Are Internet Algorithms giving Mary Shelley a run for her Frankenstein Monster?

By Hector Cisneros

Courtesy of Flickr

It’s almost the 200^th anniversary of the classic horror story Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. So, what’s this got to do with marketing? Lately, there have been a slew of news stories about how advertising and newsfeeds have gone awry doing everything from favoring a political candidate, and allowing hostile foreign governments to influence elections, to allowing advertisers to target hate speech or dissidents without the search and social media giants knowing what’s going on! In this episode of Working the Web to Win, we will take a close look at the Frankenstein results being produced by search and ad algorithms now being used by the internet giants. In fact, we will see how these scary results foreshadow the future of Artificial Intelligence and its uses in the 21^st century.

Is Your Website a Serial Killer?

Courtesy of  Flickr

By Carl Weiss

Nobody wants to upset the 800 lb. gorilla in the room named Google.  Yet, that is precisely what many business owners do when they employ serial sites to do their bidding.  Google hates serial sites with a passion.  That’s because these online clones attempt to generate position by the cookie cutter method, where the same site is used to target a number of individual keywords.  If the Googlebots catches you using serial sites, all your sites could wind up sandboxed (or at the very least lose ranking). 

Has Google Given Everyone the Bird with its Pigeon Update?

By Carl Weiss

Courtesy of www.dailymail.co.uk

Many website owners were startled in late July when their page rankings on Google suddenly flew the coop.  When the dust and feathers had cleared, it was apparent that the world's most popular search engine was once more tinkering with its algorithm.  However, it wasn't until quite recently that Google not only admitted that they had once again thrown a monkey wrench into the works, but they had also given it a name: Pigeon.  In this article, we'll discuss what "the flock" this means to businesses hoping to achieve Page One ranking on Google.  We'll also let you know how this algorithm change now affects local businesses, who previously ranked organically, may now be forced to pony up money for pay-per-click campaigns.  And that's not chicken feed.