Google+ Pages: Good News for Facebook fanpages

November 8th, 2011 § § permalink

Google+ just launched a few hours ago what has been demanded from the beginning: pages for brands. While I don’t think this is very important (yet) by itself, it is important for the effect that it will have on FB fan pages.

When G+ launched, I quickly switched from FB. Not because it was the new hot thing in town or the graphical interface of creating circles, but because of the selective sharing options.

After a few weeks, annoyed being by the continuous mass spam requests and Google ignoring the issue, I have discovered that Facebook quickly adapted and selective sharing was added. Well in fact there was there for a long time but now it simply got more visible and optimized. And I made the switch back. For good or at least for the next 2 years.

Now Google is launching pages for companies and it was forced to bring new stuff on the table to attract users from Facebook. And what they did, was simply copying the G+ personal profiles and changing a few labels. Segmenting fans of fan pages is a powerful marketing toy but without an active user base is not a tool but only a toy.

And now back to the good news: expect Facebook to retaliate in maximum 1-2 weeks (there is the pressure from the Christmas shopping season) and G+ will be once again left behind.

As a conclusion, Google+ is the greatest thing that could have happen to the users. To the Facebook users

The tech world is broken by design

September 17th, 2011 § § permalink

The tech world is broken by design will be a series of posts that cover different aspects of the tech world (hardware/software) that are obviously broken.

But what broken means in this context. Broken means that there is a huge difference between intention and implementation and this reflects on the user satisfaction, company’s revenue and progress. There are multiple levels unfortunately and all summed lead to a not so bright future:

  • User experience: what the user wants and what the user gets
  • Product development: the development cycle from the idea to the end product
  • Organizational culture: how companies function in order to transform an idea into a product
  • Marketing: what are the marketing department doing to get the product into the user’s home and the money from the user’s pocket to shareholder’s bank accounts

This series is inspired 99% by comparing how Apples does things and how the others do it. I started with this introduction to kill procrastination and have a start :)

SEO accidents: wrong title in SERPS

September 17th, 2011 § § permalink

A few days ago had a talk with a client that had an unexplainable issue: while googling for his company name, the google result has showing instead of the homepagethe sequence: “[CompanyName] Logo”.

What happened in fact:

  • the sequence “[CompanyName] Logo” was extracted from the alt tag of the logo
  • page titles all over the site were the same
  • page titles were very large and the [CompanyName] was used as a suffix

The recommandations that fixed the issue in a few days were:

  • Use unique titles on all the pages of the website
  • Use smaller page titles (up to 70 characters)
  • On the homepage use the company name as a prefix instead of a suffix and on all the others keep it as it was
  • Try a force reindexing of the website using the Fetch as Googlebot option from the webmaster tools

Google+: The first doubts

September 11th, 2011 § § permalink

When Google+ appeared I made the switch from Facebook. My reasons were not the usual crap about privacy and games polluting my stream but were more practical: I am very lazy and like to have unified services. But the more I use it the more doubts I have:

  • The API: OK, the Facebook didn’t have one in the beginning either but that’s not an excuse. I want to have apps in G+ that enhance the experience. The first one that comes in mind is Flixter app by Flixter. I want to be able to post and rate movies to my circles and get recommendations from them. Apparently Google doesn’t understand that in 2011 APIs are a must for any social service that want’s to survive.
  • SPAM. Oh yeah the spam issue. I see a lot of articles about poor innocent users having their accounts suspended for being plain idiots but in real life I don’t see it. I have submitted tens of spam reports to G+ team and the accounts are still alive and kicking. And the problem has a simple fix. The issue is not the spammers, because whatever you do they will never go away. The BIG problem is G+ helping them. G+ has a feature that acts like a bug that allows anyone in 3 clicks to spam hundreds of users. It goes like this.
    • You first add a few high-profile users
    • Than you go to the circles tab, and find people
    • On there, go to more actions, select all and add all the people to a circle
    • Repeat the procedure a few times and suddenly you have thousands of users in a spam circle
    • Profit
  • Incoming section. Ok, basically Twitter functions the same way: any user can add anyone without reciprocating (Facebook requires a 2 way connection). But Twitter has done it better and I don’t think that is rocket science to reverse engineer it:
    • Mass add is suspicious behavior on Twitter and might get your account suspended. You can’t add more than 2000 followers unless a significant percentage of them follow you back
    • Twitter doesn’t annoy you on their frontpage with spam from those that have added you

And one last thing: I had expected Google to pull the big guns on Facebook and this be a quick war. Apparently until now Facebook plays catch very well and more than that pushes forward giving Google a great competitor.

 

 

Article pagination for SEO

November 28th, 2010 § § permalink

On Webmaster World there is a pretty good thread showing a step by step guide on how to implement pagination for long articles (over 500-700 words) for SEO purposes.

Among the reasons you would want to do that:

  • Increase the volume of unique content
  • Increase the pageviews (if you are using a CPM advertising solution this would almost double your income)
  • Decrease the bouncerate on your website (call me paranoid but I bet the Google uses that as a quality factor in organic ranking).

Among the biggest issues with this, is how you handle comments. Basically you have to choose from 4 options:

  • Have the same comments on all the newly created pages (for wordpress i think this is the only available solution)
  • Have each part have its own comments (there is no plugin as far as i know for wordpress but in this case you can simply create a new post for each part and link them after you are done)
  • Have the comments separated from the content (similar to a forum, where the article title is the name of the thread)

Here are the main steps from the WW forum:

  1. Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description.
  2. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag h1. These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an h2 tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as h2
  3. On each internal page, there is also a “pre-head” that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user.
  4. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral “2.” or “3.”
  5. Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article.
  6. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic “Back | Next” junk. There’s a complete page choice shown on everywhere – 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6| 7 – and there is also a centered link at the end of each page: Next: Linked title of the next page goes here
  7. The linked numbers that are used as on-page navigation also include a title attribute that matches the title tag of the target page. I’m still not sure what a title attribute does for Google exactly, if anything, but the tool tip that it generates is a major aid for the reader of a long article.
  8. Those navigation numbers are very clearly coded to show which page is active. And the nav number for the active page is NOT linked. We don’t want the user to click and end up right where they started, and we don’t want to “waste” a link that has no real function.
  9. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tags are also included in the section h2

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