BI Revolution

PageRank Matters
We love it when goofy stupid people say stupid things. But we hate it when friends who should know better say goofy stupid stuff. The other day at a lunch with SEOs and web marketing friends from around my Durham, NC home a friend who should know better said, "PageRank (PR) doesn't matter anymore". 

I pointed out that PR is one of the few FREE and universal metrics. I went on a bit of a rant about how any metric can be modeled into significance. The new PR is a valuable, universal (everyone is treated equally by Google more or less) and FREE metric capable of helping anyone's we marketing. 

This post discuses why PR is important and what THEIR (competitor) PR can teach you Google uses PR the way an instructor uses a pointer. They hold up and reward examples of what they want. If your competitor's have PR 2 to 4 points higher than you then emulate what they are doing.

Never stop at emulation. Once your site's "emulation" "cost of poker" feet are under it DISRUPT and reset your industry's deck. Emulation + disruption is one of the formulas teams I've managed made more than $30M in B2C commerce sales.

I paid for lunch to show my friend his momentary brain fart was okay (lol). M  

**** Added a correction from my friend Mark Traphagen. PR, at least what you can access with free tools, is DEAD. Mark recommends the paid tool we use (MOZ.com). Shouldn't be a huge surprise that FREE is gone. All great FREE things cost money now. We've used MOZ.com for customer work, but thought we could model with PRChecker too. Not so much as it turns out sadly. Appreciate Mark's note. M 

Klout, Context & Links
This post links to my G+ summary in prelude to my http://www.curatti.com blog post tonight. Here are some preliminary thoughts on the page of notes I took during Dixon Jones talk.

Links & The Real Value of Content
Dixon works at Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com/ ). Majestic is asking the right question - what is the value of a link. They've even created tools that help intelligently answer that question.

"Inbound links" as a measurement is clouded by "bot spam". In a great example of the power of the "flow" tool Dixon shared. Even more powerful was an example of Majestic SEO vs. two competitors. On a purely inbound link review Majestic doesn't win.

But are all of those links valuable? Value is contextual and any spammy ways of inflating inbound link numbers need to be discovered and factored out.

Once links are run through Majestic SEO's "trust flow" tool evaluating where links came from and the respective trustworthiness of sites sending links in Majestic wins the comparison.We finally have a tool to separate white and black hats.

Think of that for a second. If you were to simply use aggregate inbound links you would buy ads with Majestic's competition or, and this is worse, you might think the competition's inflated (probalby by spam) value is something you should buy.

Once the Majestic SEO tool separates wheat from chafe a more accurate and "influential" picture emerges. SEOs and Internet marketers know how to parse page spread, social following and inbound links to pierce the veil of most who spam, but, for an outsider, "most links" may translate into "most trusted".

There is the web's biggest rub. Since the web is an interconnected system discovering if real people who have real value are passionate about a site tool, or brand with metrics such as high inbound links or big pagespread (pages in Google) is the only way to make an informed decision UNTIL Majestic wrestled context and content to the ground.

Curagmai & Majestic
The reason our Startup Factory funded startup Curagami and Majestic fit together like Lego blocks is relationships between a site and its 1% Contributors, 9% Supporters and 90% readers. Curagami helps FIND the Contributors, Supporters and Readers and Majestic helps define each of member of those "tribes" by their CONTEXTUAL influence. I may not have high Klout and be irrelevant for a conversation about women's fashion, but be perfect to help discuss cycling (since I rode a bicycle across America in the summer of 2010). .

If the first job is to FIND Contributors, Supporters and Readers and the second is to ask them to JOIN with Contributors and Supporters high on the Ambassadors list then the 3rd job is to contextually empower advocates in each group. We know the future is about community and real people not bots are the building blocks of online community.

What Dixon shared today and Majestic SEO has been working hard on is helping marketers know what kind of ASK will work best for Jill, John and Bob. Jill might know women's fashion, pets and be a car mechanic in her spare time. John may know email marketing, gourmet cooking and wines. Bob may know finance and cycling.

Curagami helps find 'em & Majestic helps define 'em in order to create an ASK that works. Powerful and very cool tool since the future is about building community and not every Contributor, Supporter and Reader who visits your site is the same. As we begin to create "rich personas" thanks to tools such as Majestic and Curagami our content relevance will go up, and up and UP.

If you are thinking more content relevance = more LOVE and MONEY we agree :). M

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

What do 24,000 ideas look like? Ecologist Eric Berlow and physicist Sean Gourley apply algorithms to the entire archive of TEDx Talks, taking us on a stimulating visual tour to show how ideas connect globally.