Infographics are here to stay
it’s all Matt Cutts fault and we all warned him in 2007 at SES San Jose
During a panel at SES this video was played
Matt thought it was funny but when he was questioned about relevancy he wasn’t worried, but I just didn’t get it how could a listing site specialising in home rentals get Link equity from a spoof a SEO Video neither could Greg Boser
from seomoz
(Rand) posed two questions to the panel:
To Greg Boser – why shouldn’t the Rentvine viral video be interpreted by Google as a signal that the Rentvine domain is valuable/unique/interesting?
Greg responds that while it should be making that viral video rank for its own keywords/topics, the current algorithm from Google rewards “trust” and linkbait/viral content helps to build that trust. Off-topic viral content, according to Greg, is a terrible signal that the content on a site that’s commercially targeted will actually have value to the searcher. He says that “just because you (Rand) and Neil (referring to Neil Patel who’s in the front row) can spam Digg,” doesn’t mean your clients’ sites are relevant. And, besides that, those links are equally paid, as linkbait development services from companies like Neil’s and Rand’s are very expensive.
To Matt Cutts – from an engineering perspective, would it not be preferable to algorithmically detect paid links, rather than request that webmasters use them voluntarily? After all, what percentage of web developers/marketers have ever (or will ever) hear of “nofollow?”
Matt agrees that yes, indeed the first line of defense is always algorithmic. He seems to change positions a bit on the topic and says that “nofollow” is really for publishers who want to protect themselves from losing their ability to pass PageRank/linkjuice. I’d love to get some clarification from Matt about why, in that case, do they seem so intent on webmasters using “nofollow” when they buy links?
I even asked Matt what if he paid a production company to create this.. Matt still wasn’t worried the way I see it is Matt is worried about people buying links, webmasters have the option to link or not link to other websites if they do it freely what the issue ?
roll on the Infographic debate which kinda came to ahead when someone on reddit decide to spill the beans and how the SEO community is gaming the rest of the world
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/
Then a post on techcruch (these are the people that have used these infographics in the past lol) came out with http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/infographics-all-the-way-down/
creating a viral video, Infographic or even a T op 100 a bit of link leverage is OK, it’s not against Google TOS and if I wanted to create a infographic on wobbly breasts and I get 100 links from it so what you ddn’t have to link to me !
or what if I created content like : http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/seo-101-common-mistakes.html
I didn’t ask these people to link to me :

4 Comments
Andy Beard - http://andybeard.eu
Some of them aren’t done quite as well as they should be and one important difference is that from memory the reality blog didn’t specify anchor text or anything – no pre-prepared link.
To be honest the closest alternative is glitter for myspace – same skillset and same sammy links… only it suits the linkerati/gullible.
Dave Dugdale - http://www.rentvine.com/
Wow Dave, it has been a long time since I created that video. Glad to see that it was one to be remembered. 🙂
Ah, I guess it worked for being remember, but as link bait goes I guess it didn’t work very well since you didn’t link to it above. 🙂
DaveN
but Dave, Did you noticed you got a comment link 🙂
Dave Dugdale - http://www.rentvine.com/
Yes, I did! Thanks for that Dave. 🙂
Is it me or does it seem like in the past year people are not as interested in SEO as they were back when I created that video? I have not been to an SEO conference in a while and I’ve not done anymore link bait since Twitter and Facebook use nofollow and people just don’t blog anymore (expect for you Dave – keep it up).