Moving at the Speed of Light!

The world moves faster and faster everyday. Technology has been the key to creating new efficiencies and eliminating many wastes in both time and money. It’s had a tremendous impact on productivity, touching almost every category and industry.

Each day we have more and more data on which to make decisions. Most of these decisions aren’t critical or life threatening. But some are!

Acting on important data, making judgments and decisions about life changing issues isn’t easy. And, because technology gives us information faster, we have to be ready to make those judgments and decisions, FASTER. If you’re looking at a potential disaster, you’ve got to do your best to solve the situation quickly, avoiding a “train wreck”. It seems like there are more and more of these kinds of situations lately.

I was thinking back to the incredible actions by US Airways Captain Sullenberger a few weeks ago, who made the life-saving decision to land his aircraft in the Hudson. Flying can be very unforgiving. Things happen quickly and multiple dynamics and systems are required to keep a passenger aircraft safely in the air. I know this from personal experience as a pilot.

I hate to think what might have happened if someone less experienced had been in command that fateful day. Captain Sully’s tenure as a seasoned professional probably made the difference. Weighing all of the options and especially the considerable risk of a water landing, Captain Sullenberger appeared to have made the decision based on experience, understanding and judgment that were the by-product of a career of on-the-job training leading up to the heralding event. Captain Sullenberger’s intuition and perspective let him analyze the data making the right decision at “the speed of light”.

This is the kind of perspective and experience that we could use more of in our everyday life. We’ve got an economy that is spiralling downward. A health-care system that’s not providing adequate care and an energy policy that is frankly running out of energy! We need some people like Captain Sullenberger to assess these situations and make some critical decisions quickly to keep us from crashing and to help put us on the road to progress. Where are the Captain Sully clones in economics, health care and energy?

I know you’re out there. We need you! The world is moving so quickly. We don’t have time to waste.

Clear Disclosure of Sponsorship Is Critical

There seems to be some ambiguity among marketers and webmasters concerning paid links and whether or not they should affect search engine rankings. If you care about Google, and you should since in almost all cases Google is your largest target audience, you should know Google’s policy on paid links as outlined by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team…

Clear disclosure of sponsorship is critical, and that includes disclosure for search engines. If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute). Google — and other search engines — do take action which can include demoting sites that sell links that pass PageRank, for example.

Being familiar with Google’s user guidelines and policies is important for marketers and search professionals who follow best practices and are helping to contribute to the quality and growth of search as a marketing and information tool. It can also keep you out of trouble!