Early Internet marketing involved a lot of strategics on how to manipulate audiences and sites to meet the most metrics, or relevancy signals.  Now a great deal  has changed: you must involve  more creativity to answer the question of how do I build, hype, promote and make  popular my site.  By popular, I mean  that other people will actively affirm that they like it via links to it and/or votes on social media and bookmarking sites. With the advent of web 2.0 and social media the LARGE majority of metrics that Google has used, is using and probably will use long into the future have been met.  Popularity is the coveted thing for both creative and technically savvy search marketer: it can feed a  campaign and be the most effective for targeting an audience and keywords.

The down side to this ‘ popular web’  for users is that “un-sexy” websites, or those that don’t use sensationalism in their marketing (like finance companies, for example) may lose out in rankings to sites that use more sensationalism and theatrics to gain popularity, even though the more boring site may actually be a better, and a more relevant site for visitors.  Just as the most popular news stories and movies are often factually incorrect, a great deal of the Internet is pretty worthless.  Back to my high school or chick flick analogy: it’s kind of like the jerk that gets the girl, while the nerd or “best friend” doesn’t, even though he may be  actually better for her; the “popular” website can be equally lacking in character.  As the algorithms improve, this becomes less and less the case: user generated spam eventually gives way to user filtered quality in the long-term.   In the short term, both qualities matter.

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