Google+ Passes 62 Million Users, Estimated To Hit 400 Million By End Of 2012

A flurry of activity has circled Google+ as of late, and the effects are beginning to show. TV commercials, enhancements and cr oss promotion on Google products have helped Google+ flourish in the month of December. Paul Allen, the self proclaimed “Google+ unofficial statistician,” has pinned the Google+ user base at 62 million as of December 27th.

This is lift of 12 million visitors within the month of December, and has Google+ posed for the largest month-to-month volume increase since October 1st. This means that nearly 1/4th of all Google+ users (24%) have joined in the month of December. Google+ is now growing by approximately 625,000 users a day.

Google+’s growth in 2011:

• July 13 – 10 million
• August 1 – 20.5 million
• September 1 – 24.7 million
• October 1 – 38 million
• November 1 – 43 million
• December 1 – 50 million

Allen also has some staggering estimation for the continued growth of Google+. The estimate for Google+ users at the current growth rate is 293 million users by the end of 2012, but Allen is bullish on these numbers. He estimates the acceleration will continue and predicts Google+ will end 2012 with over 400+ million users.

                                                   Image Courtesy of Paul Allen

If these numbers are remotely accurate, 2012 should be quite prosperous for Google’s newest foray into social media. All information and Google+ stats courtesy of Paul Allen.

Source: http://marketingland.com/google-passes-62-million-users-estimated-to-hit-400-million-by-end-of-2012-2193

Delicious Gets A Mini-Makeover – Updates To Design, Usability & Media

The popular bookmarking site Delicious rolled out a new look this week. A major change to Delicious occurred in September, and the new look helps to enhance the new changes and is a byproduct of user feedback.

Delicious was re-purchased by its original founders in April, and has been working on major feature upgrades since the transition. The new enhancements are geared to make content discovery easier as well as improve the look of the site.

Cleaner Design

While the September design helped to give Delicious the visual push it required, some elements were still outdated. The new look helps keep the look clean, consistent and modern.



Delicious stated the following about the new design:

Giving Delicious an interface flexible enough to add new features moving forward was a strong consideration. It required us to take into account overarching themes like how content types get presented (stacks, links, actions, and so on) to minute details like a consistent button style.

Better Discovery With Stacks

The largest improvement to Delicious this year has overwhelmingly been the addition of user-created stacks. These elements allow users to group (or stack) similar content together in an easy to consume format. This week’s improvements have helped to make browsing stacks and finding information even easier. A new navigation bar has been installed that makes browsing by topic easier:

A new change has also been implemented for users who are browsing stacks. More focus has been placed on images and video as the new layout resembles a newspaper format:



The Delicious team has been hard at work lately, with more to come soon. The lead designer and senior software engineer released the following statement about the recent changes:

Delicious has been a work in progress since the beta re-launch, with our attention primarily on completing the migration from Yahoo!. We’re focused now on innovating Delicious to empower web discovery, and actively building the team and dedicating the resources to make it happen.

So stay tuned for more improvements, enhancements & marketing opportunities from the revived Delicious team.

Source: http://marketingland.com/delicious-gets-a-mini-makeover-updates-to-design-usability-media-1602

Do As I Say, Not As I Do: A Look At Search Engines & SEO Best Practices

Now that the holidays are upon us, we all probably could use some cheering up. So I thought I’d have some fun with our favorite search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, and Blekko.

At Nine By Blue, I have been developing software that automatically checks sites for technical SEO best practices. Normally we run it on our clients’s sites to quickly check for issues and monitor them for any future problems.

But I was curious to see what I would find if I pointed the software at some typical pages on the search engines’s sites and then compare their implementations with the technical SEO best practices that we typically recommend.

Below is a list of some of the issues that I found in no particular order.

Disclaimer #1: This list is intended to point out how difficult it is to fully optimize a site for SEO, especially large-scale enterprise sites. I’m not claiming that I could have done any better, even if I had full control of these sites.

Disclaimer #2: Yes, I’m aware of Google’s SEO report card, but I have never read it because it is too long. Also, I didn’t want to be influenced by it.

Use a Link Rel=Canonical Tag On The Homepage

Most of the sites that I reviewed had many different URLs that lead to the home page. This can be because of tracking parameters (i.e. http://www.site.com/?ref=affilliate1) or default file names (i.e. http://www.site.com/index.php), or even duplicate subdomains (http://www1.site.com/).

Because of this, I always recommend putting a link rel=canonical tag on the home page. This ensures that links to these different home page URLs all get counted as pointing to the same URL. I also recommend adding this tag for any other pages that might have similar issues.

I was surprised to find that Bing was the only site that had a proper link rel=canonical tag on the home page.
YouTube also has a link rel=canonical tag, but it was pointing to an improper URL “/” instead of the full URL “http://www.youtube.com/”.

Avoid Duplicate Subdomains & 301 Redirect Them To The Main Subdomain

With a few exceptions, I have been able to find a duplicate copy of the sites that I review.

I have a list of typical subdomains — like www1, dev, api, m, etc. — that will generally turn up a copy of the site. Other duplicate copies of a site can be found at the IP address (i.e. http://192.168.1.1/ instead of http://www.site.com/) and by probing DNS for additional hostnames or domains.

These duplicate subdomains or duplicate sites have a negative effect on SEO because they make the search engines crawl multiple copies of your site just to get one copy. It can also cause links intended for a particular page to be spread out among multiple copies, reducing the page’s authority.

The best way to fix this is to use a permanent (301) redirect to canonical subdomain’s version of that URL. If that isn’t possible, then a link rel=canonical tag pointing to the canonical subdomain page will work almost as well.

For example, an entire duplicate copy of Bing.com is available at http://www1.bing.com/. Compounding this is the fact that the page has a link rel=canonical tag also pointing to http://www1.bing.com/ and all the links on the page point to www1 as well.

Other subdomains, such as www2 through www5 and www01, all properly redirect to www.bing.com with a 301.

Blekko has an old, pre-launch copy of its site at http://api.blekko.com/. (Here is their old executive page.) Fortunately, this subdomain has a robots.txt file that is preventing it from being crawled. But these pages, like the old executive page at http://api.blekko.com/mgmt.html is also available at http://dev.blekko.com/mgmt.html and the main subdomain at http://blekko.com/mgmt.html.

It would be better to 301 redirect these URLs to the current management page at http://blekko.com/ws/+/management than to leave multiple copies of them on different subdomains.
YouTube redirects its duplicate subdomains www1 through www5 to www.youtube.com, which is in line with best practices. Unfortunately, it redirects with a 302 (temporary) redirect rather than a recommended 301 (permanent) redirect.

Use Permanent Redirects From https: URLs To http: URLs IF They Don’t Require SSL

Another type of duplicate copy of a site that I usually find is the SSL/https version of the site. https is appropriate for pages that require security, like a login page or a page for editing a user profile, but for pages that don’t require security, it is a source of duplicate content causing crawl inefficiency and link diffusion.
The recommended solution for this is to redirect pages from https to http whenever possible.

Our software detected duplicate https copies of most pages, including Microsoft’s help pages, the YouTube about pages, Google’s corporate page, and even the Google webmaster guidelines.

The duplicate content issue with the Google webmaster guidelines page (and the other Google help pages) is compounded by a link rel=canonical tag that points to either the http or https version of the URL, depending on URL is requested.

It is important to make sure that the link rel=canonical tag always points to the intended canonical version of the page, so be careful when dynamically generating this element.

A request for https://www.bing.com/ results in a security warning (shown below) due to a mismatched SSL certificate. This is common for sites using Akamai for global server load balancing.

It even pops up for https://www.whitehouse.gov/. I’m not aware of a way to get around this issue, though I would love to talk with something at Akamai about this.

Use Robots.txt File To Prevent URLs From Being Crawled

Sites generally have different types of pages that they don’t want to have search engine’s index. This could be because these pages are unlikely to convert or aren’t a good experience for users to land on, like a “create an account” or “leave a comment” page. Or it could be because the page is not intended for Web browsers, like an XML response to an API call.

Bing’s search API calls, which are made to URLs starting with http://api.bing.com/ or http://api.bing.net/ can be crawled by spiders according to the robots.txt file. This can be devastating to crawl efficiency because search engines will continue to crawl these XML results even though they are useless to browsers.

A search on Google for [site:api.bing.net OR site:api.bing.com] currently returns about 260 results, but based on analysis I have done on clients’ Web access log files, it is many times more URLs than these have been crawled and rejected.

Use ALT Attributes In Images

Images should always be given alternate text via the ALT attribute (not TITLE or NAME as I have seen on some sites). This is good for accessibility issues like screen readers, and it provides additional context about a page to search engines.

Though many images on the pages that were checked had appropriate alternate text, I couldn’t help but notice that Duane Forrester’s image on his profile page didn’t. But he is in good company because Larry, Sergey, Eric, and the rest of the Google executive team don’t either.

Avoid Use Of Rel=Nofollow Attributes On Links To “sculpt PageRank”

A rel=nofollow attribute on a link tells search engines not to consider the link as part of its link graph. Occasionally, I will review a site that attempts to use this fact to control the way that PageRank “flows” through a site.

This technique is generally considered to be ineffective and actually counterproductive, and I always recommend against it. (There are still valid uses for rel=nofollow attributes on internal links, such as link to pages that are excluded from being crawled by robots.txt.)

None of the search engine pages I checked were using rel=nofollow attributes in this way with the exception of the YouTube home page.

In the image below, nofollowed links are highlighted in red. Links to the most viewed and top favorited are being shown to search engines but general music, entertainment, and sports videos are not.

Return Response Codes Directly

A URL that doesn’t lead to a valid page should return a 404 (page not found) response code directly.
If an invalid URL is sent to Bing’s community blog site, it will redirect to a 404 page. Here is the chain:

1. The URL http://www.bing.com/community/b/nopagehere.aspx returns a 302 (temporary) redirect to
2. the URL http://www.bing.com/community/error-notfound.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/community/b/nopagehere.asp, which returns a 404 (page not found) response.

The recommended best practice would be for the first URL to return a 404 directly. If that isn’t possible, then the redirect should be changed to a 301 (permanent) redirect.

Yahoo’s corporate information pages do something interesting when they get an invalid URL.

A request to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/anypage.html, which is not a valid URL, correctly returns a 404 (page not found) response.

But the 404 page contains an old school meta refresh with a time of one second that redirects to http://info.yahoo.com/center/us/yahoo/.

A 301 redirect to this page is the recommended way to handle these types of invalid URLs.

Support If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified Conditional GETs

I am a big fan of using cache control headers to increase crawl efficiency and decrease page speed. (My article on this topic is here.)

I found it interesting that out of all the URLs that were checked only a few Google URLs supported If-Modified-Since requests and none of the URLs supported If-None-Match.

Periodically Check Your DNS Configuration

As part of a site review, I like to use on-line resources like http://intodns.com/ and http://robtex.com/ to check the DNS configuration.

DNS is an important part of technical SEO because if something breaks with DNS, then the site will go down and it isn’t going to get crawled. Fortunately, this rarely happens.

However, I have reviewed sites that had their crawling affected by DNS changes. And I have reviewed several large sites that had their DNS servers on the same subnet, essentially creating a single point of failure for their entire business.

As expected, all the search engines had no serious DNS issues. I was surprised to see that two of them had recursion enabled on their name servers because in some rare instances that can be a security risk.
My recommended best practice is to run these types of checks at least once a quarter.

Conclusion

These are a few of the issues that were found that I commonly see or think are important. There were others, but they were relatively minor or subtle things like short titles, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, missing headers, and too many static resources per page.

Normally, I would have access to Web access log files and webmaster tools, which allows our software to check a lot more things.

I hope this gives you some ideas for things to check on your own site. And I hope that when you find something that you realize that even the search engines have their own technical SEO issues from time to time.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do-a-look-at-search-engines-seo-best-practices-102698

The Art of the Follow-Up Post

Classic linkbait campaigns follow a “throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks” model. Which begs the question: what do you do when it does stick? Let’s say you’ve written a solid piece of linkbait, and you’re ranking on page one for a topical head or near-head term. So what do you do next?

Well, one way to think about the situation is that you have a temporary landing page with strong topical authority.

Particularly given the latest algorithm update, your odds of a short-term success are a lot better—and the price of resting on your laurels is that much higher. But here’s the good news: Google is still ranking topic pages, not just news stories. (Just Google any celebrity’s name and see.)
So, how do you keep your page fresh?

Spotting Opportunities With Google Suggest

Let’s say you’ve written a solid, well-researched, and attention-grabbing piece focused on a great keyword. Fantastic. Google can tell you exactly what to write next: type your keyword into Google, hit space, and scan the suggestions—every one of them is a follow-up waiting to happen.

These don’t have to be nearly as high-quality as the original; users would rather find (and Google would rather rank) a 300-word piece whose headline matches a long-tail query than an 800-word piece whose headline is missing half of the words in the query.

It gets better: you can also test out related topics, and see which search suggestions are missing. Google Suggest’s dirty little secret is that they lean on new content, not just search query data.

If people aren’t searching for a simple variant of an emerging keyword, you can write about that variant and literally shift searcher behavior.

The autocomplete fun doesn’t stop there, either. It’s actually creating brands. Lyrics site rap genius is one of the search suggestions for “rap,” and Yahoo!’s “Primetime in No Time” is a top suggestion for the query “Primetime.” And this goes full-circle: the top suggestion for “Primetime” is “Primetime lyrics,” and the top result is from—wait for it—Rap Genius!

Recaps & Context

The problem with reporting news is that you eventually run out of it: no story keeps happening forever. When things slow down, there are two easy angles you can take:

• Recaps: sum up a few other pieces on the same topic.
• Context: run a recap, but of a related topic or story. The definition of “context” in online news is ridiculously broad: if it’s directly related, it’s defensible; if it’s indirectly related, it’s merely a clever parallel. (This is the argument behind, e.g. “[X] Marketing Lessons from [Zombines / Lady Gaga / Rick Perry / My Plumber]” articles.)

As long as it’s original content, on topic, and accurately timestamped, it’s going to look like a continuously updated story. And it’s helpful to readers, too: people who search for a topic right when it gets hot are more likely to be subject-matter experts; the amateurs get active later in the news cycle. So it’s safe to be repetitious, if you’re saying similar things to different audiences.

Twitter-Based Resuscitation

Here’s a trick perfected by Business Insider, champions of fast-twitch news reporting. If you have a story that’s really taking off, post it to Twitter again—this time, swap your headline for a pull quote. If it’s a great story, it’s going to stay quotable; the better the story, the more times you can get away with this.
Compare:

I always wondered what a “McRib” was made of. Now I know http://read.bi/uOow21

to

THE McRIB: A “restructured meat product containing a mixture of tripe, heart, and scalded stomach” http://read.bi/uOow21

Same article, obviously. One headline is straight to the point: one’s a little gross but very good at grabbing attention. (And it doesn’t hurt that McRibs are in the news.) A quick hit like this can revive a flagging article. Don’t abuse it—but you’ll be surprised at how much you can get away with.

After Google’s freshness update, we’re doing News SEO whether we like it or not. Google is pushing for a faster, more reactive Web, with a SERP that looks more like a news feed or a Twitter stream. And part of that means keeping the story moving, not just reporting it once.

Fortunately, they’ve equipped us with the tools to do that exceptionally well.

Image from Flickr user Patrick Doheny, used under creative commons.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/the-art-of-the-follow-up-post-in-news-article-publishing-100804

9 Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

It’s not surprising that small businesses make mistakes in Google Places when setting up and claiming their profiles. It can be confusing and the guidelines even change over time. So, here’s a list of some common mistakes to avoid.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a “what not to do” article (see What NOT To Do On Local Business Websites). But it’s worthwhile to emphasize some of the things I still see local businesses doing wrong in Google Places, since some of the more common stuff results in needless frustration and delays.

Nine Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

Again, do not try these at home!

1. Use a post office box for your address

I know it doesn’t make sense – this should be alright to do for businesses which do not have physical addresses, and you may even find some competitors doing it, but Google Places doesn’t like it. If you register a new listing with a P.O. box, you can expect it won’t rank for many primary keyword combinations. (For background on this subject, read about Google Places and businesses without addresses.)

So, find a street address to use for your business. Use your home addresss (often not ideal for privacy/security reasons), or partner with another business that will allow you to share their street address, or contract with a company that provides mail service with a local address.

2. Add directions into your street address

Including directions in the street address field (ex: “on corner with Elm Street”) can result in your map location being messed up and/or can cause Google difficulty in linking information from other business directories for your listing.

Either leave the directions up to Google’s automated map features, or include the helpful directions in the description field, if you absolutely must.

3. Tell Google not to display your address

This often goes hand-in-hand with businesses that use P.O. box addresses, but not always. What’s confusing about this is that Google Places provides this as an option, but they neglect to tell you that it may royally affect your ability to rank. The reason is that they prefer to show business locations on the map, and their algorithm is instantly dubious of any business that obscures its office location.

So, if you’ve traditionally used a P.O. box and are thinking of switching to your home address in combination with not displaying it, then think again. Okay, theoretically, you might be able to develop enough credibility with Google Places to overcome whatever governors they have on rankings for address-obscured companies.

But in practice, this is such an uphill battle with no information or feedback from Google about your status that you might as well avoid the beating at the begining and simply don’t toggle your address display off.

4. Use product names and place names in the business category field

It’s confounding that these are free-form, and it’s silly that Google doesn’t merely warn you if they detect a place-name in this data field for your Place page. But what Google wants here is just the business type, such as “Accountant”, “Florist”, “Attorney”, or “Electronics Shop”.

Do not put the names of products here (generally), nor your city names, even when combined with the category name. Google really hates this and it might even get you dinged!

5. Use a call tracking number as your business’s phone number

There are folks that have a fetish for statistical data who like to argue with me over this one, but there continues to be a pretty good consensus among those of us who are expert consultants for local SEO as to our stance on the matter.

Using an alternate phone number makes it harder for Google to match up your data from multiple sources across the local ecosystem, which can reduce your ability to rank.

For most small, local businesses, rankings and performance in search results ought to trump the desire to have tracking to see where your phone calls originate. Performance is a necessity, and analytics in this case is a comparative nice-to-have!

Google has come out and officially stated not to use tracking numbers, too: “Types of phone numbers that should not be included are: call tracking numbers and phone numbers that are not specific to a business location.”

6. Post some shill reviews in Google Maps

Getting your employees to help you in posting positive reviews for your business, and/or posting negative reviews about your competition, could result in your listing getting flagged by users and automated algorithms.

People can often sense that a review may be false, and this can result them stating their suspicion outright in their own review under your listing, for all to see, or they may report the listing to Google.

Either way, any juice you got from those reviews might get revoked along with anything else you’ve touched in Google. False reviews are against the law, too, so stay away from this dishonest, bad practice. Instead, harness the power of reviews in acceptable, positive ways.

7. Make radical changes to your business name, address or phone

Changing your address or business name in Google Places is highly risky to the stability of your rankings. Google canonicalization algorithms may struggle to match up your data from across the Web afterwards, and it could even cause your listing to get flagged as potentially compromised or as an attempt to manipulate.

Expect a few weeks of disruption to your rankings at minimum, assuming you can change all the various citation references out there to match. If you can’t get them to mostly sync up consistently, then expect longterm ranking impact and perhaps also ongoing problems in terms of duplicate listings, too.

If you occupy a really great ranking spot, you might consider leaving it as-is.

8. Add lots of fictional office listings in each city all over your metro area

Once you’ve poisoned the entire pond, the negative effects will eventually come back to roost with the rankings of your real, original location!

You may think you can add listings all over without Google detecting it, but your competitors will “helpfully” flag each listing and tell Google that you’re not really there. Expect to have your faux listings tank in the rankings and they’ll take your real, original listing with them.

9. Ignore that your map pinpoint location is completely off

You may be an ADD, multi-tasking, stressed-out small business owner, but this is something you’d better pay attention-to or it can irritate potential customers, reduce your walk-in traffic, and even get your listing erroneously flagged as out-of-business before your realize it.

So, check your map location and use the tools to correct it if you’re significantly off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be publishing this list. After all, these items result in loads of work for those of us in local search marketing. However, untangling borked business listings is more difficult than setting up a fresh, new business profile completely from scratch.

So, avoid these bad practices so that you can spend more energy on further promotion efforts, rather than trying to correct something that’s been borked!

Source: http://searchengineland.com/9-common-ways-to-bork-your-local-rankings-in-google-99336