Web PieRat

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

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introduction of Search, Plus Your World. Last week Practical eCommerce explored the social media impact of Search, Plus Your World, in “Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results.” In this article, I’ll focus on the search-engine-optimization impact of this new feature.

Visibility in Search Results

The biggest impact SPYW has on SEO is the visual and personal nature of the results it returns. Compare these two search result sets for a very common search phrase: “shoes.”

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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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I was underwhelmed by Google’s Thanksgiving doodle … UNTIL I played with the personalization animations. Very cool, Google! Did you know that if you click the wing you get a slot-machine-esque changing of features that settles into a random configuration. And for the first time there’s a link to share your doodle to G+ (nice move, makes perfect sense) as well as a button to get the link to share to your other favorite social network or email around or scribble it on a slip of paper and stash it in the hidden drawer where you keep your toenail clippings. Hey, I’m not judging, everyone has their thing. I love the push pins in the corner of the doodle, too, because who among us doesn’t remember making a turkey from the tracing of your hand and decorating it? Of course, my favorite turkey doodle is a pirate! Check out my Pierat pirate turkey, make your own favorite version, and have a fabulous Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: Ohmigod I’m so excited! An anonymous commenter tipped me off to the all-black-feathers trick! Make all the feathers black and you get a KABOOM full-blown pirate with five extra accessories and a flapping beak: a parrot, captain’s hat, hook, treasure chest and giant black beard! SO Happy! Thanks for commenting, “Me!”

While Google Analytics is indeed free and includes some great features, I have one giant red flag issue with it: sampled data, AKA Fast Access Mode.

My experences with Google Analytics have led me to become disenchated with the tool for large data sets. When you drill down to the critical intersection of SEO data — which URL drove visits & transactions for which keywords — the data is sampled to such an extent that it is useless to base decisions on.

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While researching how to add the +1 button, I came across this interesting tidbits on using rel=canonical to consolidate +1′s to the canonical version of a page. This bit from the FAQ is interesting because it mirrors advice on canonicalizing URLs to consolidate link juice, which points to a possible future in which +1’s enjoy a similar level of algorithmic importance as links do. Otherwise, why bother to worry about canonicalizing for them, hmmm?

From Google’s +1 FAQ:

However, your site may make the same content available via different URLs. For example, your site may have several pages listing the same set of products. One page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=alpha
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. As a result, +1′s for the other versions may not appear in search results.

You can make sure Google displays +1 annotations for the most search results possible by adding the rel=”canonical” property to the non-preferred versions of each page. This property should point to the canonical version, like this:

This tells Google: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.” Now, when a user +1’s a page with a non-canonical URL, Google will associate that +1 with the canonical, preferred version.

Barry Schwartz broke the news today on Search Engine Land that Google’s URL removal tool has allowed you remove URLs from ANY domain, not just domain you own and verify.

Yes it’s a faux pas on Google’s part and clearly needs to be fixed, but how is it much more than an annoyance? Google’s guidelines for the tool state that the URL requested for removal needs to either 404 or be restricted using meta robots noindex or a robots.txt disallow either before or soon after you submit for removal.

To ensure your content is permanently removed, you must do one of the actions below before or soon after you submit your URL removal request. If you don’t, your site may later reappear in search results.

So unless the site owner you’re trying to sabotage has kindly already sabotaged himself using one of these methods (404, etc.) the removal from Google’s index should be temporary, especially for sites that are crawled frequently. Which makes sense because the same Google Webmaster Tools help page also states that the tool is for emergency URL removal. If it’s that big of an emergency then it should be removed from the site as well. Google recognizes that you can’t always do that immediately, but if after several crawls that URL is crawlable and there happily serving a 200 OK, it’s fair game again for indexaion.

Still, Google had wisely disabled the feature for now.

How do you invite friends to Google+ while it’s in field test mode and invites are officially disabled? Use the the “share by email” back door.

All you need to do is share a post with someone who isn’t a Google+ member yet. I just share the same post over and over from my profile stream. Here’s what I use.

You can paste in their emails individually or create a Circle of unregistered friends and invite that Circle all at once.  When you add unregistered friends an option appears at the bottom of the share window next to the Share button to confirm that you want to share with these unregistered users by email. YES, you do! Check the box and hit send.

Google+ will send them an email work the first words of the post you’re sharing as the subject line of the email. It looks like this.

All your friend needs to do is click that orange-red button to start the registration process. New users are rate limited by hour so if they can’t get in at first tell them to try again later.

This is a Google+ invitation loophole, so be warned that it may stop working temporarily at any time. Good luck!

Oh and if you don’t know anyone who can invite you, leave me a comment here with your email. My comments are moderated so no one will see your email but me. PieRat’s promise not to use them for any purpose except your Google+ invite lest I be keel hauled.

I admit it, I used a coworker’s Google+ invitation to sign up two days ago, and now I’m surrounded by … no one I know. For the first day I couldn’t even find anyone I didn’t know.  I’m here to tell you, a social network with no social is extremely depressing and a little creepy. It was starting to feel a little bit like The Blair Witch Project, when they were separated and scrambling through the woods in the dark lost and alone. “I’m so … scared….”

Why was it so hard to find anyone else on Google+? How long would the typical new user really put up with this sad experience on a new social network? Not very long. But I’m a geek. And I want Google+ to win with an unreasonably strong desire.

Then I discovered the “Nearby” screen in the mobile app’s Stream. When viewing your Stream in the Google+ Mobile android app, just swipe to the right to switch to the Nearby Stream. At least now I could see comments from people I didn’t know physically nearby having conversations I didn’t really care about. But they were people — I’m not alone anymore!

Better than skulking around after random people, today I discovered that Mashable and The Next Web are on Google+ and followable! Following them led me to discover their writers, such as my favorite Mashable author Ben Parr. Ben is single-handedly lighting up the stream with Google+ chatter, Hangouts and generally helping folks practice their Google+ing. Now my stream has content in it, and I can see the appeal of Google+ a little more clearly. I’m more eager than ever to invite my friends so that I can use Google+ how it was actually intended.

Today Google+ is a mini-Twitter to me. Content streaming in from a couple of blogs I already follow in my feed reader.  Not that interesting, but a novelty.

In the future, I can see Google+ as a maxi-Facebook. Google+’s sharing and communication features are superior to Facebook’s. Hangout is brilliant, and I don’t even like video chatting. The idea of “hanging out” with a group of friends near and far online over video somehow seems more desirable than video chat, even though I know it’s the same thing. Incorporating it into a social experience where I’m likely to be signed in most of the day anyway on my PC and phone, though, makes it somehow feel more interesting.

All I need now are my friends and family. And guess who has them: Facebook. No, you can’t add your friends directly from Facebook to Google+ since Facebook and Google don’t Like each other. But Mohamed Mansour developed a Chrome plug in that let’s you export your Facebook friends to CSV or Google Contacts, from which you can add them to your Google+ Circles. Way to go! I’m trying it out right now. With 400+ Facebook friends, it’s a slow process, but it’s working in the background so what do I care. Hopefully someone I really care about out of those 400+ friends will be on Google+ too.

LinkedIn also allows you to export your connections here http://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport. I should do this anyway, but importing these 460-some connections into my Google Contacts now will likely yield a  few more Google+ers.

Aside from those import options, I wait for invitations to open up again. Care to follow me? Jill Kocher on Google+.

Google’s SEO liaison and head spam cop Matt Cutts is repeating his mantra on user experience every chance he gets these days. But who’s to say what that great user experience consists of?

Search Engine Journal quoted Cutts at Inside Search:

“Google is trying to figure out what users want. And so rather than you as an SEO chasing after Google, and Google chasing after what users want, if you chase directly after what users want, then both you and Google are trying to get to the top of the same mountain in some sense.”

In principle, I agree. SEO changes frequently. Quick tricks that worked last year don’t work now. Stop looking for the easy way to game the engines and focus on what matters long term. But Cutts isn’t saying that SEO is dead (sigh). He’s saying that the kind of SEO that looks for loopholes to exploit is shortsighted and SEOs who rely on those loopholes are just asking to get smacked down by whatever the next Panda-esque update is.

But back to the focus on user experience focus rather than SEO. Put 10 people in a room and you’ll get 12 different opinions on what great user experience means for single site. I work with a lot of people who are certain that great user experience means AJAX-y navigation and personalization. As a user I tend to agree. However, if a site focuses solely on that lovely user experience and doesn’t provide a crawlable alternative, how exactly is that going to equate to great organic search visibility?

As with all SEO advice, the key is in moderation. You have to have both SEO and user experience. You can’t focus on one strategy, tactic, trick, fad, news item. SEO is a moderate blending of all the cool stuff you read in SEO blogs, filtered through your experience, webmaster guidelines, and analysis of your unique site’s data and business requirements.

So, abandon all SEO and read up on a bunch of UX books? I wouldn’t. Instead, think about what aspects of SEO might have a positive or negative impact on user experience and vice versa:

• Keyword stuffing vs unique, engaging content
• Shallow synopsis of other sites vs unique, engaging content
• Link stuffing vs intuitive and relevant cross linking
• Bait and switch tactics vs giving users what they expected when they came to your site
• Spamming up forums and comments with irrelevant links vs thoughtful community participation

The core goals that SEO and search engines share still come down to valuing unique content, earned links and crawlable sites. These three values create a positive user experience. And that positive user experience increases the likelihood that you’ll earn more quality links. That’s what ethical SEO is all about.