How not to run a facebook promotion

Over the past month, Nissan Australia has been running a public online promotion – managed by their own internal staff titled Micraspotting (twitter hash tag #micraspotting), to win a car and some vouchers. The prizes were won by spotting random photos on random partner facebook company pages in the quickest time per week and over the whole 36 days of the competition.

As Search Engine Optimisation experts and social media / online promotion fans in general, we watched much of the exciting competition. During the competition there were several odd occurrences, and possibly unethical and illegal behaviour. More facts and cries of scam seem to be coming to light hourly.

In the end, Zac Martin (“Digital Strategist” at George Patterson Y&R), a male described as “BFF” – best friends forever (who says that?) of the internal employee and competition manager Simon Oboler ended up winning the major prize. Another friend, who some claim was a girlfriend of Simon, also won a high value weekly prize.

Since the competition was a game of skill, knowledge, intelligence and time, the odds of both winners (out of an estimated 3 to 4 thousand entrants) being very close friends to the employee who was running the promotion is more than a little curious. This has obviously led to a lot of suspicions and even anger from some other vocal facebook fans and other media outlets.
Such a result is not impossible, since employees would naturally encourage their friends to enter to spread the word (and would be some of the initial and earliest entrants). That is how social media works, and was within the terms and conditions as far as we know.
We are not aware of any proof of any direct passing of clue answers on to entrants/illegal behaviour occurring, and would be impossible to prove. They could have genuinely won, and being early adopters into the competition would have given them a substantial but fair advantage.

However, due to the skill required to win the prize we find it absolutely astonishing that 2 friends won, and the social media channels are starting an uproar about this and throwing around several accusations. Some people are raising valid concerns, but some are flying off the deep end, in what has been an otherwise fairly well crafted social media campaign.

We are not aware of any proof that would indicate cheating.
At this point we see no reason why they do not deserve their prize (and they personally do not appear to have broken any conditions), but certainly there are several other entrants that may have been shafted out of a prize, due to altering the terms and conditions and adjusting the results, as has been admitted by Nissan. These people, if not all entrants too should also be fairly rewarded.

The main issues we have are that are fact are that Nissan Australia has admitted to manually adjusting times for 1 or more of the bonus clues, which could have changed the overall times for some by hundreds of hours or more. By adjusting these times, giving some an advantage, and giving disadvantage to others, it is a fact that the overall spot times are subjectively changed, and would have definitely changed the rankings of many entrants.

The reason for them manually biasing the data this way was given with the reason that the terms and conditions had changed part way through the competition. Making such adjustments, whilst possibly against government body regulation rules or illegal, would have definitely given a bias to some, after the competition has already started.
Given the fact that a statement was made by Nissan Australia on their facebook feed that such action would be taken (and was) that was contrary to the edited term, and was at best confusing to many, it makes an unethical change to terms and conditions even more questionable.

Such manual adjusting of both the terms and times in the database could have easily turned some one ranking in first place to then losing several positions, and turn someone with a discovery time of hundreds of hours and a low ranking, into a person ranking in first position, and “unfairly” winning a prize.

Even if run with their intention of best ethics and ethical rules, and non intentional rigging (not purposefully rigged to a particular individual’s favour) this would have affected the overall rankings and altered the entire leaderboard. If it changed weekly or overall first place winners or not, we can not say without analysing the secret data.

Even Qantas did better with their embarrassing #qantasluxury PR campaign (which has been a huge laughing matter on Twitter, and widely cited as yet another public relations blunder), and at least offered some gifts to their customers.

So what can we learn from this?
What you should not do in online competitions and promotions is change the terms and conditions half way through.
You should definitely not manually adjust entrants and rankings, this will inevitably bias some entrants and disadvantage some, taking away the objectiveness and fairness.
Even if no intentional rigging has occurred, such mismanagement and the fact that
adjusting the times inevitably gave an unfair advantage to some brings your whole brand into question, and defeats the whole purpose of you running the promotion in the first place. Rigging or not, the fumbling, moving the goal posts and complaints now leaves thousands of people with a bitter taste in their mouth.

If you do stuff up like they have, you should do your best to admit your mistakes and offer a generous prize/gift to those concerned, not something cheap like a showbag/pyjamas as some have.
It is also a better idea to outsource such promotions to a dedicated firm of social media management, not run by internal staff (who may have little experience), to leave it in the hands of experts. This way you mitigate much of the brand damage and legal responsibility if something does go wrong, and you’re more likely to get a smoother running, a positive campaign and a better result in the end.

Business owners looking to gain many more customers and better rankings and results from Google and Facebook should get in touch with us today.

Prevent website spam email & comments

Website spam comments and emails sent through your website contact and message forms can and should be prevented, but not all comments.

We’ll discuss the top 5 reasons to stop SPAM, and then tell you how you to set up the invaluable facilities to help stamp it dead in it’s tracks.

Leaving comments open on your website can be a fantastic opportunity for your readers and customers to discuss your content, products and services. If you engage your visitors not only will they appreciate the interaction they are also likely to come back again. The more they come back, the more likely they are to buy from you.
If not managed correctly a comments feature also allows a fantastic opportunity to receive a truckload of SPAM.

What are the top 5 reasons to properly stop website spam email and comments?

1. SPAM comments on your website can hurt your SEO.
Such comments can damage your rankings in the search engines. If you link to one (or perhaps hundreds- as we have found on one client’s website) of “bad neighbourhood” sites; certain types of dodgy industries and dodgy websites, Google can punish you.

2. SPAM Links and comments are often generated by automated software.
The auto generated text uses poor grammar, and is almost always overly general, so it can be plastered on thousands of sites in an attempt to bypass webmasters screening methods.
Poor grammar and spelling mistakes can be detrimental to your SEO campaign.

3. Why advertise dodgy products on your own website?
Your business website should not link to other websites it is not familiar with or have any connection with. It is fine to link to other businesses and other sites of interest, just be selective and make sure the sites are all reputable.

4. “If we let one of you in, we would let everyone in”
Spammers use tools to test the waters with their junk content, often with randomised letters and text that seems to make no sense.
If one of their test comments or links gets through, especially without any moderation, this can alert their software that your website is an easy target, and open the floodgates! Once this happens, expect to receive hundreds or thousands of SPAM emails.

5. Website vulnerabilities can shut your business down
Most webpages are poorly designed by people with no security knowledge, and can allow SQL injections and other simple forms of abusing and hacking your website without your knowledge. This could be happening right now! Not just hackers, anyone with basic knowledge can use tricks to hijack your own website into sending thousands or millions of SPAM emails, making you the spammer. You could lose a lot of customers and you personally could get into legal trouble!

Long story short, not only does SPAM waste your time and resources, it will hurt your ranking in search engines like Google.

With simple systems and programs 100% of SPAM can be prevented on your website.
If you require help to stop junk spam email being sent and received via your website forms and clogging your email inbox, or you wish to prevent your site being hijacked, damaging your reputation and costing you money, we can implement extremely quick and cost effective measures.

Everyone with a website should have these systems in place to prevent SPAM, do you? Contact us to find out how.

SEO Courses Melbourne

Expert Melbourne SEO courses for beginners through tech heads and SEO training in general is usually not very cheap. Control Alt Elite are so passionate about Search Engine Optimisation, and helping the local Melbourne and Australia community, that we often run free education courses to small business owners to promote your business to the surge of online customers eager to buy your product.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can dramatically benefit local Melbourne businesses, it will help your page rank higher in search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and increase the amount of visitors who will find your business on the web. How would you like to capture every person looking for the service or product you offer? You would no longer need to advertise, people would be knocking down your down to get what you are selling.

If you are a charity or non-profit organisation, we would love to offer you some free SEO consulting services and advice (limited availability where our time permits). We share your dream of making the world a better place.

For all other Melbourne businesses that are out to make a profit and grab market share from your bigger competitors, we are planning our next education lecture. When these simple lessons and material are applied, we promise doing so will help you be better optimised to rank well in search engines. We are also available for consulting and professional SEO services to Melbourne, Australian clients, and worldwide. For quick and easy results, we handle all the technical SEO tasks an d hard work, leaving you to do what you do best; run your business.

Get in contact with Control Alt Elite SEO now to find out more and get started today. We are based in St Kilda, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Flash and SEO

Flash and SEO do not mix. One piece of advice we have to anyone looking at getting their website designed is to avoid Flash as much as possible.
As common as Adobe Flash is, it is not a web standard. We predict it will be phased it within a couple of years with the onset of the new HTML 5 standard.

Why should you avoid using Flash with SEO?
If you care about SEO and how your web page will rank in Google then you’ll want to avoid Flash heavy sites. Why? Because currently, search engines like Google can not read any text contained within a Flash script. Google has made advances in their ability to index certain Flash content, and it is likely within a year or so Google will have the technology and resources to be able to understand and read animated text, human speech or any other content contained within Flash websites and files, but it is likely never to fully support it, or favour it for SEO purposes.
If you’re whole site or sections are contained within a Flash script, including the main menu, text content, banner headers etc, all Google will see is a blank page. This is terrible for optimisation. Google will have no basis to rank your site for any particular keywords, or at least severely limit it.

Not only is it bad for SEO, any Flash on a website viewed with an iPhone or iPad will not be visible. With these products growing market share, you may be seriously limited your websites visibility, and hurting your bottom line.

Some website designers, in particular graphic designers, love to use Flash in their websites designs. It looks pretty, but little do they know you can do just about everything Flash does without using Flash, and make it user friendly and SEO friendly!

Whilst it is possible to apply SEO to a website built with Flash, you are restricting the potential. Without an aggressive link building campaign Google will rank a website with visible relevant text above a site that relies on Flash. Avoid Flash and SEO.

Does Australian hosting affect SEO?

Does having your website hosted with an Australian host help SEO, or a US host affect rankings? Will it have a positive effect on SEO or have no benefit on where you rank? It’s a bit of a grey area, as is all of Google, but we have tested and studied the benefits of both, and know what works and assists our rankings best. Can of worms opening in 3, 2, 1….

As long as you have a .com.au top level domain Google wont see it as anything but Australian, you cant even tell it to NOT be Australian in Google’s webmaster tools.
We even have US hosted, US domains (.com / .org) ranking well for Australian searches, just by setting the Google webmaster tools option as Australian).

But it’s a matter of degree.

Officially Google says the IP address/location does matter in these issues.

But Matt Cutts word isn’t 100% reliable, and is intentionally vague.

Sure, without any other geographic SEO applied to the site to steer Google in the most relevant direction to determine the country, by itself IP address will be a deciding factor.  This is easily overcome with simple SEO tricks.

What Matt doesnt say, and my reasoning it could matter is the only practical impact would be server load time VS distance, which does impact SEO. If you were Google, what site would you rank higher, a site that takes 1 minute to load, or one that takes a second? Naturally, due to the physical factors of network technology, a website stored on a server in the USA or UK or anywhere on the other side of the world has to travel further over the internet before it reaches your computer in Melbourne than an Australian hosted one. However this does not by default mean it will be faster, and often is not.

You might get a slow Australian host, making it rank worse for SEO factors. The difference between most hosts will make little difference to SEO compared to a poorly coded website that is not well designed by website designers who can make a well coded and efficiently run site. We see sites all the time that would rank far better if only their site structure and backend was programmed more smoothly, in fact most sites are effected by these SEO problems.

In reality, what Matt does not say is that the server location in the scheme of all SEO factors summed together holds practically no sway compared to other SEO factors if you were to rank them with an assigned percentage weight. When you do your Search Engine Optimisation the right way, and put in place all the geographic pointers, IP address makes extremely little to no difference at all to results, nor give any power to improve ranking results based on location. We have disproven this time and time again.  There are other more important factors that do affect geographically relevant rankings much more than IP address, and most definitely will hurt or improve your position in the search engines.
From my own extensive testing and work the benefit/penalty difference is negligible as US hosting is the standard and it would be impractical to get penalised. In any event you can tell Google you are an Australian targeted site with the TLD or in Google’s Webmaster Tools as a first step towards steering the relevancy towards Australian users. It should (and has for me) nullified this every time.

With the sites we experiment with and host, we now only have 1 site hosted on Au hosts, and its exponentially more expensive. We only keep it there because the site was bought off someone else for playing with and testing the SEO/pagerank/authority, and didnt want to set off any red flags changing hosts/host info in the whois information.

Non Au hosting has been working for us. If having Au hosting on top of that could have pushed up the rankings even more is hard to say, as all of our sites already do very well.
Many Au hosts are actually just US host affiliates, so be careful not to get shafted that way if you are considering paying through the nose for Australian expensive hosting.

You won’t NOT rank for Australian searches with US hosting. We have position 1 with US domains and US hosting for some Australian Google searches, as do thousands of other people/websites/seo experts, but Au hosting may give you a very tiny boost. i.e. server speed, which would also impact conversions to a small degree, especially if your site is media heavy.

All things considered we say just go for the most reliable host.

We highly recommend Host Gator, you get about 20 times the bandwidth/services and support than most Australian hosts, and more than most US hosts.

Use coupon cheaphost4aus for 25% off here: http://controlaltelite.com.au/hostgatordeal

We feel they offer the best service at the best value, and is the most feature packed of any web host we know.