Web PieRat

Excerpted from my latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

Google’s mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile has traditionally focused on content designed for feature phones and their extremely limited browsers. Google recently announced, however, a new version of Googlebot-Mobile that crawls using an iPhone user agent, enabling it to discover content designed for smartphones, which are more robust than feature phones.

As an avid searcher and a search engine optimization professional, I’ve been disappointed in Google’s treatment of smartphone search results — I addressed here a few months ago, in “Google Says Smartphone Sites Aren’t Mobile.” When a searcher takes the time to tap in a query on their smartphone’s keyboard, the search engine should reward that searcher’s effort by favoring smartphone content over desktop content. Instead, Google has left the task to each individual site to detect smartphones and serve the appropriately formatted content — with mixed results.

Read on to see how one major retailer flubs smartphone usability and potentially misses out on mobile search sales.

My latest article at Practical Ecommerce, read it in full here.

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remains that search marketing and social media cannot be managed in silos.

According to the presentation given by Andrea Fishman, vice president of global strategy at BGT Partners — a marketing and design firm — at Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2011, “57% of digital marketing impact is derived from SEO.” But search engine optimization also has a symbiotic relationship with social media, press relations, paid search, offline advertising, and other marketing channels.

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Sorry, I’m going to pat myself on the back now: I’ve been asked to be a Contributing Editor at Practical Ecommerce, a leading online magazine for ecommerce merchants. YAY! I’ve been writing SEO articles for PEC and its sister site Ecommerce Developer regularly for two years now, and am so pleased to join the team a little more officially. Plus, when I attend SES Chicago next month I get to go as a member of the press. So cool.

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Will Jeff Bezos, Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com, blanket the internet with Silk?

Amazon is registering Silk-based domains by the hundreds, possibly indicating the future availability of the day-old Amazon Fire’s browser on more platforms. Of course, the domain registrations could be defensive, but 500 domains is an awful lot for a browser meant to live on a single tablet island. I prefer to think that Amazon’s registration of SilkSmartphone.com means that soon I can browse faster on my android phone.

Silk browsers for PCs, Macs and mobile devices would be a good move, Amazon. If you own the browser, you can suggest your services. “What do you want to do? Watch, Listen, Read, Play, Shop?” I’m envisioning a browser toolbar with tabletesque icons for each action that look delicious and seduce you to click. An Amazon browser that makes it easiest to consume Amazon products and media, plus collects all your browsing data to feed the Amazon machine, is a no-brainer.

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Internet governing body ICANN approved custom gTLDs yesterday, making it possible for sites with too much cash looking to be too cutting edge to blow $185,000 per gTLD + $25,000 annually on vanity TLDs and domains like bmw.car, nike.shoes or pepsi.cola.

With such a steep price tag only the very rich will be able to afford these custom gTLDs, AKA generic top level domains, which will hopefully minimize their release into the wild. I have three major concerns:

1. Usability: Internet users are entrenched in their .com ways, or their .ca or .co.uk ways. Whatever the primary TLD is for a country, the majority of internet users will try to append it to whatever URL offered them. Trying to get users to your supercool new hot.wings domain? They’re probably going to stick .com on the end of that and end up somewhere else.
2. Brand: For big brands, the only ones who could reasonably afford this vanity service, why oh why would you risk confusing customers and prospects with the scenario above? Most brands are still trying to master marketing and transactions on their primary .com web site. Adding a vanity TLD to the mix sounds like an expensive recipe for #fail.
3. Trademark Violations: If any word can be applied for as a gTLD, brands will have a harder time protecting against trademark violations. For example, with Nike’s brand strength it should pretty easy to prevent anyone but Nike from registering .nike as a gTLD. But would it be permissible for me to apply for the .shoes gTLD and then put domains on it for nike.shoes, adidas.shoes, etc. Afterall, shoes.com has the right to create a nike.shoes.com subdomain on their own shoes.com domain. Should the laws be different if the domain is nike and the TLD is .shoes instead of .com? ICANN’s site makes reference to this thorny area:

ICANN does not accept reservations or pre-registrations based on trademarks. But registries will be required to operate sunrise or intellectual property claims services for the protection of trademarks.
–gTLD FAQ

The registry operator must implement, at a minimum, a Sunrise period and a Trademark Claims service during the start-up phases for registration in the TLD, as provided in the registry agreement. These mechanisms will be supported by the established Trademark Clearinghouse as indicated by ICANN. The Sunrise period allows eligible rightsholders an early opportunity to register names in the TLD. The Trademark Claims service provides notice to potential registrants of existing trademark rights, as well as notice to rightsholders of relevant names registered. Registry operators may continue offering the Trademark Claims service after the relevant start-up phases have concluded.
– gTLD Applicant Guidebook (PDF)

Personal Note: You may know that I am the SEO Manager for Groupon, a competitor/co-opetioner with some of the sites mentioned here. I found this example reading group buying industry news, not in an effort to spread stories about other sites in Groupon’s space. I would have felt compelled to post this perfect example of good and bad commenting even if it had been a story completely unrelated to my employer’s industry simply because it is related to the SEO industry.

Comment spam is one of the lowest forms of “link building.” Yet people continue to do it because it’s easy, because they think it works and because they don’t understand that many comment sections aren’t crawlable even if the links are followed. But sometimes comment spammers get outed, like in the comments on this TechCrunch post about the partnership between BuyWithMe and SCVNGR. I grabbed a couple of screen shots in case the thread is deleted to illustrate this example (click them to enlarge).

What’s wrong with these comments? If they are from real people with real opinions, nothing. But the same users allegedly posted these comments on multiple posts on the TechCrunch, leaving links to UrbanSpoils on each. Other readers recognized the tactic and called him/them out on it. Personally, I can’t find any duplicate comments from these users, but I didn’t look very long either. The point remains: Comment spam at your peril — is the link inserted valuable enough to risk the scorn of the other readers and commenters? My answer is no. And in this case at least, certainly not. Here’s why:

• Disqus.com comments are fed into posts using JavaScript. The comment spam isn’t even crawlable in this instance (see cache). So if the goal was to seed links into posts to improve link popularity, #fail.
• If the intent was to gain click-through traffic from other readers, it’s possible that some clicks were achieved before the outing. Afterwards, I would doubt that many clicked, at least not with the intent to transact. But only the log files know for sure. Still, I call this a #fail.
• And lastly, even any positive brand recognition that positive comment mentions would have generated have very likely been more than negated by the tongue lashing from other commenters. So #fail.

Not all commenting is spam, of course. When you legitimately have something of value to add to a conversation and when you disclose your identity if you have a self-interest, then comment away. On the very same post, the co-founder of SayLocal comments, disclosing his identity and self-interest. You’ll note that no one flames his comment. It may be just as self-interested, but he has given us the ability to judge his comment honestly.

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Starting up my new SEO blog was an exercise in compromise. For once in my life, I decided not to obsess over the (super fun) details and instead moved straight to writing posts. I grabbed my domain, paid $10 to map a free WordPress blog to it, and slapped my social network icons in the sidebar.

I didn’t have the time to figure out hosting and plugins in addition to writing the content. I decided to focus on the things I had to have (content and a place to put it), and the things I could not change later (domain) without negative impact on the blog’s SEO. The rest (hosting, cool templates, control over SEO elements, plugins) can be added on or changed later after I’ve proven to myself that I have enough to write about.

In the process, I found a couple of important SEO elements missing in the free WordPress-hosted offering:

1. No 301 Redirects: This is a biggie for SEO. WordPress does not 301 redirect when you move your blog. In addition, WordPress does not 301 redirect your blog’s subdomain to your mapped domain name. Example: http://jillkocher.wordpress.com 302 redirects to http://webpierat.com. Consequently, if you want your blog to build link popularity & keep it, map it to a domain right from the start so that you can either keep the same URLs or control the 301 redirects yourself when you decide to move it later. Without the mapped domain, your content will either be stuck at the blog’s subdomain or will have to leave its link popularity behind when it moves.
2. No Plugins. Plugins are not available when blogs are hosted at wordpress.com. You can’t modify your title tags or meta data, no sticky posts or other great SEO plugins for custom WordPress installations.
3. No Google Webmaster Tools Verification. WordPress is working on it, but the former verification method is kaput.

And a couple of social media and usability elements are also missing:

1. No JavaScript Support. WordPress’s free blogs only support HTML. Many of the cool plugins and widgets require JavaScript. Bummer.
2. No Social Media Integration in the Templates. If you want to offer quick logos and links to share posts on Twitter or Digg or Facebook … you can’t. That requires JavaScript, or manual coding in every post. There’s also no quick way to list all your social profiles in your sidebar without manual HTML.

That said, WordPress does include some nifty features in the free version:

1. XML Sitemap: WordPress creates an XML sitemap automatically, and makes it autodiscoverable on the robots.txt file it also generates automatically. Example: http://webpierat.com/robots.txt links to http://webpierat.com/sitemap.xml. Unfortunately you can’t modify these manually.
2. Edit Post URIs + 301 Redirects: Bloggers can edit the default title-based URL while they’re in the post admin. Cool. Better yet, if you publish the post and then want to change the URI after it’s live, WordPress automatically 301 redirects the older versions of the URL to the latest version (even through multiple URL changes).
3. 404 Errors. Deleting a post produces a hard 404 error on that URL, which will prompt deindexation if a URL has been indexed. Would be better to 301 redirect it to harvest any link popularity the URL may have collected, but at least it’s a 404 and not 200 that lives on forever cruftily.
4. Tags & Categories: It’s nice to have the ability to create tags and categories for posts to easily create a navigational hierarchy. Be careful to choose wisely, though, so you don’t give prominence to non-valuable keywords & phrases. Similarly, don’t name both a tag & category the same thing or you’ll inadvertently set up competition for the same keyword phrase at different URLs.

One day soon I’ll start experimenting with a custom installation, but I’m still too excited about the prospect of playing with 301 redirects and CSS to allow myself to get distracted by it. There are a lot of other pros and cons to starting your blog on WordPress’s free platform, but these are the ones that made an impression on me.

What has made an impression on you?

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My name doesn’t exist in Spanish. Jill would actually be pronounced Heeee – J’s make an H sound and LL makes a Y sound. Jill works just fine in the American Midwest, but when I moved to California for college I encountered a whole new world of Spanish-speaking folks who were genuinely confused by my ridiculous name.

On a far larger scale, the same issue exists across the internet as sites attempt to expand their reach from their native language to serve other countries in other languages. American English is very close to the Queen’s English, but American English just doesn’t speak to the British in the same way. It’s more than sprinkling in some U’s and swapping Z’s for S’s. In Wisconsin I’d stuff a package in the trunk, but in London they’d place a parcel in the boot. I watch my step, they mind the gap. And we’re not even going to talk about the double meaning of fanny packs, yikes.

Some sites translate their navigation and major headings only, but leave the featured image content or product detail information in the original language. I can’t think of a better way to illustrate that customers speaking that language are not a priority. Sears uses a translating technology that autoconverts English textual content to Spanish, but the featured content images are still in English. Message to the Spanish-speaking population: You don’t matter as much but we’d like you to give us your money.

Would you send your English-speaking founder to the streets of Paris to sell the widgets he’s passionate about and communicates magnificently well in English, armed only with a sheet of common French phrases and expect him to sell like gangbusters? Of course not. He won’t be able to communicate effectively there, no matter how passionately he believes in his widgets. Similarly, French customers are not going to drop $300 (or euros) on your site if your French content is poorly written and archaically constructed. You wouldn’t write your primary content woodenly, why on earth would you translate woodenly? It’s ineffective and even insulting. You can’t just slap a French flag on it and call it a day.

In some cases, the navigation is in the original language but some linguistically orphaned content exists deeper in the site. If you can’t read English, how could you navigate the English Virginia.gov site to find the Spanish translation of the preparation for college guide? Lovely that it’s offered, but how will the people who need it find it on the site?

Sites communicate most strongly in the languages of their creators, naturally. When attempts are made to create content for other languages, many sites make the mistake of purely translating the same words they use to the equivalent word in the other languages. Not so good unless you just really don’t want to make a connection with those readers / customers. In that case, save everyone the time and don‘t bother to translate in the first place.

I enjoy babelfish as much as the next gal, but it’s no way to localize content. Localization is about creating content specifically for a geographically defined audience in their preferred language. It’s about carrying your message to them as an important audience equally valuable to the one that speaks the core language of the site, not expecting them to piece together your message and thank you for the opportunity to enjoy your delightful site so clearly not targeted at them despite its translated status.

If you’re serious about expanding your reach to other languages and countries, take the time to hire or contract with someone native to that country fluent in the dialect required. Don’t ask him to translate the content you’ve already written, boil it down to a series of key message bullets and allow him to create the content from those key messages in a way that will resonate best.
For more on localization and SEO, Andy Atkins-Kruger is an excellent resource at Multilingual Search Blog or WebCertain.com.

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