The First Annual (Virtual) G+ Bloggers Conference - The SMO of SEO

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis and we're here tonight with the first annual virtual G+ Bloggers Conference and we're wrapping it up tonight with session 6. And boy, it's been one great day. We've seen a lot of very talented plusers here and they've been sharing their time with us and sharing their skills with us and it's just been a great day. I hope everybody out there is getting a chance to enjoy this conference. If you've not seen it live, hopefully you'll catch it on a replay on YouTube later. Tonight is the icing on the cake for me, and because we're gonna go over something that, you know, not just food bloggers, but I think all bloggers really need to know and need to work on, and that is SEO. And tonight we have Joshua Berg with us. Hey, Josh, thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Thank you. And we have Mark Traphagen.

Glad to be with you all. Thanks for inviting us.

My pleasure. And tonight they're gonna be talking about They're going to talk mostly on the subject of the SMO of SEO, and then they're going to elaborate more on how to use SEO and maybe touch a little bit on authorship. And anything you might have a question about, this is the time to ask it. Put it in the comment bar and we'll try and get to it as soon as we can. If you have a specific question about it, we'll do our best to answer it. But hang on there and listen up good because we're going to really share some great information. So guys, I know I don't know which one of you would like to start it off, but I'm going to kick it over to you now, Josh, or—

Yes, sure. Alrighty, I will start it off. So let me just give a brief rundown on SEO, SMO, what the terms mean for people not familiar with that yet. Smo is social media optimization, and that is a term that we've used only more recently in the last few years. And SEO is a term that people are more familiar with. That's search engine optimization, and it's also one of the terms that's had a bit of a bad rap in the last couple years because it has— was quite overused in the past. People's websites and content being over-optimized, that caused a lot of problems that Google had to use some algorithms to downgrade the sites that had too much optimization. But all of this is moving a lot more towards, uh, social signals, however. So the thing about social signals is they provide a, uh, much better way of filtering out the noise and getting more quality content in search results. So what, we've seen is a move within the last year or two more directed towards— the search algorithms are getting more directed towards social signals as important factors in their search ranking. And a lot of us believe that that is a trend that will continue. And I believe it will become a lot more so quite quickly in the near future because it is a much better way of understanding what the— what people really want. And that has been one of Google's founding principles, to give the users what they really want to have most. So Mark here will also talk about authorship, which is something that is tying the two of these things together a lot better than we ever had in the past. So Mark, do you want to give a brief rundown on, on that and explanation of the terminology for that?

Certainly, Joshua, that would be fine. Authorship, or Google Authorship specifically, because that's what we're really talking about here, is a program that Google has been talking about for years, going back before even 2007, surfacing first of all in a series of patents that Google published and was granted. That described systems to be able to identify things on the web that they called entities or agents that are beyond just the normal web pages and links. When we talk about SEO, a lot of what we're talking about is the whole magic that Google created as a search engine was being able to look at the hyperlinks, the links between things on the web, between different websites and web pages and see those as meaningful data relationships. At the simplest level, you know, in SEO, if I have a site and there are a number of other sites out there that are good sites and authoritative and reasonably about the same topic that are linking to mine, pointing to mine, Google sees those like votes for my site. But Google's been getting hungry to find more signal and more diversified signal because as Joshua was alluding I was alluding to earlier, those links became a game for people to get. People were buying and selling them and creating fake sites to get more links and all this kind of thing that Google has been trying to crack down on. Well, one place that as the social web emerged that it became clear that you could find perhaps better signal is from real people interacting with the content, with the sites that are out there. What are people saying about those? What are people pointing to and saying is authoritative? So this is inter-authorship. As Google began to realize that what's truly valuable on the web, on websites, is content, and that the fact that the best content is produced by real people, and that if somebody is a good content producer producing content that's meaningful to people, that answers their questions, that helps them,— that when they find that content in the search results, they like it. That if you could identify the author of that content and say, if this guy or gal has written something wonderful here, probably whenever they write about that across the web, it's going to be good and people will want to see more of it. So how can we identify those people and match them up with that content and then use that as a signal in the search results? Enter authorship. Basically, authorship is an idea of identifying an individual author, which is just a term for a content creator. Author typically means written content like a blog post, but it could be producing a YouTube video, it could be a lot of slide deck on SlideShare, it could be a lot of different kinds of content. Identifying those individual authors, finding a way to make a verified connection between them and their content across the web, and then tracking the data from that, watching how do people interact with that content, and you do that through the social networks. Google+, when it was introduced in mid-2011, became the engine by which they could accomplish that, because when you— on Google+, you're setting up a profile that Google can clearly see who you are. And then Google has provided the means from the profile to link to your content anywhere on the web. You link back from that content to your profile, and that establishes the two-way verified identification. And the first little kind of carrot that they threw out to authors to incentivize them to do this— you know, why would you bother doing it? Because they were still, even in the beginning they admitted, were still a long ways off from being able to use this as a ranking signal yet. The first little carrot they threw out was, we'll show your— if you hook up to this, potentially we'll show your photo next to results, in search results. And when you see that, that's what you're looking at. You're seeing Google Authorship in action there. When you search for something and you see somebody's profile photo right next to the result. So I'll go in more deep later, but that's basically the fundamentals of it. Now Google+ becomes a part of that because your author profile is also can be active on Google+ and Google+ becomes another huge place where you can be building up that signal, building up that authority, building up that— showing Google that people like what I do and they like when I talk about certain topics. So that's fundamentally what authorship is. Authorship is one of our— from the whole bigger topic that we're talking about, social media optimization, the intersection of social and SEO, authorship is cool because it's probably one of the clearest indications we've had from Google that they really are interested in that signal. They are interested in you as a person, Mr. and Mrs. Blogger out there, and what other people think of you as a content creator.

Well, that's good stuff. Talking about authorship, okay, and I also did hear somewhere that they're also going to be looking more at your profile image, that it's got to be— there's got to be facial recognition there.

That's already been true pretty much from the beginning. It's just part of their obsession here with they want to be as much as possible identifying real people. That's one of the reasons they emphasize— there was a lot of controversy about this in some circles in the early days— that you had to have a real name. You had to use your real name for your Google+ profile. The other requirement for authorship is yes, it has to be a clearly identifiable face photo. A real photo of a real human face. And while they've never outright said this, we've pretty much figured out that they do use facial recognition software to verify that. Probably the software just vets and flags things that don't look like a face, and I think then it's human-checked. The reason I say that is we see some lag. I did a test about a month ago where for the first time since I've used Authorship I intentionally changed my profile photo to an icon of something, and it took 4 days, about 4 days, and all of a sudden all my authorship snippets disappeared from the search results. And when that happened, I immediately put my face photo back up, and within about 24 hours they started showing again, and I'm back where I was. So yes, just long answer to your question, you do have to have a real face photo, you have to use the name by which you're identified on all your content across the web, and those are the two main ID requirements of it.

Now talking about the names, okay, I see, and I've been telling people this for a while, and so, but I want to get some more clarification. You know, we see people using just an initial. Is that enough for a last name? Is that sufficient for Google, or—

It can be. And Google has somewhat modified the policy on names and using pseudonyms. They still want you to go as much as possible by name. Basically, the thing that they want now is that you go by the name that you're known by across the web. OK. So that's the main— That's the main requirement.

OK, great.

Well, we have— go ahead, George. For a little while, using the wrong kind of picture or using different kinds of names, sometimes that's not going to be a problem for a while, or in a lot of cases. But then it just almost quite randomly, your authorship picture disappears. Or, you know, if there are any spam complaints or complaints against your profile or something in the future where someone gets flagged and then they actually have a look at that, then, you know, that can come up. So it's good to stick with the basic requirements as much as possible.

Now, I'd also heard, speaking of spam, that if you did not have a legitimate account with a good picture and with your name, that Google might consider your account as spam. Have you heard anything about that?

I'm going to say that they haven't been as— every case is not The same as the last thing, every case is not the same, and, you know, it could be considered that way, but in most cases I haven't seen there being any kind of a crackdown or concern on all of those details. There are hundreds of millions of users, so it's quite difficult to keep track of everything. But if you want to make sure your authorship appears and, you know, also be relevant to everyone else within the Google+ system, then, you know, you want to look like a real person and you want to, you know, use best practices. All around, you know.

Right now, and this is something that I'm just gonna speculate about, but right now Google seems pretty liberal about some things. I mean, beyond, you know, the requirement that you have a real face photo and that sort of thing. But we see authorship showing up in the search results sometimes. When I say authorship showing up, again, I'm referring to seeing that what's called a rich snippet result where you see the face photo next to a result. For things that I think authorship is really not intended for, for example, somebody who doesn't really produce content, just has a site that's, you know, e-commerce site and there's no real deep content there, but sometimes you'll still see even for the homepage if they've connected it to that, it'll show up. And I think people think like, "Ooh, cool, I can do that," you know, and get that rich snippet that people will click on more and that's why they want it because it's proven that Generally, those results have a better click-through rate. People's eyes are drawn to that human face. They'll click on that, even if that link is further down the search results page. They'll click on it more than they would have normally. But I think of it like the early days of Google, when you could get away with a lot of things. Google always said, you know, well, you should produce really good content and have a really good quality site, and if you do that, everything will be great. But people with commercial interest pretty quickly learned that, yeah, Google says that, but the real quick way to get ranking on Google is to build a bunch of fake sites and links and buy links and that sort of thing. And people got away with it for years. And then when Google lowered the hammer, a lot of people had a rude awakening. And I think it's going to be that way with authorship. I think we're in the early days of authorship. I don't think— this is one of the reasons why I don't think they've really turned it on as a ranking signal yet. That doesn't mean that they aren't tracking the data. If it's Google, you can be sure they're tracking the data. So I would not want to be using my authorship right now in sloppy ways. I would not want to be associated with low-quality sites. I would not be wanting to associate it with things that really aren't original content. Because someday they're going to use this. And when they start to use it as a real ranking signal, that's when they're going to put— turn to quality. On, and the people who are messing around with it are going to suddenly disappear. So if you use it, start working now like as if Google really has it all together to measure the quality and know who's really doing it right, because eventually they will, and those people will be the winners in the long run.

Good advice. We do have a question here from Kirsten Hall, and she's asking, how do I optimize the usage of Google+ so it improves my SEO? I already use Yoast SEO for my WordPress blog, which connects my Google+ profile to my blog and improves my SEO. What else can I do?

Okay. You wanna go first on that, Josh?

Yeah, uh, that is a, uh, big topic, and that is kind of the central topic, so glad you brought that up. Uh, that is, uh, I've written a number of articles about it, uh, where I've broken down the different aspects of that. Uh, honestly, when I came onto Google+, I was trying to figure out a lot of that myself. And I've been involved in SEO stuff since before we had the term SEO, you know, 10— more than 10 years ago, and doing internet business for 20 years since the earliest days. However, when Google+ came around, a lot of us professionals were still not sure or understanding a lot of the aspects of how it would affect search or what were the different signals. Would it be number of followers that you have? Would it be the number of pluses that your content got? And what about fake pluses? For example, someone creating 100 pages and then plussing all their own content and things like that. So I finally figured out after a while that it was— there was this PageRank, which is an algorithm used throughout the internet that affects all of that very much. And so I wrote a series called PageRank in Google+, parts 1 through 6. For anyone that wants to get a lot more into the technical side of this, uh, it is, that is, uh, quite deep. There's a lot of technical terminology, but some of it is also quite simple and for people to understand. Then there is another thing that I wrote called the SMO, called Social Media Optimization, SMO for SEO and the Future of Search. Where I actually talk about the direction that search is going and how it's using more of the social signals to become far more perceptive. 'Cause see, search is getting more intelligent all the time. It used to be only based on keywords and, uh, uh, out— very much algorithm-based as far as keywords, number of keywords, the density, et cetera. But it's moving a lot more towards being able to understand a general context, and we call that semantic search. So, but to come back a little more towards answering your question, the, the— that's why we're talking about Smo here, and that's what I've been using that terminology more for recently— social media optimization— where we improve our social profile and our social standing, reputation, and authority within, for example, the Google+ environment, and use that to increase our authority overall across the web. And this affects our content and our websites, blogs, and everything else, what have you. So they're, they're all coming together a lot more closer where they interlink with each other. And this is what I call the, the marriage of social media and search. And so I, I used that term in the article that I wrote, SMO for SEO: The Future of Search. Uh, it's also called The Complete Business Guide for SMO and SEO. And I, I use that term where I talk about the, the dynasty of social media and search, because for many years they have grown up separately from each other. They've been around since the very beginning. Social media, we used to use dial-up when I first started using internet. Actually, it was pre-internet. We used dial-up bulletin boards And you would use your modem, which would dial up, you know, 1,200 baud or 900, 600, 300, from the very earliest days. And you would dial up and then you would just type onto a bulletin like a forum thing. And those were the very earliest days, but that was a kind of social. And so that has been going on, but only in the last, uh, few years after MySpace, Facebook, a lot of these became very popular with many, many people, did social media really start to grow up. And then search also started to really grow up, grow up. And then a couple years ago it became quite apparent that these two needed to come together to make information and knowledge a lot more accessible to everyone. And that's what I feel the Google+ and authorship was designed to do.

Let's take us now from the— that's a great— you know, Joshua gave a great kind of background overview of why this is happening and where the search engines are moving and the integration of this. Let's take it intensely practical now, and I'm going to jump ahead here, Dennis, if I may. Sure. Tie in a couple of the next questions I see in the event chat from Kim and from Ronnie. I think they relate to Kirsten's question about what exactly are the signals. We're talking about social signals, we're using all these terms, but what are they? Is it number of followers? Is it how much interaction that you get? One of the things to be very practical here that Joshua has been— talks about in all these articles that he's talking about is this understanding which is pretty amazing of how Google designed Google+ that your profile also things like pages, brand pages, and now communities are treated for all intents and purposes like Google just like web pages or websites. Profile. So you can think of your profile in a sense like that's your website or one of your websites. And just like a regular website out there on the web, we've discovered is that Google looks at the signals coming at that site, in this case your profile, and essentially scores your profile. We refer to it as PageRank, that's the most outward facing part of that scoring algorithm, but it's actually much more complicated, involves many more signals than that. But to keep things simple, that there's a kind of score assigned, that's your authority, your search authority. Now where does that come from? It comes from not only the number of connections that other entities on the web are making to you, but the quality of those and the authority of those connections. So what are the connections we're talking about? Well, very simply, for a Google+ profile, the authority of a profile comes from two places. It comes internally from inside Google+, the connections that you make in Google+, but it also comes externally because remember I said these are treated pretty much like websites. So links to your profile from the outside, including your authorship links, because authorship is a link to your site,. So when, if I post, do a guest post on a high authority website out there and I use my authorship, that creates a link from that high authority site back to my profile. That's a signal to my profile. If somebody writes an article about me out there, interviews me out there, and they include in that a link to my Google+ profile, that's an authoritative link to that. Now to get practical with some of the next couple questions that came up there, a lot of people assume it must be like the number of followers and the number of +1s you have. Not necessarily. I mean, that counts for something, but it's not necessarily the strongest signal. Everybody has an authority rank out there. It's not something we can easily see. Josh can talk a little bit about— you can see the PageRank of a profile. Sort of, but it's a very, very relative measure. But basically the more interactions that you have with high authority people in Google+ and high authority sites out there, the more search authority your profile will gain and also that your profile gives out. You're sharing that influence to other people. So a lot more I could say about that, but that's kind of on the simplest level. One more thing is people ask me, what are the types of connections? What we know is that the types of links within Google+ that pass as authority are things like if somebody shares your post. You write a post, somebody else shares it, that post becomes embedded in their post, and that is what we call a followed link. Which means that Google passes authority through that. So if a very high authority person shares one of your posts, that creates a link to your profile that's high authority. The other kind of fundamental link is when people mention you, +mention you somewhere. That is also a followed link. So if, you know, Vic Gundotra, the head of Google+, mentions me, which which a couple of times he has, God bless him, he gives me a +mention, that's a link to my profile from a very high authority profile.

So that will help you. So in answering her question then, another way to increase your— the first one was increase your SEO presence is by using Google+ to get those high link authority, high links to tie into you.

Yeah, and she's talking about the authority of her own site. Something important to realize on a selfish level is Of course, you're going to be, I think, if you have a site and you're publishing content, you're going to be sharing that content through your profile. So that's why, but not only through your own profile, but as you build network relationships, and this is where the unseen value of the valuable relationships that you build in a social network like Google+. 99% of the people that are using it and doing it well aren't even thinking about this.— and actually Google doesn't want them to think about it. But just by being good networkers, by building great relationships, by making friendships with great people on Google+, they get to like you, they get to like your content, they're going to naturally share it. The more they do that, that's producing signals that go back to your blog, your site, that build its SEO strength and power. So that's why being involved in social networking is especially on Google+ right now, is so incredibly valuable.

Mark, there's another question here that says, from Kristen Parker, that says, does the SMO only apply to those that are logged into their Google accounts when searching, or does it apply to anyone who performs searches on Google? So maybe you could explain a a little bit about that, how it does affect search a lot in those two different ways.

There's kind of two levels of effect there. And that's a great question. When people— the first level— well, let me step back. The bigger level is, to answer your question, yes, the basic kind of SEO effect, if you will, works whether you're logged in or not. In terms of if you're a high profile, a high authority profile, you have high authority with Google as a search engine and that doesn't matter if people are logged in or not. You know, for example, I'd like to share is like I've got a number of Google+ posts that I've created over the last 2.5 years that rank very highly as Google+ posts in regular search.. And that's for anybody in the world. If I'm logged out, I see them right at the top of the search. For example, if you search for Google+ Page Analytics, which is something that people keep hoping will come, it's been promised to us for 2 years by Google, we haven't had it yet. But I wrote a post on February 6th, 2012 about Google+ Page Analytics. If you search that in Google, logged in or logged out, I'm usually number 1, 2, or 3 on that, and I have been for a year and a half. That's a Google+ post. So that's just an example of that search authority applies whether or not. Now there's another level of personalization. Google is moving more and more into— all search engines are— into personalization of search, which means that no even logged out of Google, no two people see exactly the same results. Your search results are affected by things like location, your search history, you know, a number of factors that you may not even be thinking about Google takes into account when you do a search. But if you're logged into Google, a whole other array of things come into play, including your Google network.. So if you're logged into Google and you have contacts, even your Gmail contacts, certainly the people that you circle on Google+, they start affecting your search results. So if you have a large and powerful Google+ network, when the people that are in that network— and now I'm beginning to believe that this effect can extend even to a certain extent to your extended network, meaning like people who are friends of friends of yours, you can go way out there. Google will influence, you're influencing their search results by what they're seeing. So things that when people that circle me on Google+ search Google logged in, if they're searching for things that I have liked, I shouldn't say liked, but you know I've +1'd, I've re-shared, you know, I've indicated my interest in, and Google sees that connection and Google knows like, well, Mark is authoritative on that topic, they're going to push my— the results that I favor higher in their search results. So that's the dual effect. If that makes it clear, I hope.

Okay.

Excellent. We have another question here from Where is it at? Oh, Maureen Shaw, she wants to know, for those of us who are brand newish to G+, do you have any recommendations for things we should start doing right away?

Yes.

Go ahead, Josh.

All right. Yeah, in the article that I wrote, which I actually just put up a link to it here. The link says realsmo.com social media optimization, SMO for SEO. I talk a lot about the social media optimization aspect, how engagement within Google+ is important and that you really need to have that. So let me talk about the two different possible scenarios. And, and what I see is a bit of a problem in, in the way a lot of people come in using Google+ that is, does not optimize very much. And that is when, if they come in and they start using it like a bulletin where they decide to post their favorite news article every day, or their favorite, you know, the mortgage rates, or the latest technology updates. And they just post these— we call them embedded posts— where you drop the link in and you don't write very much of anything, and then you post that in communities. We're seeing a lot of that, and because it's kind of obvious that there wasn't a lot of time taken, involved by the person that shared that to talk about it within Google+, a lot of people just don't really feel, or it doesn't relate to them, so they tend to not interact with those posts. Anyway, that, that action of just repeatedly posting links to different outside content has the opposite effect, because I was talking about PageRank in Google+ as being a factor. If you understand the principle of the PageRank algorithm And someone actually recently mentioned, wrote about that a lot of people who've acquired authorship have even seen some downward ranking signals a little bit, if anything. And this is my explanation about that. The reason that we see that is because a lot of people come in posting a lot of outside links. So what it is, is like you take a bucket— and this is why we call the PageRank link juice, because you can compare it like that— you take a bucket and you start filling it up, and then you, if you fill it with tons of holes, then all of that is PageRank is, is literally flowing it out. Flowing out, and you cannot fill as fast as you're literally giving away all your authority because you're, you're citing so much content to other people and places all over the web, even a lot of random and, and, or, or irrelevant content. And then other people are not engaging with that content. They're not commenting or sharing and plussing. So what that does is, is, uh, it shows Google that the things that you're putting up, other people are not interested in. So the way we build authority is a lot like you do in the real social world. And this is something that I have been trying to encourage people about within Google+ to understand, especially many of the new people coming into communities. To understand. You, uh, the, that kind of posting where they just post links, I call that a soapbox posting. Uh, if you came into a social, uh, network, you know, uh, a group meeting or something, and you just walked in and you put up a box and started talking and no one was listening, it would be something like that. But in the real social environment Okay, you go to people and you start talking to them and you try and get their attention. You don't just say what you have to say, but you listen to them and you interact. That is what we see is, is the most effective on Google+. And then when these people, they become interested in you because you commented on their content, they turn around and comment back on your content., and it becomes a two-way street. And, and that flow, that engagement in Google+ and social media is what increases that authority, because the PageRank is given to your profile or your business page by the amount of people commenting about it or sharing it. Tagging it, mentioning it. When people share your content, then that increases your authority. So if you come in— and that's, that's the good side. I said I was going to talk about the wrong way and the right way. So the right way would be really engaging with people. And in the article where I talk about the SMO for SEO, I, I give a list of principles: create, relate, captivate, arouse, enjoy, share, acknowledge, contribute, use influencers, use communities, build your reputation, use engagement, build your authority, use leadership, thought leadership, and optimize for social. So the, uh, that list that I've written out there is quite long. There are many subtopics to that that you can read about in the article, and it builds on that idea. That is the good way, on the positive aspect, that I want to emphasize that will really build your authority. It you will quickly see, once you get real people of influence and authority within Google+ talking about you, mentioning you, sharing your content, that has a very powerful effect. But then the— on the negative side that I mentioned, the problem with that is that just talking about a lot of links, not getting that engagement, not getting that interaction, you're giving away all of that authority. So that's— for new people coming into Google+, what I would encourage is to think about the— you know, even though you're at a computer, really think about that this is a social network. And you build a social network and you hang out with people of influence in your own field. Experts in your own field is especially good, especially effective. You know, Chef Dennis Littley is a strong influencer within the food blogging community, and there are many other leaders within that field, for example. Engaging and communicating with these leaders is, is very powerful and that has a strong effect. So, and I mentioned in the article about there are positive ways of doing that and then there are ways that wouldn't be so good, that would be kind of spammy. So think about Google+ as a real social situation where you meet real people and you need to interact with those people, but you need to hear what they have to say as well, not just say what you have to say. It's really a two-way street.

Excellent. I tell people that a lot, and I say one thing you're gonna do is— and I know I see a lot of food bloggers that do it— is that they come and they post their links, especially to different communities. And they will post the same link in 5 or 6 different communities. And honestly, when I see that, I don't even let them in my community. When I go to their page to see what they're doing, if it's that, I just click them off and they're done. But I refer to it as like a hamster wheel where they're chasing their own tail. That's, that's always my analogy, is that they're going around in a circle. They're not doing anything for themselves, they're just spinning their wheels, wasting their time where they could be engaging. With other plusers, and that's really what's going to get them some, some—

and they don't understand it's not building their authority.

No. And other ones who are always asking me about auto-posting, and my remark to that is that, you know, people, plusers realize it's an auto-post, they're not going to respond to it. So, you know, I'm glad you did bring that up about how those link posts really don't get the response. Response.

Another tip that I'd throw into this, Josh did such a great job of covering the kind of etiquette and behavior that makes you most attractive and makes people more willing to engage with you and follow you. Also, one of the things that people need to really realize about Google+ that's different I think from most other social networks out there is how, if you do it the right way, how easy it is to get noticed here and to get in with people who are influential. It's amazing to me that you can break into the kind of, you know, they might seem like clicks, but if you follow one of the strategies that I pursued when I was new here and I was a nobody was I began to observe the people that I admired on Google+, people who seemed to be doing it right, especially people who were in my my field, in my topics of interest, and people who seem to be gaining some reputation and authority. And I would identify them and I would put them in a special circle. I actually called it my stalker circle, which sounds creepy, but you can name your circles anything you want because nobody sees it but you. So nobody had to know I was being creepy. And I would go to my stalker circle frequently intentionally, you know, see what they were posting and engage with them, what I would find over a period of time is not surprisingly, a lot of those people knew each other and were already interacting with each other. So if I go to person A and I am very helpful on a post, I answer a question that he has, or I contribute something that's meaningful beyond just a, hey, great post. And I do that there. And then an hour or two later I'm over on Person B, who also is a friend of his, and I'm being a good engager there and I'm helpful and I comment in a helpful way and enter into a discussion there. Person A is also on Person B's post, they see me. After a while these people began to see me on different people's posts and I just naturally became part of their community. Nobody said like, well, who are you to be commenting? Engage with you, if you're proving your value, if you're being valuable to people and they begin to see you in the connections that they have, you become a part of that community. And next thing you know, they're sharing your posts, they're telling people to follow you, and that's when it begins to grow and that's when the magic happens. So you can be, at the same time that Joshua has been very good about saying like, be real, Be engaging, be a real person in there. You can also be strategic about it. Just don't do it in such an openly creepy way that you turn people off. Don't ever tell anybody that you call it your stalker circle.

Yeah, don't be a stalker.

And don't get turned off the fact if you leave one message or one something on somebody's post and they don't put you right in their circles. Think, well, jeez, they don't like me. It's going to take more than one time coming by somebody's place and commenting on something they do or asking them a question when they respond to you.

Absolutely. It's very much like the real world, as Josh was comparing it to going to a meetup or a cocktail party or something like that. You can't just walk in the room and start blasting out stuff and expect, oh, everybody's going to put down their drinks and come over and look at you. They put down their drinks and run away. So it takes time, it takes engagement, it's a long-term investment, but boy when it starts to pay off, boy when you get that, you know, after that long hard work of being real and being helpful and being engaging, you start to see some of those influencers sharing you and telling other people to follow you, that's a great feeling. Then it begins to build on its own and then you don't, after a while you don't have to think about it so much. I don't check my stalker circles so much anymore. It's just happening now. That's a wonderful thing, and anybody can get there.

That's the one thing about it. I mean, G+ offers you the opportunity to grow as much as you want to grow for as much effort as you're willing to put into it. That's what it's about. Charging you so more people see your post. They want you to engage with each other so more people see your post.

Exactly.

And if I can address one question Karen asked about reposting the same link with a different picture, if that was alright. Karen, if you post good content, if you post quality content, you don't need to reshare your own post again because other people are going to do that for you. Other people are going to reshare your good content. Other people are going to comment on your post, and when they comment on your post, they're going to help drive it back to the top of the stream. So if you post something worthwhile, you don't need to post it a second time.

Now I'm going to disagree with that just a little bit. Okay, go ahead. I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with it because I agree with what you're saying. For a lot of posts, that will happen if you're doing it right and doing a good job. But also is a realization that— and this is maybe more true once you start gaining a following. It's not going to be true when there's only 10 people following you, but when you start gaining a little bit of a following, you get out there. I've had great success in republishing my content at different times of the day, different days of the week. I'll separate it well, but you never— you got to realize most people are not sitting on their Google+ stream staring at it all day long. Saying like, darn Mark, he published that 4 hours ago and I saw it. But you're going to catch different people dipping in the stream at different times. So that's the only thing I would say about that is you probably can do it, but I wouldn't do it until you've got a pretty significant following. Because if it's the same 10 people, you are going to piss them off if you just repost the same stuff.

And that answer can go either way. Because there's the, the positive aspect of posting and then the other aspect. If you're posting something that's uninteresting, that people are not talking about, sharing, or commenting about on, and it doesn't engage with anyone, then reposting it a few times only increases the, the negative aspect where people will—

I agree.

So there's that side of it. Whereas what Mark's talking about, the positive aspect, if you do have something that's really interesting, something popular, something you find that interests people, well, by all means, share that again and at a different time of day and of the week, a little later on, or from a different angle.

Yeah.

There's that. So because you know it's already interesting. To people that content.

And at that point, I know Mark, you had said that you actually rewrite some of it and republish it as a little bit of a different kind of article. If I'm resharing then, like I know I have with some of these things for the conference, I went back to my original post and I didn't write a new one, I just reshared that original post. Is that the right way to do it then?

Well, because you can, when you reshare it, you can write an introduction You get that chance to write that new comment. I did it this week. I had a post with this whole thing that everybody's excited about with the way that Google's changed the +1 now. I don't think we should get all into that tonight, but they've made the +1 now a little more elevated, that it can cause a recommended post into people who circle you. So before, where the +1 was just something that you could casually just, you know, I like that, +1. Now you have to realize when you're +1ing a post, it could be generating a recommendation of that post to other people who circle you. Well, that aside, you know, there was a lot of controversy over it, there was a lot of people misunderstanding it and voting it. Early on I wrote a post that was helpful to a lot of people in explaining what this does and doesn't do, and who does and doesn't see the post. And a lot of people said, oh, finally, you know, I understand that, it's great.. As the week went on, I saw the discussion evolving, I learned more about it, I saw other people influence my thinking about it. I reposted that same post I think 4 times, but each time I wrote a different introduction to it and I included like, alright, you know, 2 days have gone by, now we see this, or somebody help me understand that. So we call that repurposing of the content and staying with the flow. If you can find a way to take an old piece of your content that was successful before, that people liked before, and bring it into a new situation, give it a new light, give it a new spin, then even people who have seen it before will still enjoy seeing it.

And the key to that is that it was successful.

It was good content. What Joshua said is like, yeah, don't— listen to what your public is saying, don't beat a dead horse. If you've got dead horse posts out there, just throwing them more at people is not going to make it better.

Now, Karen did bring up another good question. A lot of us as bloggers, and I guess a lot of other people do too that have brand pages, will post something to our personal page and then repost it to our brand page. Is there a correct way to do that that's more beneficial?

I don't think there's any rule that you can say about that. The only thing is I try to keep it seperate. Everything I'm going to share right now is just my own way of doing it. It's not the rule. I don't want anybody to make it a rule. It's just what works for me. I post more from my personal profile than my brand page for a couple of reasons. One, I think you can get more quickly, you can get more relationships and influence from a personal profile. People will warm up to a person long before they will a brand. So that's one reason why I do that. So I kind of save my most important stuff and I will republish it through my brand page, but at a different time. Because there are, not everybody, but there's now a significant probably intersection of people who follow both my personal page and my agency's brand page. So that's a great way that I can increase the audience of a piece of content, but I just carefully, I don't go bam, share it, now share it from me because a lot of people are going to see it one after the other in the stream and that's annoying. The other thing is that you can do strategically to help your brand page, and this I've done a lot, is you create a great piece of content say on your blog, post it first on your brand page and then a little bit later share it, but share it share on your personal profile from the brand page. That way it carries over the branding, it carries over the link to the brand page. I think a lot of people ended up following my Veronte brand page because I did that. Because they would see like, Mark shared this great content, where did it come from? Well, it came from this Veronte. They might not even have known it was my company. They click through the link or they hover the link and follow it. So that's another way that you can use that. Josh, I don't know if you have any different ideas or practices on that.

Yeah, well, that is good, and that is true. But still bringing it back to the important factor is if the content is of interest to other people, then that's the most important thing. Getting that content and sharing it through your business site page and then sharing it through your profile, that is a good thing. I think the— at least what I have seen in many industries, probably the most difficult thing about using— bringing your business into social media is how to apply it, how to make it interesting to other people. Because so much, so many businesses are just not that interesting to most people within the social realm. A lot of people, they just want to look at funny pictures and things like that. So finding a way to make that interesting in the social media article that I mentioned earlier Um, I have a, a subtopic called Captivate and Arouse. So that's where you think about your business and what aspects of it are, are interesting to other people. And once you could find the key, you, you're gonna have to play around with it a lot and maybe do a lot of different things, try a lot of different things. Right, from different viewpoints and aspects. You can also look at some of the content that has done well related to your business online. Search and see what are people interested in, what do they interact with the most. And then what— but once you find the key, once you click in, well then that's, that's golden because then your efforts start to become more viral. And that is the icing on the cake, since this is a food bloggers community. Icing on the cake. If your content can go viral and people really are interested in it, they plus it, share it, then all these other things we're talking about, you know, which page should I share it and how should I share it, what time, is becomes almost irrelevant because everyone will start to share it. And that doesn't happen all the time, but once you do, and that is something you should really think about and maybe even bring some creative minds in with you, with your business, to talk about.

Let me share a quick real-life story about that and make that intensely practical, because I get this a lot. I deal with a lot of companies that are boring companies. With Brand Pages. And what do you do? Let me give you an example. One of my clients is a warehouse automation company. Wow, exciting, huh? Everybody standing up and cheering like they want to go to that site, right? We got warehouse automation. So they were languishing on social media and things like, they were just posting pictures of shelves and conveyor systems and boy, that's just so surprised nobody is +1ing that. And I was sitting and talking with them, we were just kind of sitting around talking about their business and what they were in it. He just kind of casually mentioned this whole thing about how in cooperation with Walgreens department stores down in South Carolina, they built this warehouse that was specifically built to be— the systems in it were built to be friendly to mentally and physically challenged people. And long story short, it's this incredible success. They have the highest productivity of any Walgreens distribution center in the entire country. Entirely staffed, this huge, huge distribution center, high-tech distribution center, entirely staffed by mentally and physically handicapped people. People have moved across the country so that their family members who are mentally or physically handicapped could work at this place. I heard that and I say like, that's a story, that's a human story, you know, let's tell that. And it's been fantastic, you know, people connect with that. Now all of a sudden Automation is the coolest thing on earth because it enabled these people to be better human beings and have fulfilling and amazing lives. Find the story, find the human connection in whatever it is that you do, and whether that's your personal profile, your brand page. Joshua is just so right to emphasize that. It's so much more important at the end of the day than all the technical keyword optimization stuff that we could give you and how to link to this or that. If you're doing that, that stuff will happen. It'll happen automatically for you. You won't have to be manipulating it or trying to waste time thinking about it all day.

Now you just made me think of something by explaining the things, both you and Joshua, and one question I have is can you make ordinary content more interesting because you engage more with other Plussers? Can you take a hamburger that I made and a hamburger that someone else made exactly the same, but because I engage more with people and I— they know me more because of the engagement, will my hamburger do better than someone else's? I mean, can engagement make your your content more interesting.

Yes, absolutely. Uh, certainly. That is a really important aspect that we're talking about with the engagement. It's kind of like, uh, saving up brownie points or something like that. Your engagement with other people means when you do have something they, they will look at it and consider it, whereas someone that they did not know, they may just browse past it. And you gotta realize in social media there's so much content and so many. And now in Google+, there's— if you've got a wide monitor, you're gonna see 3 streams coming down at the same time. So a lot of people prioritize their circles as well. And the people who are— they call them, call them their engagers, or their shakers and engagers, their movers, their influencers. And I build circles of what I call my sharers and influencers. I've talked about that. And those, I put that in first in line. Those are the streams that I read and look at most of the time, those people, those people who've engaged with me. The people that don't engage with me within Google+, frankly, I don't care how good their content is or how interesting it is, but I'm not interested in, in that content if they are not going to interact with me as well. So by talking with other people about their content, engaging with them in a real way, the things that you see are interesting, then you also save that up, because then— or you share some of their interesting content, and then later you have something that's interesting, they will look at that and say, oh, well, you know, I'm gonna share this. And you feed off of each other's power, you know, you grow your aura from each other and it's sticky and it gets around. So the more you interact, and that's back to the social aspect of the real world, you know, hanging out with rich people, one example that I've used, if you if you could hang out with a group of millionaires and just by hanging out and socializing with them, you would become a millionaire. Well, would you do that? Sure, you would do that. And you would interact with them all day long and you'd bring them coffee and tea and cookies and whatever. So that's very much what it is.— the system that's built into social now with Google+, with the authority and the influencers is that you've got this authority that's already built into a lot of the influencers or experts in your field and you can— that rubs off on you and it rubs off on everyone around them and the people who they interact with. So that's important. Good.

Thank you. Thank you. We did have another question here. Kristen Hall had wanted to know, how does stolen content, not shared content, influence her rankings on Google? Does it influence my ranking after the stolen content has been removed and taken down? So I'm thinking, as food bloggers, people lift our stuff all the time and republish it as their own.

They used to say that the best revenge is living well. And I say that the best revenge on— the term we use in the SEO world for people that steal your content and don't give you credit for it or try to take credit for themselves is scrapers. Sometimes it's because it's literally an audit. Sometimes it's robots. I mean, it's an automated system. They'll just scrape your content. I know I can name like 10 or 12 scraper blogs out there at least that I've found that every time I post something on the Bronte blog, in 10-15 minutes it's on their site. Well, if the best revenge is living well, the best revenge in SEO and social and search like that is being better than them. If you're doing the things that Joshua and I are talking about tonight, if you're building all this solid social credit around yourself your content is excellent, people are sharing it, you're getting all these signals on there. Don't worry about those, I don't worry about them anymore. It used to really make me angry and I don't even look at it anymore because they can't catch me. Those people always have crappy sites, they aren't doing, they're lazy. They're doing that because they're lazy. I mean if they were like us they'd be creating their own content, instead they're stealing it. But they're not They're not building real social relationships, they're not building good signals around themselves. So if you do that, and at first it may be frustrating, you may see them outranking you in the search. You know, 99% of the time you're not going to be able to find— there's not even anybody to contact at the website, you're not going to get them to take it down. Stop worrying about it, wasting your time. Be better than them, beat them at their own game. You know, whatever. I now take it as a compliment that I get scraped so much. They're detecting my stuff is really good if they're scraping it. That's my answer to that.

And it also hurts— it can hurt your reputation and, you know, without knowing it, and it'll be unspoken, but with the influencers that I'm talking about right now that are so important to engage with, if they see you've got a lot of copied content and you're always grabbing stuff that's not your own and you're not original, well then that's got the negative effect. That's not going to increase your reputation and authority. So it hurts— it would hurt the copier most of all.

Okay, yeah, you know, I think, like you said, we can spend all day long worrying about it instead of being productive and writing good content. Spending the time writing good content is going to get you so much more than spending all day trying to track down who's taking what. I know it is frustrating and it really does upset you.

It's another reason, by the way, to use authorship too.

Yes.

Authorship definitively connects your content. Google can see when I post something, it's connected to my authorship so they got that signal right away. 8:02 and 36 seconds this morning, this blog post is published, it's associated with my authorship, with my content. They see that and then they see connected to that all the goodwill that I have out there, all the great social signals that I have on Google+, all the good things pointing at my content that 2 hours later it pops up on XY— the same content pops up on XYZ blog. Google's not going to pay any attention to it. So authorship, that's another great reason for using authorship. It just secures that connection to your content and helps Google, makes Google's job even easier of identifying who does this really belong to.

You just made me think of an interesting point. Would you think that authorship then, alright, you are creating, you have your authorship tied into your blog, you have it tied into Google, they know you wrote it, everyone knows you wrote it. That's almost like a copyright at that point, isn't it? Without getting technically as a copyright?

You just registered it with Google as an article that you wrote. Very much so, and I think that's what a lot of people refer to as a digital signature, and that idea has been around for a long time. I personally think that Google could do a lot better job with it. I think they could get a lot more sophisticated with it. I'm in personal contact with some people out there in the open source community who are trying to invent something that would actually be more portable and more even secure kind of authorship ID. But I'm not giving up on Google Authorship because it's tied into Google. It's so powerful. But essentially, yes, it is like that. It's putting that registered trademark on your stuff. And if you think of Google as being the land that you live in, the government, the land that you live in, then you've registered with the right place. I think that's a good way to think about it.

And if you find interesting content or something that you want to use, I'm not talking about copying a straight picture or something like that. But for example, I've written some news summary articles where I summarize a lot of content. When you take some content to— and use snippets and portions of that and quote it and cite it and you add to that, well then that's part of— it's called a fair use. There's fair use in copyright where if you bring something, and that's A lot of the parodies fall under that fair use. If you bring something and you add to something in a contributory way, so whereas that— and you're introducing it to a new audience, then those are some of the primary factors in falling under the fair use guidelines. Is if you have brought something and then you, you've added to it, brought out new aspects, and, you know, maybe you found a funny side of something, or, or you wanted to analyze something, and you're not just doing, you know, straight-out full copying of content, etc., then that can be a positive aspect, and, and you will see people, uh, uh, respond to that in a positive way if what you're doing is actually contributing back to the other user. You're citing that user. That means you're giving them authority, you're giving them some PageRank, and, uh, you're referring back to their content, and you're talking about it, and I think, and adding to that. So that can be the good aspect, and we should see that a lot more. And I think that is the bottom line that Google+ has about sharing, is not just straight share, share, share content. And you can do that, and that's clicking on the share button, in other words. But when you do that, you should add to that and write about it. What is interesting to you? Because you're sharing with your own audience. How did this affect you? Why do you want to share it? And that's, that's really important, and that's very important towards the engagement factor as well.

Another little tip that I shared this morning, I think, will be relevant to this audience. I shared this morning in another one of your conference sessions, Dennis Littley, that we found effective is a lot of times when something is stolen, you know, one of your images turns up on another blog or a large piece of your content is quoted without credit, sometimes it's not malicious, it's not stealing, it's just people that, you know, people have this impression that it's on the web, I can just take it and use it, and they don't mean to be thieves, they just don't know any better. And instead of being angry at them or threatening legal action or asking to take it down, a lot of times it can be an opportunity. What we do is we reach out to them and say, hey, you know, you used my photo here, or you used a big piece of my one blog post. That's awesome. Would you mind, you know, giving me credit and linking back to me? And they'll say, oh yeah, sure, you know, be glad to. Sorry I didn't do that. And what you've just done is you've created a link back to your site. Links are valuable. That's good positive link building. There's nothing shady about that. You're asking for something that you should get. You should get that link and that credit if they're using your stuff. So do some of that too. Look, if you don't think it's a nefarious thing, if it looks just like an innocent error of ignorance, reach out to the person, see if they'll link back to you, and you've gained a friend and you've gained a link.

Absolutely. Good advice. Again, be positive. Be engaging, be positive. Don't dwell on the negative and just don't talk about yourself the whole time. You want to engage with people and get to know people just like you would in real life. That's Google+. That's why it's growing the way it's growing. I have people all day long saying, "Well, why do I have to join?" join. Well, you don't. I'm not going to beg you to join anymore. If you want to use Google+, use Google+. If you don't, there's going to come a day that you're going to go, "Wow, I wish I had used Google+" because it's coming and it's going to be the law of the land whether you want to believe it or not. It's coming. There's going to be a new Marshall riding around. Facebook, I never advise anyone to leave any community they have anywhere. If you've got readers from Facebook, you should still keep those readers, cultivate those readers. But I think any extra time you spend, that's like a dead end anymore. You guys agree with that, or you think there's still a lot of life left in Facebook?

I don't indulge in some of the Facebook bashing that goes on. I have some of my friends here on Google+, they have whole communities bashing Facebook. I think it's—

It's silly to bash them, but I just think the time better spent.

Yeah, for my money, you know, it's why Josh and I are here, because we understand what we understand is that Facebook can be valuable. You know, if you have a lot of times, I think where Facebook has the best value is if your customers or your fans or whatever they, you know, whatever your community is, are already there. A lot of them are already there, then you should be there with them. That's great, but for finding new opportunities, this is the place. This is where the gold mine is happening, the gold rush. The opportunity here, as Joshua was emphasizing at the beginning, the real thing that so many people don't realize here is the tie-in to all things Google and how much Google can accelerate and expand your reach. Because I've built a large and powerful network here on Google+, right now while I'm sitting here you know, having this Hangout with you, I'm influencing other people's search results. I mean, that's crazy. You know, people are seeing different things in their search because of me, because of their relationship, their connection with me. People are finding me and following me right now. My stuff is being expanded and broadcast out. That's so valuable. So I would just say, you know, oversimplification, the kind of characterization, Facebook is great for the people you already know. Google+ is to go let the world find out, you know, that doesn't know you yet. That's where the opportunities are.

And that's the whole key. You said the world, and that's one thing different about— I think, I mean, I had a few people from around the world on Facebook, but on Google+, I am truly global, and there's no doubt about it. So I think that's really broadening your reach, and the more you broaden your reach, the more you Remember that old commercial, that shampoo commercial, "I told 2 friends and they told 2 friends and they told 2 friends." Well, I mean, to me that's kind of like what Google+ is doing and it's spreading all across the world.

Way to give away our age there, Dennis Littley.

It's a little late for that.

I want to give a shout out to Kirsten in the chat, the event chat there. She's been contributing a lot and she also just put a comment a few minutes ago very nicely thanking us and saying, that we all deserve a great libation for our work here tonight. I just want her to know that I've taken her up on that and we're indulging.

Good. Well, I think we're gonna wind it up for that. It's been a wonderful session. Thank you so much for coming in. Joshua, it was a pleasure having you here today, earlier, and last night. And Mark, same thing, great job. Thank you so much. I'm truly blessed to have so many very brilliant wonderful friends on Google+ and I will advocate it till the day I can't speak anymore and then hopefully even after that I'll nod and drool. Thank you so much. This is session 6 and I'm a little punch drunk here from being on all day of the first annual virtual bloggers conference on Google+ and we're making history in Thank you so much for being with me. Tomorrow morning at 10:30, bright and early, uh, that's New York time, we're gonna talk to Sally Eckes of the Lisa Eckes Group as she leads us through how to write a book proposal. So I hope to see you there. Thanks again, guys. I'll see you soon.

Thank you, Dennis.