TweetGHC is seeing very strong success at not only managing affiliate programs but getting affiliates interested more in the companies we work with. I would estimate that only 1% of affiliates do any solid due diligence before signing up for an affiliate program. One of those ongoing education tools should be social media from the [...]
Greg Hoffman Marketing Gorilla Affiliate Management
Two years ago two location sharing services targeting the mobile platform, emerged on the scene – Gowalla and Foursquare. Both were touted to become the next big thing. But while one went onto become hugely popular by building a better and much more popular network, with sky rocketing check-ins, the other floundered, so much so [...]
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Tags: facebook, from, Gowalla, its Acquisition, Profits, Shop, Shut
Facebook & Twitter have some of the worst landing pages on the web.
At least if you look at it from a search engine perspective, who should assume that every visitor isn’t a member of the site they are referencing in the search engine.
It should also be understood that both Facebook & Twitter are bursting at the seams with former Google engineers & execs – they can’t claim they were unaware of what Google is looking for from content owners on the web, webmaster guidelines etc.
You can’t look at the Google cache and see exactly what Google sees, because they do some sneaky redirects which are very akin to cloaking.
I have written about this before.
Video Exclusive: Has Google Given Twitter a Cloaking Penalty?
This is what Google sees based upon the preview
The little piece of text at the top of the page is what amounts to your profile… you can’t count the background image if any because it can’t be read by Googlebot unless it works really hard using OCR, and certainly can’t be read by people with disabilities.
The links within the content of the page are mostly nofollow, and the links in the sidebar get blocked by robots.txt.
The link at the bottom of the page to access more content… which may be of interest to search is also blocked by robots.txt.
I am not the only one who has spent considerable time trying to get Twitter fixed. A great example is this post by Vanessa on Search Engine Land.
How Twitter’s Technical Infrastructure Issues Are Impacting Google Search Results
Facebook is worse
There is nothing there of any real value… it isn’t the timeline a logged in user might see.
If you want to have some kind of membership wall for users, then Google have special arrangements where you are required to show content for the first click.
Google over the years have published lots of content about what they think of cloacking.
I can still think of a few cases where some kind of cloaking would be justified. As an example on uQast we serve RTMP video with flash and use javascript “cloaking” to provide mp4 for iPhone. We could even serve that video to Googlebot’s mobile crawler without breaking Google guidelines as “cloaking” to serve content to specific browsers is allowed. But we can’t serve Googlebot which crawls for the main search index something it understands, as the Google guidelines require you treat Google as a normal desktop user browsing from California in the USA.
So Googlebot is served flash based RTMP within the webmaster guidelines rather than something it might like to see which we would be quite happy to give it.
That doesn’t prevent Google sometimes (though rarely) indexing the mobile video by figuring out the javascript, but it would be so much easier to give them something they understand.
One area that Google isn’t necessarily playing fair is that I don’t seem to be able to view Google+ profile pages in their own cache, and they don’t give a preview of the page that Googlebot sees.
This is my Google+ Profile
You can normally search in Google for cache:https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts or any url to get a cached version of what the crawler sees.
It is possible for every site to tell Google and other search engines not to store a cached page, so Google are well within their rights not to do so… but it prevents comparrisons.
Compare
cache:andybeard.eu – brings up a cached result
cache:https://plus.google.com/102279602913916787678/posts – does not bring up a cached result, just a 404 error
The blogoshere love a good witch hunt, but I can’t see that Google is treating Twitter or Facebook unfairly. Eric Schmidt was quite right about some of the nofollows, but there are bigger technical restrictions in place on crawling.
I actually quite like a Google profile as a default profile and identity on the web, but Google need to live up to the promise of salmon and make it a viable endpoint for all activity, or as an alternative use it for identity, and allow me to define my own default profile.. which if I choose might be Twitter or Facebook.
I can also understand why you wouldn’t undertake the complex engineering to make such flexibility possible for your first itteration, especially with partners who are unwilling to do something similar themselves.
Just ask Twitter how many content partners they now support on the new Twiter for embeds. (I wrote them a letter a year ago and never received a response)
This post ignores what a logged in and fully javascript supporting human might experience, but in many ways Google’s profiles whilst now having a social element for years have generously linked out to any other online destination of your choosing, and provided the necessary markup to claim them as being part of your personal social graph.
Tags: cloaking, facebook, facebook seo, twitter, Twitter SEO
Posted by Cyrus Shepard
Notice anything odd about your Google+ profile? Does it rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name?
Colleagues note that their G+ profile now outranks other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks #2 for my name. It now ranks higher than both my Twitter and Facebook profiles, even though I use those services far more often.
Profiles aren’t the only thing ranking. Individual Google+ posts frequently appear in search results as well.
Ranking for people’s names is one of the Holy Grails of search, like Amazon ranking for every book in print. With 7 billion people in the world, ranking on the first page for even a small portion of these is lucrative territory.
As search and social focus more on the individual, the war over names has begun.
How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.
For Facebook especially, this is a sensitive issue. Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.
I often work with websites and startups wanting to build SEO features into their platform. If I were to build a social media service for SEO domination from scratch, I would build it exactly like Google+.
Here's the takeaway: Use SEO to your competitive advantage, no matter your niche.
Not long ago, Google started displaying author photos in its search results. In order to display a photo, Google asks authors to add links from their webpages to their Google+ profile. This creates potentially millions of high quality links from the world’s most influential online publishers, all pointing to multiple Google+ profiles.
Twitter and Facebook both benefit from similar links, but never before has a social media service offered such an incentive.
Google's SEO Tactic: Require Authors to Link to their Google+ Profile
One thing noted about Google+ when it was released was just how easy it was to be in lots of circles, or add lots of people to your own. People who struggled on Twitter for years to build up 1000 followers, suddenly found themselves in 2000 or 3000 Google+ circles, seemingly overnight.
Google’s strategy to connect everyone on the planet also makes for good internal linking. Following more than 1000 people may not create a practical social experience, but it creates a great SEO opportunity. The more your content is shared in other people’s streams and profiles, then the more your content is crawled, indexed, and deemed important by search engines.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Large Circles Counts
My public Google+ profile contains a wealth of information, all visible to search engines, including:
Compare that to my Twitter account – limited to 160 characters of biographical information, or my Facebook profile, which reads like an auto-generated pamphlet.
Consider how a search engine sees these pages. Take a look at the source code of any Google+ profile or use a tool SEO-browser (a search robot simulator) to see how many words appear on each profile.
Google structures content to provide a wealth of information for search engines, to index and serve in search results.
Google's SEO Tactic: Search Engine Friendly Profiles
Google+ makes it easy to share posts from others – a feature much like retweeting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. These Google+ posts frequently show up in search results as their own entries.
As the title tag is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization, Google wisely choose longer, more descriptive title tags. Compare these to the shorter title tags offered by Facebook and Twitter, which often run no longer than three unique words.
Here’s the title tag to 3 different posts, all by Rand Fishkin. Each of these posts is indexed by Google.
Which do you think ranks better for a query with “Rand Fishkin” in the search?
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Google's SEO Tactic: Descriptive Title Tags
Every post I’ve ever written on Google+ has been public. As a result, every post has been crawled and indexed by Google search. The privacy settings on the profiles are simple, intuitive and encourage openness.
The big green button screams, “Pick me! Pick me!”
Most Twitter posts are public by default, although unless a tweet becomes famous the 140 character limit prevents most tweets from reaching the definition of “rich” content. Facebook, in contrast, only shares posts from fan pages with Google, and not posts from regular profiles.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Public Sharing
The first 5 items on this list represent SEO tactics that anyone can use, but in a way #6 belongs to Google alone. By linking to Google+ profiles in search results, they create an advantage that no other social media service can duplicate.
Is Google “cheating” by favoring it’s own property? Some say yes, but on the other hand, is there a more relevant result? To me, it makes more sense to connect my author profile with the website that actually hosts the content, such as my profile on SEOmoz.
This demonstrates the power of rich snippets. Since Google introduced author photos in search results, webmasters have scrambled to get their mug included – the idea being that rich snippets of all kinds increase click-through rates. The question is, are we increasing the CTR of our own website, or Google+?
Google's SEO Tactic: Creative Rich Snippets
Except for #6 above, most of these techniques are available to any online business. Google has found a way to create large amounts of search engine friendly content, and do it at scale.
The lack of diversity this creates in Google's search results is troubling to some. Google risks turning into McGoogle, where every result and every page looks the same. With any luck, more companies will adopt strong SEO strategies to raise themselves in search.
Now that the adoption of Google+ has hit 62 million users and growing, expect to see far more Google+ in your search results soon.
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I was reminded of this recently when getting together with my closest friends and family for Christmas this year. We don’t all celebrate the same holiday, so we’ve made a few compromises in our customs – latkes for brunch on the day before Christmas, watching a movie on the DVD player, and a (non-Chinese) dinner out. That last item presented a bit of a hurdle. We wanted a nice dinner, but what’s open for dinner on Christmas Eve? Facebook came to the rescue. One of my nearest and dearest friends had friended a well-loved local restaurant. I hadn’t; while I enjoy the food, it’s too expensive for…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials
Tags: businesses, facebook, Local, Should
With over 153 million unique users per month, Nielsen research has named Google the top Internet destination. Facebook, which is the most visited social networking site and second largest Internet destination, received an average number of 137.6 million unique monthly visitors. The combination of the battle to be the top Internet destination, the inevitable Facebook [...]
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Tags: facebook, Google, of Business, Plus
Last week we asked if you have the Facebook Timeline enabled and how you felt about it. These poll results are really interesting. Have it and like it – 101 Don’t have it and want it – 34 Have it and hate it – 41 Don’t have it and don’t want it – 97 The [...]
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Tags: facebook, Helpful Links, POLL, Results, Some, Timeline
I am not a big fan of the new Facebook Timeline. I feel like my eyes don’t know which way to look and I can’t really quickly find what I am looking for, but I know that with time I will get use to it (I think). So we are wondering if you have it [...]
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Tags: enabled, facebook, profile Poll, Timeline
Do you want to tap into the audience of over 1 billion people using Facebook?
This Wednesday I will be hosting a free live webinar with someone who has taught me so much about Facebook Marketing – Amy Porterfield.
At a recent session at Blog World Expo that Amy was teaching at I came away with a long page of action items of things to implement on my own Facebook pages and I’m confident that in our webinar you’ll likewise come away with some great ideas and things to do.
Amy is the author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and has consulted with numerous well known companies and individuals on their Facebook strategy – she knows what she’s talking about and is a great communicator. You’ll get a heap of value from this webinar.
Registration is free and this webinar is live. I’m looking forward to participating but more than anything from the opportunity to soak up some more great knowledge from Amy.
The Webinar is happening this Wednesday (7th December) at 9pm-10pm EST (US Eastern time).
Register here to participate. Numbers on the webinar are limited and we won’t be posting a recording of this one so do make sure you’re on the call.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Free Webinar on Facebook Marketing: This Wednesday
