and no brains, but there is an interesting effect with lawsuits other than your secret mansion being exposed: Links. I know it sounds ridiculous, but they tend to be juicy back links. Everyone loves to point out ridiculous lawsuits like chubby girls suing McDonald’s for their food choices and robbers suing their victims for injuries, and naturally they get passed around quickly.

That is why I was not too surprised to see SEO Book list Suing Google as their #62 link building suggestion. Yes, it works, but they rightly put “Proceed with Caution” nearby.

It seems that useful, relevant content would be the way to go. I say grow up, stop externalizing your link building efforts to the courts and learn to take responsibility for your decisions. If you do get those links, I hope you spent just as much money on content, if not more.

But many people are suggesting the treasure trove of social networks as a source of links. This comes with a major caveat, NOT ALL SOCIAL NETWORKS CREATE LINKS EQUALLY.

Twitter has been pressured (probably by Google) to attach ‘nofollow’ tags to outgoing links on tweets. What does this mean? It means you can post nonillion (yes, that’s a real number) links from as many Twitter accounts as you can marshall and it won’t count as a back link. Sorry.

The 'nofollow' tag, the link killer

Facebook does the same. In fact, Facebook has a function called UntrustedLink, which essentially is an anti-spamming tool. It adds the ‘nofollow’ tag so that search engines do not follow the link. This means no link credit.

What it can help you with is getting traffic through those tweets and hopefully those will get indexed by the search engines. So once again, build links by doing something remarkable. Then links will come to you, and of course you can always supplement that with traditional link building. But remember, if it’s too easy, you’ll get penalized, or no credit at the least.

Digg and Delicious are still search engine and link friendly, but it appears that Reddit is not. Any other updates on link friendliness? Comment below!

http://www.deauxmaingroup.com/hide-a-page-or-post-from-navigation-in-wordpress/

Converting Excel lists, to comma lists can be time consuming without such a simple trick

1. Take your long list, and copy it into a blank Notepad document.
2. Select All and copy it again into a Word document.
3. Use Find and Replace to find “^p” without the quotes, and replace with “, ” without the quotes. I suggest putting a space after the comma to separate the values.
4. Hit Replace All.

Now you have the Excel list, converted to a more user friendly view that is more helpful for meta keywords and backing up long lists. Want to convert back? Just switch the two values in Find and Replace.

Motorola Droid, aside from some loaded software, and being GSM) and it fixes a ton of little things and add some nice new features that users have been requesting. But the moment I put it into my Droid dock (which is awesome for space savers like myself) it immediately crashed the dock/station application. Here’s the fix, which for some reason is nearly impossible to find in English. If for some reason you would rather read it in Portuguese, it is available here.

From the Home Screen go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications

Select  Menu Button > Filter -> All

Select “Base Multimedia” or “Multimedia Station” and select Clear Data.

Go back to the Home Screen and insert the handset into the dock.

Voila, no crash!

Solution by Danilo Araujo
(http://www.vivoblog.com.br/dia-21-para-os-stones.html/comment-page-2#comment-17535)

Users, also had the same problem with the dock. To resolve follow these steps.

1) Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications
2) Button Menu -> Filter -> All
3) Find the application "Base Multimedia" and find the Clear Data option.

1) Apple puts ridiculous restrictions in section 3.3.1 on what platform iPhone apps can be written on. This isn’t a platform killer, but it sure is asking for platform cancer.  Sure, the best apps usually aren’t written on the native platform, but this is really a high stakes move.

2) A college age guy finds the prototype for the next gen iPhone (left by Apple engineer Gray Powell) on the floor of a bar in Redwood City, CA, and sells it to Gizmodo (awesome tech blog) for $5,000. Not more than a week later after they post the pics, representatives from Apple show up at the house and get stopped by a room mate. Two days later, the top editor at Gizmodo Jason Chen gets his house searched and computers, cameras, mobile phones, American Express bill, bank checks and the iPhone prototype (assumed) raided by a combination of law enforcement agencies.

3) Apple bans apps that make fun of public figures. Are you kidding me? If the App Store was a news paper, there would be no political cartoons, no op eds of sarcasm and only information you were supposed to see. Wow.

4) Steve Jobs, the CEO who is known for personally emailing customers, told one person that if they wanted porn on their phone, they should get an Android phone. Well Steve, I have an Android phone and it turns out that it does have porn available. It also has EVERYTHING AN IPHONE HAS. Here’s the kicker though, Apple’s App Store is considered way to raunchy by the Parents Television Council to be for kids. Of all networks, Fox News gives you the dirt on what’s still available.

Wow, what a rough month for Apple.