Sphinn, the social media site for search marketers, is shaping up. I have to say I am impressed with the way it has started to demonstrate real value. But one thing I would hate to see Sphinn suffer is “under achiever syndrome“. You know, where you try hard but stop pushing when it’s time to push the hardest, for whatever reason. We have enough of that in SEO already… SEO practitioners working for too little money, and suffering too much criticism from people who probably don’t even know how to register a domain. Sphinn doesn’t have a single article pushed past 75 Sphinns, and most are under 30. What’s with that? Why don’t you marketers Sphinn stuff? It looks weak, especially when the Diggers and Slashdot kiddies spare a glance. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is up to you. Sphinn can help promote YOU, not just the BigFish brands that dominate the SEO space. With this post and your Sphinn account, I offer you a chance to be part of history.

Sphinn this submission to make this post go to 100 and make attention history. Sites like Sphinn live off user involvement : Click to promote (or Sphinn). Often your click is more important than the story. Often who submitted the story is more important than the story. How many Sphinn’s it has can definitely be more important than the story. Is Sphinn a popularity contest? Of course! Markeitng is a popularity contest! It’s all about attention! Rand knows this. Rand is a marketer. Oh, and by the way, Rand’s picture is at the top of the “Most Sphinned” page, with his submission of a “story” that says “Sphinn is good”. Duh. Of all the marketers on Sphinn, why has no one else worked Sphinn to place themselves at the top of that page? I use the first name “Rand” and everyone knows it is Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, right? And WHY is THAT?

It only gets worse over time. The front page items get prominant placement for Sphinns. That’s why you want to go over 10 or so, to get to the front page; to get more Sphinns. That’s momentum.. just like organic SEO has momentum. I have to highlight for you underachievers out there, it is not gaming the system to work to get more Sphinns! Just as a comic book writer wants to get syndicated so more kids can read his comics, you want more Sphinns so more people will be exposed to your message! That is marketing, and I know you know that!

So why don’t you Sphinn stuff?

What about that “greatest hits” page? Appearing in the top 10 on that page adds exponential growth possibilities… everyone knows you can’t go wrong Sphinning something on there. Everyone else has already said it’s worth Sphinning! Did you ever go there? Ever Sphinn anything up? Sure you have! Was it somehting in the first ten, above the scroll? Of course it was! So those items get even more Sphinns. Will the Top Sphinned article ever get displaced? Maybe, but only by an earthquake of popularity. And in the mean time…. Rand’s face is top front and center.

Now I don’t have any problem with Rand holding that position. He’s a marketer, and he’s playing the Sphinn site to market himself. All fair in business. But I want OH SO MUCH to see the Sphinn community control the marketing power of the Sphinn site, as opposed to the BigBoys like Rand. So Sphinn this article to get it to 100 first. Just do it to prove the point. It won’t stay forever. Guys like Rand won’t leave themselves at #2 for long. But at least they should be challenged to work harder, right? I mean, sit there at the top forever because you were the first to post “Sphinn is great” and everybody agreed? Geesh. That’s like reserving SEO.com in 1995 for $75, and keeping it forever. What a great idea.

But Sphinn is not like the Internet domainname system Sphinn members are in control. Now is your chance to make a difference. Sphinn this article, to get it to be the first article with 100 Sphinns. That should be easy, since 100 is not very many. Your reward for putting my mug above Rand’s on the MostSphinned page? A back link from my blog to yours. That’s right, I’m buying votes Million Dollar Home Page style, but for the community benefit instead of cash for me. You Sphinn this article and I list you here, and we Sphinn the submision to 100 before any other gets to 100 and we make history. And what history would that be? Marketers taking control of their own community site. That’d be nice, eh?

Duh. A marketing community executes on a plan to promote itself, on it’s own site, to prove it is a community of marketers and not just a community of followers. That’s what I want to see. Come on Sebastian and Natasha and Todd, have a go. Get your link, and put your mark on the point. Tamara? Rand? Come on, Rand. I know you want the back link. Why not be the first to Sphinn this? What a statement that would make, eh? Better hurry, before Danny Sphinns it first. I can see how that would be a positive bold endorsement of “power to the members” from Danny. And everybody else. Sphinn, and email me, and get a link to your own blog. It’s that easy. How fast to 100? That’s the only unknown.

So Sphinn this article to 100. Or don’t. I don’t care, but I would love to see it, and I suspect it would help push Sphinn further down the road to becoming a true marketer’s resource community, like we need.

(True marketers will be thinking hmm… I’ll be first, and get a link, and then hope it dies down, so no one else gets a link, and I get all the link juice from John’s blog. See what I mean? Don’t let them scare you off. Sphinn it and get your back link.)

—– off to a great start! So these people should use the competitive webmastering form to send me their URLs… please limit it to something branded with your Sphinn identity if at all possible. I will link to a gun site or whatever if it’s got your real name or can be linked to you somewhere on the web (show me), but no adult sites, illegal stuff, etc. you know the drill... all rights reserved, can change at any time, won’t spam you with affiliate links to SEOBook, etc etc etc).

• Danny Sullivan
• Scott Fish
• David Wallace
• Nathan Holman
• Dazzlin Donna
• Burgo
• James Dunn
• Jimmy Floyd
• Barry Welford
• Hobo Saun Anderson
• TopRankBlog
• Todd Mintz
• DoshDosh
• Sunpost
• socialmedia David Wilson
• Simon Heseltine
• Fantomaster
• VanessaFox
• Michael Gray
• dreras Drew Stauffer
• SEOish Patrick Sexton

• SEOHome
• Hawaii SEO
• Mark Laymon AListSEO.com
• Amy Greer Closed Loop Marketing
• Paul Hancox Internet Influence Magic
• Dustin Woodard Webconnoisseur
• Cameron Olthuis Cameron Othuis
• Sergi moteurs-news
• Erik
• Benjamin Cook SEO Refugee
• Emergence Media
• Michael New
• Joseph Cerra
• Jason Bailey Best CPA Network
• Aerobe
• Rebecca
• Shell Harris Big Oak SEO
• Tanner Christensen Internet Hunger
• penbeatssword
• Andy Beard Andy Beard
• Alex
• Ben Bicais California Wineries
• Jeremy
• Shelby Garlock
• Stefan Juhl
• Scott Boyd
• Derek Edmond Cape Cod SEO
• Vince Blackham Shift SEO
• John Honeck
• dlarson104
• Marty Weintraub Duluth Guide
• Darren Moloney On SEO
• Web Professor
• Neil
• Raj Dash Internet Ultra Geek
• Rhea Drysdale Rhea Drysdale
• RuZ
• John Mueller
• Naoise Osborne Canalytics
• seoforgoogle
• Todd Emaus
• kiru4
• James Omdahl Marketing Punk
• Kimber Cook Dallas SEO
• Aviva Directory
• Syzlak Syzlak SEM
• Adam Carson
• Loren Baker Search Engine Journal
• Francis Skipper Search Matters
• akrone
• LukeRegan
• DL Perry DL Perry
• Ciaran Norris SEO Blokes
• Kevin Gibbons SEO Blog
• coolice
• ViperChill Viper Chill Blog
• Rob Watts Yack Yack
• Patrick Altoft
• Tony Ruscoe Google Blogoscoped
• Ram karthik Blogging And Making Money Online
• Lyndon Antcliff
• Tim Dineen Exposure Online
• Jim Boykin Internet Marketing
• Paul Carruthers UK SEO/SEM BLOG B10G
• seoz87 SEO Blog
• Silver Smith Natural Search Blog
• Casie Gillette KoMarketing Blog
• Jacob Wolfsheimer Wolf Trust
• Brandon Adcock
• Simon Heseltine Search Engine Tigers
• Patrick Sexton seoish
• Andrey Milyan
• Steve Wilson
• Jeremy Luebke
• Hamlet Batista Hamlet Batista
• Lisa Barone Bruce Clay Blog
• Praveen Kodur SEO Online Marketing
• Bill Slawski SEO by The Sea
• Scott
• Derick Internet Marketing Monitor
• georgiecasey
• Matt McGee Small business SEM
• Matt Webb SEO Honolulu
• PPCblogger
• Sarah de Haas Chronicles of Oxford
• Rand Fishkin SEOmoz Blog
• Sebastian X Sebastians Pamphelets
• Lucas Ng
• navdigital
• Mendax Fabryka Spamu
• Will Critchlow Monitoring Your Reputation Online
• Michael Visser Redblock.com.au
• ppcblog.co.uk

If there’s no link, it’s because the Sphinn profile didn’t have a link, I didn’t get one from you, or we made a mistake. Let me know what to fix.

Help me out here, so I can understand if we need to coin a new phrase “tight pages“.

A web page has topical content. A web page with a lot of additional, off-topic content is “bloated“. A web page full of rich content or too much content is “heavy“. A web page with too little keyword content to rank is “light“. A web page with some topical content and alot of template content is “templatic“. A web page with too much keyword content is “fat” while a page with a goodly serving is “dense“. A web page that is perfect is “optimal“or “optimized”.

So what is a web page that has nothing but the exact, keyword rich content it needs to define itself as relevant for that key phrase? I call that a “tight page“.

Sometimes Google adjusts itself in a keyword market such that it prefers “tight pages“. At that time, optimized pages that are dense but not overly fat no longer rule the SERP. They need to be “tighter”. Of course, once so adjusted, they may once again be called optimal, but in SEO discussion, one still might say “tight pages are ranking well” since it is market-specific or new.

If you’re not into the LSI style of Google optimization you may not recognize the differences between bloated and fat, or the reasons why Google make such adjustments, but that’s ok. You’ll still likely see the changes and the preferences for “tight pages” when such changes are made. I’m just looking for an easy way to refer to them.
So I think we need a new term for “tight pages“.

Please comment if you know an existing term I can use for this that SEO people will understand, or if you like this term, or if you have a better way to describe this page character. Thanks in advance.

A few years ago I was photographing surfers off the Northern California coast. My Jeep was parked at water’s edge, way out on a jetty.  I had a Canon 400MM fast telephoto lens, which is large and white like you see at NFL football games. A big lens, and very obvious. If you don’t know anything about surfing, you need to know that surfing is good when there are waves but no people, and surfing is no good when there are no waves or too many people.

I didn’t know any of the surfers, but at the end of the day I brought over my LCD player and showed them the shots. I collected some email addresses so I could send them pictures of themselves. Some had been surfing for many years, yet never had a photo of themselves on a wave.  We talked about surfing and photos, how the surfer magazines cover the events, but more importantly how they expose secret surf spots to a huge audience that subsequently shows up and crowds out the “real” surfers. “That’s your Jeep?” one of them asked me. “I almost waxed it. It’s good you came over”.

Privacy is important, even if it’s not a “guaranteed right” by legal standards. Sometimes we want privacy, even in our public lives. Yes, I had a right to shoot photos of surfers and publish them in a magazine along with a map and description of how to get to that great secret spot. But that wouldn’t make me any friends among the surfers. In their eyes, I would be exploiting them and their lives for my own gain. A shitty way to behave.

And that is why my car windshield would have been waxed. So I could experience that shitty feeling in my own life. And, I was told, if I ever show up at a surf spot where they don’t already know I’m cool, I should beware the seemingly friendly surfer walking up to me and my Big Lens with a smile and an outstretched hand.  Chances are good the hand will be coated with surf wax, and the fingers will divert away from handshake pose at the last second, to swipe across the front of my lens. Surf wax, in case you didn’t know, if very very hard to clean off glass (especially a high-end photographic lens).

Privacy is like courtesy - it’s required for quality of life, yet not legislated. We owe it to each other. Although we can’t always afford to guarantee it, we should always try.

Which is why Google is pissing people of (again). Google’s StreetViews program exploits people’s public lives, by publishing it for the world to see.  The poor social skills of technologists lead them to all sorts of uncomfortable geeky situations, and it seems Google is making that mistake again. People picking their noses, visiting alternative book stores, getting lectured by traffic cops, all published by Google for the world to ridicule see.  Oh Google, you’re geeky immaturity is getting you in trouble again.

Street View vans roving around us, pointing cameras at us, so Google can exploit our public private lives.  Thank god we have surf wax, eh?