I know, I’ve had a lot of Like button posts. So I’m sorry, here’s another one.

I just wanted to point out that the call to action is not always appropriate. While I think the Like button has potential to really change the way that content is aggregated (as long as Facebook makes some fixes), I have some big problems with seeing it on every page.

Blue Fountain Media (a great SEO Agency in New York), reported a similar example after Gary Coleman’s death. TMZ’s site showed a like button. And those innocent content sharers, were trying to innocently show their friends the news they’d just found. It was, after all, shocking. As a result of everyone’s sharing the article, Gary Coleman’s death was “liked” by nearly 4,000 people.

Now, it may have been inadvertent. No one actually had to click the “like” button in order to get the article to count among the likes. In fact, if you share and article on facebook, the article will be counted as liked. On my blog for example, I have an article with a picture of a camel spider in it. Google the word, it ranks really well in image search. Even before I’d put the like or share buttons on the site, I had nearly 54 people who had put it on facebook. And now, no matter whether you click the “share” button or the “like” button, the counts on both will increase. Likes are a bit of a false positive. It’s a call to action that isn’t really signaling everyone’s intention. Sometimes, people are just wanting to “share” an article, and they get flagged as a person who “likes” the article… I don’t know what I ultimately think about that or if I even really care, but I do, at the very least, think it’s amusing.

The first time I noticed this was on an obituary posting I saw a long time ago on a local town newspaper’s site. Then more recently, I saw it on articles about the Craigslist killer’s article. I understand why people might like the outcome of that case, but seriously, inappropriate.

And then again today, I noticed the like button on BuzzFeed’s article on the girl who is taped throwing puppies into the water. Really? 3,000 people like this? I doubt it…

This last week I was going through my analytics. Just the other day, I put together a post on how an user could use Google Analytics to track the like button. And I’m pretty happy about that. But what I found in my analytics is inexcusable. Just under 5% of SpiderMarket’s traffic (nearly 100 people everyday) are being diverted from the page they are trying to get to, to a page that shows up as blank. And it seems like I’m not the only one having this problem.
Just google the appendage. You will see that Google has so far indexed over 50,000 pages with the “?fb_xd_fragment=” at the end. These pages resolve to a blank, codeless page.

The most interesting thing of it is, if you look at the URLs affected, it’s not just little guys like you and me. It’s big sites that you’ve heard of.

• CNN
• Urban Spoon
• Simon & Schuster
• LiveStream
• MSN
• PC World
• Salon
• Forbes Russia

The common thread here is that none of these sites use the rel canonical tag. It seems like that has done well to keep the fragmented sections out of the index for most sites. But for people like me, the loss in traffic is significant.

What’s more is, it appears that facebook developers have been made aware of the problem, but they aren’t working quickly to fix it. So, for the time being, until this little problem is fixed, I’ve removed facebook’s like button from my sites.

I don’t usually put anything political on my site, but I had to share this with you. Chris Young, mayoral candidate for Providence, RI, decided to whip out a tape and sing a self-composed song for the woman who was given the unfortunate task of interviewing him. Be careful, this video will make you feel more awkward than you’ve ever felt. It proves that yes, there are people like Michael from the Office.

TV Gold!

Today I have been introduced to the perils of online video marketing. I logged into my YouTube Account, only to find the following message:

ATTENTION
The following video(s) from your account have been disabled for violation of the YouTube Community Guidelines:

• Internet Marketing Tools – (donutdrinkp)

Everyone hates spam. Misleading descriptions, tags, titles or thumbnails designed to increase views are not allowed. It’s also not okay to post large amounts of untargeted, unwanted or repetitive content, including comments and private messages.
Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the termination of your account.
Date Received: August 12, 2010

The video, however, is nothing like SPAM. The tags were correct, the links away from it were to relevant sites mentioned in the video. It was linked to from credible blogs like the site of John Henshaw, the JAR Group, and other places. It was, since January, ranking #4 if you googled “Internet Marketing Tools”. And yet today, I logged in today and my video had been removed. I have been looking at the forums, and I’ve noticed that everyone accuses people who claim that Youtube pulled their video of lying. Well, I’m not lying. My video isn’t SPAM, it wasn’t marked incorrectly, and it was informative. You can view it from the VodPod channel below.

The truth is, I’m really upset by it. Because your apparently not allowed to appeal a video’s removal if it’s taken down for violating “Community Guidelines”. I guess this means that I can conclude that YouTube’s algorithms (or whatever is responsible for removing legitimate videos) needs work. I wish I could just leave YouTube, but it’s the biggest video site on the web, and so I sort need to be on it. But (in case someone from YouTube even cares), I feel a bit like someone just robbed my house. I feel vulnerable, violated, and helpless. I can’t really do anything about the fact that my video has been removed except write this little post. But God it makes me hate Google.

Have you ever had a video illegitimately removed from YouTube?

So you’ve probably heard a ton about the Like Button lately. It’s sort of the new thing in marketing. Sites are integrating it in an effort to mitigate the effects of users living on the web in a different way than they used to. Whereas search has, for the past 10 years, driven users to websites, nowadays, users are being driven to new sites through a combination of both search and suggestions from their friends. Rather than them looking for content, content is being suggested to them.

The beauty of it is, if someone Likes a page, that page and perhaps a picture from it are posted to that users wall, propogated to their friends on facebook, and that can be hugely effective in getting new eyes to your site.

So how do you track it? I’m actually surprised that I haven’t seen anyone else using onclick tracking in the facebook like button, which tells me that no one knows you can do it. So to put it simply, if you’ve installed a like button on your facebook and you are using Google Analytics, add a variation of the code in yellow to your button. Below I have outlined two methods for tracking clicks on the like button below.

Virtual Pageview Method

<fb:like onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'THENAMEOFYOURPAGE/like']);" href="YOURSITESURL.COM"></fb:like>

This will register in GA as a pageview. What’s more, is if you use Google’s URL Builder, you can append some variables to the end to track traffic that results from those likes. That code would look like the following.
<fb:like onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', 'THENAMEOFYOURPAGE/like']);" href="YOURSITESURL.COM?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=like"></fb:like>

Using the URL builder will post a URL to Facebook that allows you to know that people are coming from a click on your Like Button. This means that you can track both the push and the pull of a like button. You will see in your pageviews when people click the element, and you will see the people that come from each of those clicks. From there you could actually estimate the number of visitors your site gets from each click of that button. If you are a site that operates on a CPM, that means, that you can essentially track the value of a Like.

Event Tracking Method

If you don’t want to track a pageview, this method will work to simply help you track the event. This let’s you track the push and pull of users and visitors, and it is probably a more honest way to track interactions on your page. Whereas the virtual pageview method will add a page to those who interact with the like button this will simply add an event that says an user clicked the like button.

It would look something like the following (new code in yellow):
<fb:like onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Likes', 'Like', 'TITLE OF YOUR POST']);" href="YOURSITESURL.COM"></fb:like>

And again, if you want to track the Like Button’s magnetic effect using Google’s URL builder, the code would look something like:
<fb:like onclick="javascript: _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Likes', 'Like', 'TITLE OF YOUR POST']);" href="YOURSITESURL.COM?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=like"></fb:like>

There are very few very good seos in the world. There are a ton of moderately competent ones. And there are millions of dudes in their underwear, who live in their mommies basement, who do it for the guy down the street for $3 an hour. The last group reads articles from 1999 and says thing like, “Google likes keywords so let’s put the keyword you want to rank for in your site’s footer 300 times on every page.” I’m not poo pooing these underachieving ignoramuses, because most of the SEOs in the first and second group were once these assholes. The second group reads seomoz attends conferences, may do client work, and generally know what they are doing (with a few exceptions). The third group are the names you’ve heard of. These are the guys who write books, speak at conferences, produce original data sets and whose sites rank the highest for SEO keywords.

These gentlemen and gentle-ladies are often met with a bit of contempt in the SEO world. They are referred to as Conference whores, regarded as lazy asses who do nothing but get on a speaking circuit, no-talent hacks who like to write books but don’t know how to do what they claim they can do. And it’s easy to think that way. The truth is, the majority of SEO is nitty gritty, grunt work. The process is formulaic, and not very difficult.

To put it simply, most engagements go like this:

1. An individual or company has a site and knows they need SEO, so they come to you and ask you what they need to do to get ranked
2. You do some research, find out a little bit about their niche, come back to them with estimates and a proposal based on several data points.
3. If they accept. You assess their site, recommend changes that they need to make to remove obstacles to better rankings.
4. Once the changes are made, you build links…tons and tons of links.

The reality is, the first three bits of an engagement are somewhat important. On-site changes (especially title tags) can do wonders to get a site ranking. But a majority of the work, especially for competitive keywords is in the link building. So how do you build links? Basic, link building is super duper easy. It involves going to article directoreis, social bookmarking sites, link directories and getting links. No problem. High-level link building, on the other hand, is a practice in networking. To outrank other people in highly competitive niches, a site must get links from high quality sites that are, hopefully, in the same niche. The best SEOs ask the question, “how do I turn everything into a link building opportunity.”

More than that, the hardest bit of link building an SEO company/search marketing company can do is link building for themselves. Why? Because it’s time consuming. So for them, the question should be, how do I get good links so that I can rank for awesome stuff? One of the best ways to do that is to become a known enitity. If people trust you for information on SEO stuff, guess what, they’re going to link to you. Going to conferences gets you up in front of people. It goes, you go to conferences, you put your face in front of hundreds of pepole, they start to trust you, you get links, lots and lots of links. The work is minimal, the payoff can be huge. I think the one that understands the equation Life=Linkbait is Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive. Then again, I can’t believe that other SEOs haven’t figured it out.

It is all to say, go ahead and make fun of the circuit speakers. If your an SEO, and you are full up on work, then yay for you. But for those who really want to grow and build their business, the truth is, you are competing with those who are actually thinking strategically about building links. Yes, I’m saying that if you want a good, scalable way to build links, you should do that which you hate – get in front of every one, give away your secrets, speak at conferences. Yes, Give into the man, educate others, get links.

I published this rel canonical post at 2:35. I noticed that it had already been indexed at 2:39, four minutes later. Incredibly fast. I guess caffeine is really doing the trick. That or I just happened to publish a post right before my site was crawled. Either way, still a super fast indexing. You’ll also notice that the rel canonical issue appears to be solved.

Ok, so I’m not perfect. A few months ago, my homepage fell out of the SERPs and my pagerank started to do crazy things. It was right around the time that I switched to the Thesis theme and made some other changes to my site. Alas, this tends to be the site I experiment on, but I was having trouble figuring out why my homepage wasn’t getting indexed. For the past couple months I attributed it to the php 301 redirect I have on my site where it forwards you from http://(.*).spidermarket.com to http://www.spidermarket.com/index/. I left it because I was interested in seeing if Google was really having trouble reading my redirect (which really is a standard redirect). Alas, I was completely wrong.

Combing through my code tonight, I discovered that the rel canonical link on my homepage was pointing at my most recent post. I rectified the issue by changing my homepage from a static page to “Your Latest Post” in the options under “Settings>>Reading”. God knows why I’d set it to a static page. That makes no sense. But I’m excited that my page will finally get indexed correctly. I had, for a time, sort of resolved that my site would never index correctly again. I guess it goes to show that even good SEOs can make rookie mistakes… We learn, we move forward, and hopefully, if your site is doing the same thing, you stumble on my post and it helps you solve the problem.