Matt Cutts

Free Webinar: Unlocking the Power of YouTube Brand Channels

2013-01-22T11:30:00.002-08:00

Date & Time:
January 23, 2013 at 11:00 AM PST (2:00 PM EST)
Duration: 60 Minutes
Cost: Free

With daily views topping 3 billion, a new guide-centric redesign and meteoric mobile growth, YouTube is more important than ever to your brand. Join our team and one of our valued customers, TaylorMade Golf, as we help you to understand recent YouTube releases and dial in your YouTube strategy. We will also address community management on Google+.

Click here to register for free!

A Question from Matt Cutts to Google Webmaster Help :-)

2011-09-21T06:50:00.001-07:00

Q: How do reconsideration requests work at Google?

A:

Google Accounts Log-in Redesign Affects Auto-fill Username / Passwords

2011-09-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

Post Google+ launch, Google is busy redesigning most of its apps to match Google+ look and feel, and now they in the process of changing the log-in pages for most of the services and apps with the new look and feel.

The problem after redesign: saved passwords in the browser doesn't work anymore, you have to type and store it again, because with the new redesign, any log-in page is redirected to "Google Accounts" authentication URL which is different from the previous one, and most of the browsers couldn't map the username and password to the new URL.

Can Google get a quick fix to it?

Is Google Promoting Orkut?

2011-07-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the below screenshot, a link to Orkut is now visible next to Google Plus. Is Google promoting Orkut again as their secondary social network ;-) ?

How To Make Money Using Google+1: Spammers Trick

2011-07-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

I think this must be the first spam trick for selling Google +1s. Next target is Google+ ;-)

Social Media Boosts Referral Traffic! Really?

2011-07-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

As per the recent Google Analytics benchmark report, the referral traffic has gone down by 1.6%, if this is the case how to justify that "Social Media Engagement" really helps in driving traffic to websites?

And in the other hand a report from "Search Engine Land" says, integrating your website with Social Networking sites like Facebook increase referral traffic by 300%!!
So which one of these values is exact? Any thoughts?

PS: "Social Media Engagement" may not drive enough traffic but gets business!

Google+ (Google Plus): Gmail Gets Its First Update

2011-06-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

As part of the Google's new Social Networking project "Google+ (Google Plus)", Gmail gets first cool update.

On the right-hand side column (after opening a conversation) Google+ pulls public conversations and profiles of people listed in the conversation.

You can Initiate Group Chat, Send Meeting Request, Group Reply, Find Relevant Conversation, Get Info about their public profile, and much more to come...

Preview:

Social Media Sites Used to Engage with Customers #Webinar #Poll via @Position2

2011-06-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

A poll result from the Webinar by ChiefMarketer, sponsored by Position2:

Question: What social media site will you most likely be actively listening and engaging with prospects and customers?

Answer:

As expected Twitter and Facebook leads the race...
Click image to enlarge

Retweet, Facebook Like and Now: Google +1

2011-06-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

Finally, the code to add Google +1 for websites is out. I just received an email from the Google team with a link to add the code. Here is the link to get the code, go ahead and add it to your website and "+1 your website" the Google way...

For more information please read Google's official note.

Tip: For bloggers, please include the script in your <head> section, it doesn't work when you added it just above </body> tag.

Social Cheaters: Please Follow Some Ethics [Twitter Rules]

2011-03-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

Do you tweet? And do you follow-back all your followers? If so please save yourself from "Social Cheaters".

The History:

At early times, when search engines' ranking algorithm was powered only by back-links, people used to add reciprocal links to pass PageRank (PR) and to improve their rankings. But very few of them keep a track of their back-links and most of them will remove the reciprocal links just before the Google PageRank Dance to boost their search engine rankings and PR.

The Present:

Similar to Google PageRank for a webpage your Twitter profile has an influencer score, and to increase the score "Social Cheaters" follow the same old method. This is what they do:

First they will select the list of twitter accounts to follow.

Then they will follow each and every twitter account.

As soon as they 'click' follow, the twitter account holder will get an email alert saying "You got a new follower".

But even before the 'new follower' email alert reaches inbox, the 'Social Cheaters' will Un-follow them.

Most of them will follow back even without checking the followers current follow status.

By doing this I have seen most of have gained a good profile score.

Example:

I recently got a new follower alert from @buzzwave a twitter account from http://buzzwave.us.com and they have followed the same trick to gain more followers.

As you can see the ratio between following and the followers is way too high. How do they attain this?
I got their follow request by 8:40 PM and I checked their twitter account by 8:50 PM, but by that time my account was un-followed.

Most of them won't check for the current status of the new followers they will simply follow back. And this is how they could easily increase their followers. A best example of poor social media ethics!

How to Prevent?

Before you decide to follow-back any new follower, please check for their current status. To verify the current status please check for the message button. If the message button is visible then they still follow you, if not they have un-followed you.

Following:

Not Following:

So what happens if they un-follow after you follow them back? Use tools like http://who.unfollowed.me/ to check your followers' status and un-follow the "Social Cheaters".

Conclusion:

It is not necessary that all un-followers are "Social Cheaters". Sometimes if your twitter timeline is spammy you will lose your followers. ;-)

Tips to keep-up your followers:

Do not overload your twitter timeline even if you are posting relevant news items.

Do not send spam links to your followers.

Do not send DMs very frequently.

Tips: when you consider following someone:

Follow only if their timeline interests you.

Don't follow just for a follow-back.

Do not un-follow immediately to increase your profile score.

Tips to maintain your twitter account:

Check your followers' status and un-follow the "Social Cheaters". I use http://who.unfollowed.me/ to manage my list.

If possible stick to specific topic while discussing on your timeline.

Give credits to the original twitters, always use RT or VIA or use the default Retweet.

So what are you waiting for, start scanning your account and eliminate the cheaters.

Happy tweeting!

PS: I use http://klout.com/ to check my profile score.

GMail - New Header

2011-02-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

GMail is testing their new header. I like it. Neat...

How are site: results ranked? [Video]

2011-01-31T03:08:00.000-08:00

Hurray! Matt Cutts has answered my question in Google Webmaster Help YouTube Channel.

Thanks Matt :-)

Google #Chrome Will Overtake Internet Explorer (#IE) by Dec 2011

2011-01-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

As per the browser usage statistics published by W3Schools, Google Chrome is the only browser which gained popularity in Dec 2010.

Source: W3Schools

Comparing growth level with previous year, IE lost almost 10% of its share while Google Chrome gained more than 10% of usage share. Going forward with the same trend, Chrome will overtake IE by end of this year 2011.

Top 5 #SocialMedia and Search Trends of 2010

2010-12-14T10:36:00.000-08:00

Based on the recent trends released by Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, I have listed the top 5 trends of 2010. The list includes the most popular topics out of the 4 individual lists.

Here is the Top 5 Trends of 2010:

1. World Cup
2. Oil Spill
3. iPhone
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Justin Bieber

Top 10 Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo Trends:

Twitter
Gulf Oil Spill
FIFA World Cup
Inception
Haiti Earthquake
Vuvuzela
Apple iPad
Google Android
Justin Bieber
Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
Pulpo Paul

Facebook
HMU
World Cup
Movies
iPad and iPhone
Haiti
Justin Bieber
Games on Facebook
Mineros / Miners
Airplanes
2011

Google (News)
haiti
besiktas
chile
earthquake
lady gaga
iphone 4
jörg kachelmann
menowin fröhlich
mobile technology
oil spill

Yahoo
BP oil spill
World Cup
Miley Cyrus
Kim Kardashian
Lady Gaga
iPhone
Megan Fox
Justin Bieber
American Idol
Britney Spears

Click here to download the above data in Word/TXT format.

Bat Cave: Batman Hates #SocialMedia

2010-12-07T08:35:00.000-08:00

Source: Agent-x

#Google Testing New Ways to Dispay #AdWords in SERP?

2010-11-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

While experimenting with the Google's related search functionality, I came across this new type of ad display. The ads are displayed like AdSense's "Link Unit" if you click on any of the "Also try" links, it will lead to another SERP with no or minimal ads, mostly with the advertiser on top (#1).

In this case how to track AdWords CTR?

Social Media Is All About Winning The Viral Race!

2010-09-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

When will you say that a social media campaign is successful?

The success of a social media campaign is defined based on one major factor, i.e. "visibility".

"If you can think and construct a unique, interesting theme to market your product or service, the end result will be a successful campaign."

I have taken couple of social media virals to explain how unique and interesting your campaign should be.

Campaign from OldSpic:

This is one of the successful viral video campaigns which attracted so many social media users.

Campaign from Cisco:

Copycat of OldSpice, which is a failure and couldn’t generate enough buzz among the social media users.

Reason for Cisco's failure:

The main reason for Cisco's failure is the idea is not unique and moreover a social viral will not fit for all kinds of products and services. In this case you can’t use the same technique to sell both after-shave and networking routers

Few tips for a successful social media campaign:

1. Think unique

Copying an existing social media campaign will create another “Cisco Spice”, so think unique.

2. Consider your target audience

A brief research about your audience like, age group, gender and the geo location can help you create a campaign for your target audience

3. Interesting campaign topic, character and theme

Selecting an attractive character, name or theme is very crucial as this the entry point where it hooks the users to stop and view the viral.

4. Refresh (be active)

Any social media camping has its own expiry date; you can’t just create a campaign and expect users glued with your service always. If you don’t refresh your ideas users will keep moving.

As you can see the graph below, traffic reached the peak when Oldspice released their viral, then it become normal. Be active to keep yourself on top.

Finally, think viral! If you want to win the social media race, think and act viral.

#Firefox4 - Bundled with 2 Cool Features from Google Chrome

2010-08-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

I am big fan of Firefox but still I liked Google Chrome for some basic features like,

- Tab placement
- Apps Tabs
- Installing Add-ons without rebooting browser

But now the new version of Firefox will have the first two features added.

Firefox 4 Features:

New Tab Location

[Image source: mozilla.com]

App Tabs

[Image source: mozilla.com]

And the other new features like, 'Switch to Tab' and 'Firefox Button' will add more flexibility and work area.

But I will really like if they can enable Firefox add-ons to be installed without rebooting.

What is your favorite feature and what would you like to see in the next version of Firefox?

Free Social Media Monitoring Tool - Do It Yourself

2010-07-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

How important is to monitor social media?

It is time to go beyond your regular website analytics! Why? Using traditional website analytics you can only measure activities that are happening after the user enters the website. But how can you monitor users’ activity outside the website, I mean the activities and comments that they are publishing across the social media networking websites?

Social media monitoring tools are expensive. But there are plenty available...

There are plenty of social media monitoring tools available but most of them are still in the learning phase and yet to build a comprehensive solution. Moreover their costing won’t work for little start-up companies. But social media monitoring is required for all kinds of business who use online media to promote their services and products, how large or small the business is, doesn’t matter.

A Simple Zero-cost Solution

So what can be a possible zero cost solution? After doing a small research I have come up with a simple plan to easily monitor your users’ activity across all major social media websites.

How social media monitoring tool works?

Before I being the process, I just what to give an introduction on how traditional social media monitoring tool works. The process is pretty simple as the search engine workings. The challenge is to define different indexing and search algorithm for various kinds of social media websites. For example a video streaming website like YouTube has to be indexed very differently when you compare with a discussion forum.

How to build our own social media monitoring tool?

As per the flow-diagram we need three different modules to create our own tool. Let us begin with the first module “INDEX”.

INDEX

Oh wait! No need to worry about buying a server cloud. It is already built for us; we have to just use it. It is nothing but the “Google” INDEX. Google has a massive indexing engine which can index millions of blogs, forums, news and many other websites and segregates it algorithmically.

As our initial step we use Google index to build our indexing module. To start the indexing module we have to define the types of social media websites to be indexed. And here is the list,

- Blogs
- Discussion Forums
- News
- Videos and
- Micro Blogging (Twitter)
- LinkedIn
- Facebook

And here is how we build our indexing engine.

- Use Google Blog search and news search to follow the activity in Blogs and News respectively
- Use Google alerts to follow recent activity in forums, videos, LinkedIn and Facebook
- To follow twitter activity use its own search

It may be vague at this point of time, but once we build our complete system it will be fun using it.

The second module, “SEARCH”

SEARCH

The search module will not only help searching the network it also helps to segregate data collected from various sources in a unique form.

The unique form of data is “RSS Feeds”. Here is how you generate RSS feeds for various kinds of social media websites.

- To generate a RSS for blog index, go to Google blog search and search for the keyword you want to monitor (tip: it can be your brand name, product, services or competitor’s brand) and save the feed URL (I prefer Atom).

- To generate a RSS for Forum index, go to Google Alerts and type the keyword you want to monitor and select the options as shown below,

Create alert and save the feed URL.

- To generate a RSS feed for video follow the same process as you did forum, but select the type of alert from the list accordingly.

- To generate a RSS for News, go to news.google.com and search for the keyword and save the feed URL

- To generate a RSS feed for micro blogging (Twitter), go to twitter.com and search for the keyword you want to monitor and save the feed URL (shown below)

- To generate RSS feed for Facebook and LinkedIn, go to Google Alerts and enter the search term with a prefix “site:facebook.com” and “site:linkedin.com” respectively and save the result as RSS feed

Now we have generated different feed URLs which can search and fetch updated results from the indexing engine.

Next and last module is the “RESULTS” module

RESULTS

Add all the feed URLs to Google reader and rename the subscription for easy identification.

Now the tool is almost ready to monitor. Give at-least a day to pull results from all RSS feeds.

The following reporting/engagement features are now readily available:

Email – send useful and interesting post
Tag – for search and easy access
Share it with note – an easy-share with your views
Star – mark important or favorite items
Send to – re-tweet or post it to various other social media websites with single click (go to reader setting and enable it under “send to” tab)

Now take a look at the tool’s work-flow, I have tried matching it with the traditional social media monitoring tools,

Click here to download a step-by-step tutorial.

There are few limitations in this tool when you compare it with an enterprise level monitoring tool. And if you are really looking for one comprehensive tool, try Position2’s Brand Monitor.

Meanwhile, I will analyze and add more stuff to enhance the free social media monitoring tool.

#Tweeting Best Practice?

2010-06-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

Do you tweet? If so, I have explained two ways of posting updates to your public time-line. Which one do you recommend?

Option 1: Tweeting Everything at a Time

Option 2: Tweeting Evenly Throughout the Day

Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Option 1: Tweeting Everything in a Time

Open twitter.com (or any other twitter client) once in a day, and dump all your ideas/items which you want to share into the time-line with multiple updates and shut it down.

Benefit: Your updates will be clearly visible to all of your followers and noticeable.

Drawback: It’s a kind of hacking into others time-line (i.e. your followers), unless if you are not a very big personality you may lose your followers as some of them can’t tolerate such dump.

Option 2: Tweeting Evenly Throughout the Day

The other option is constantly accessing twitter and updating the timeline with information throughout the day evenly, instead of dumping everything at a time.

Benefit: Your followers will get real-time updates and a clutter free timeline

Drawback: If your follower is not using any of the twitter clients and not managing his timeline, then there are more chances of missing some of your interesting (instead, useful) updates.

So what is your opinion? Vote for your favorite and recommended way of tweeting.

If the voting box is not visible, please click here to vote.

New Look to Position² Blogs - My 3rd Successful Wordpress Integration

2010-04-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

Today, I have successfully launched the redesigned Position² Blogs. This is my 3rd successful Wordpress integration.

The template was designed using DIV, CSS and CSS Grids. I have not used tables at all.

This project is a successful inclusion to my earlier list of Wordpress integration: Subroto Bagchi's blog and MindTree Foundation website.

Thanks to Zubin for giving me this opportunity.

Any feedback on functionality and other features?

#Gmail Suspicious Account Activity Warning!

2010-03-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

Couple of days back Gmail launched this feature and today I am one among the list of affected victims!

Or, is this a way to remind users to change there password?

When did you last changed your Gmail password? Update it now to safeguard your account!

Irrelevant Starred Results - Google SERP

2010-03-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

I was searching for an online portal of my savings bank and landed on the below search page :-(

Irrelevant results! How Google's starred search works?

Obviously, these starred items are bookmarked under my login, but not relevant for the search term. Also, if you do the same search inside Google bookmarks page, you will not get these starred results!

Worried! Can I turn if off? or fix it? Help!!

Targeting Users At Wrong #Advertising Medium? - The Online

2010-02-22T11:44:00.000-08:00

Which is the easy, cost effective, high ROI and measurable advertising medium?

Obviously, the "Online" medium!

But the recent online activities show that the future of online advertising will be very tough!

Here is a little proof:

Note: As per the W3Schools browsers usage stats, Firefox, IE and Chrome are the top three browsers.

To show ads we need browsers capable of displaying ads. But what if the users say no to ads, then what will be next step to show ads? And how the user says "NO"!

Here is how?

What do you think the most popular browser extension/add-on for Google Chrome and Firefox?

The Ad Blocker!

Image: Firefox Popular Add-on

Image: Google Chrome – Popular Extension

Millions of internet users say "NO" to ads, if this is the case then how you are planning to deliver your ads to online users using one of the above mentioned popular browsers?

This question kills so many advertisers, isn't?

So what is the possible solution?

Hint: Stop bugging like "Sales Representatives", understand user requirements and deliver ads accordingly! Or the online medium will not be an easy place to advertise.

I know this may not be the actual solution! But trying to find a perfect one...

Share your thoughts too!

MindTree Foundation Website - Opened for Internet Users

2009-12-03T09:43:00.000-08:00

The project which I worked on recently was successfully released today for internet users.

Visit www.mindtreefoundation.org and let me know your feedback.

I designed/templatized and hosted the MindTree Foundation website using Wordpress CMS.

Sneak-peak:

Couple of plug-ins that I have used while building this website. You may consider these when you customize Wordpress for your corporate/personal website.

Contact Form 7 – A nice Ajax based custom form building plug-in. Easy to create, implement and manage multiple forms.

Simple Press – Neat and easy-to-install Wordpress forum plug-in, with multiple forum skins to match your website’s theme.

I will release the other list of useful plug-ins after I complete the next version of website with many more added features. This is an initial release and many background activities are happening to enhance the visibility and usability of the website.

Meanwhile, feedback from my readers is always appreciated, which I will consider during the enhancement process :-)