Hello and welcome back to the un-Official Sphinn Awards, or the Sphinners. When we left off over at Search Engine People, we had just given out some dazzling hardware to some of your favourite Sphinn- addicts;

The Frustration and Futility Award
The Fast Fingers Award
Spread the Love Award

Be sure to check those out if you missed it.

Sponsor; The second half of our program is brought to you by - Matt Cutts’; Link Spam assassin. If you’re building your own search engine, then this cutting edge software is for you! No more endless reams of spammy results, no more worries about 3 way links, paid links and general link spam manipulation.... Now you can play with the big boys!!! Get Matt Cutt’s; Link Spam Assassin today!

Now back to the festivities… let’s meet our next Sphinner winners!

Hot or Not - A Sphinn-o-ween Tale

I decided to spend an hour of my evening last night amusing myself some numbers. Ultimately, it ended up dragged me along giggling and snittering into the night - I do get carried away you know. You see, after my recent rant about some oddities and amusements at the expense of the crowd at Sphinn. I began thinking about some of Jeff’s number crunching, while I don’t have the patience to go into the depth he did, I was curious, possibly a tad over tired and just had to know;

What do some of the top stories ( Hot Topics) on Sphinn have in common? How is the editorial pie being dispensed? With some due-diligence and a few pots of tea, I cracked the code. Now the truth can be told… muuuaahh ha ha haaa. I have concocted a devious plan that any of you bright lights out there can use to get yourself to glory and greatness in the Sphinn-o-sphere!

But remember…..

Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught. -- William Shakespeare; English dramatist & poet (1564 - 1616)

…and away we go ….

Some like it Hot - the Sphinn domination plan! ( tongue planted firmly in cheek)

I loosely based a ‘Hot’ commodity level of at least 25% of total submissions, meaning that to be a top dog you had to have at least 1 in 4 stories that are going ‘Hot’, and here's what I found;

A rant and a ramble into the Sphinn-o-sphere

Oh my freaking GOD!!! -- Here’s a new one… Marty ‘Sphinned’ some Sphinn comments that Lyndon made. This is just getting too funny. If things weren't already freaking me out over there, now people are actually starting to treat comments on the site as a 'News Story' - which in themselves are merely a poor excuse for a message board. Talk about redundant. This reminds me of marketing folks that ‘Blog about Blogging’ - Oh, and the actual comments of Lyndon’s were in response to Marty 'confirming' that the nepotism is still alive and well. 

The funny part? Well, it seems that even the one ABOUT the comments was a ‘Hot Story’ - according to the Sphinions ( the minions of the Sphinn Idol). Day by day I see more crap rising to the top over there and some actually interesting stuff that gets no more than a few hours of play on the ‘What's New ’ page. It is the same people over-and-over that are magically the purveyors of good information it would seem. I see the opposite happening, the Power-Sphinners are submitting just about anything they come across because the minions have convinced them they can’t miss and some pretty interesting stuff never sees the light of day.

How about this one – good for a giggle;

Blogging about bloggin. Diggin’ about Diggin and stumbling all over stumbled upon. Every story has a ‘Sphinn’ to it these days huh?

I was chatting with some one the other day and told them that writing for the marketing plan and optimizing for the search engines can have some consequences that may not be all together obvious.

I always liked listening to MC giving the company line (and personal?) of ‘build a quality site’ for reasons of getting natural links or for perceived quality from a search engine. I like this from the standpoint of conversions more than anything. It is the end product/service/offering of the site/blog/whatever that will dictate the actions of the visitors. Getting hung up on obtaining visitors at the cost of the offering, seems unsound.

If people get hung up on baiting with ‘Title Grabbers' and ‘flavour of the day’ posts – Digg-able stuff – they can miss the entire model of what they are trying to do. A brand is a brand.. person, place or thing, there is an identity.  The same can be said for search optimization, in that folks can start trying to please the search engines over pleasing the end user. I have seen this many times and finding the happy balance is important.