Today, Google appears to have disabled the PageRank database. Google Pagerank toolbars and online pagerank checkers are not working since this morning. It was working fine yesterday.

All pageranks are now NA or 0. (Read further before crying). 

To be honest, this was not going to change much in SEO if this news was true, as the Pagerank was a “dead” value and deleted from most experienced SEO’s KPI’s list.

The last confirmed pagerank update was 27 June 2011, after more than an year.

The first Google Toolbar with the PageRank value was introduced on the 11th of December 2000.

Google PageRank is still alive! Google has updated the URL which is used to query it, causing various toolbars and websites to stop reporting the value. Could have been a nice April Fools day joke… but we are far away from April!

Want to know more about the URL query change? Read more here .

Yahoo! has announced today that the Search alliance with Bing will start on the 3 of August. All Yahoo! organic results will be unified with Bing results in Italy, UK, France, Germany and Spain. The Paid search part will still be different for now until next update.

Yahoo! Site explorer will be shut down soon and all the webmaster issues (sitemap submission, link controls and more) can be managed through the Bing Webmaster Tools.

This is an epical revolution in the Search Industry, and for me the third of August will be a sad day.

In someway Yahoo! is the first victim of the excessive power of Google. The alliance with Bing looks more like a withdrawal from the Search Market War to me. I personally was a user of Yahoo! Search and somehow liked it especially for it’s usability. I think that at some points Yahoo! was challenging Google with some good innovations… but unfortunately this hasn’t been enough.

Simone

During a routine analysis I found out that many websites that I manage have lost a significant amount of traffic from referrals sites despite the overall traffic is normal or in some cases even increasing. I had to investigate further and I found out that on the 22 of July Google Analytics deployed an important update effecting the way that “Google Images” searches are reported.

Before the update every Google Image Search was reported inside the referral section of Analytics, now it appears to be in the Search Engine section.

This means that you are likely to observe a “strange” increase of Google Search organic traffic and a decrease of referral traffic – good to know during the monthly scorecards evaluations…

To check this you can create a filter in the referral traffic section including only “google.images sites, you should notice a drop from n to 0 from the 22 of July, exactly like in the example below:

Simone

Are you trying to access adwords from your iPad or Iphone with Safari but it crashes? It’s normal… or at least both Google and Apple are aware of the problem, and no, they haven’t found a solution yet!

The good news is that there is a good workaround to the problem. You can use the Mercury Browser, downloadable from iTunes for free (limited version with ads). The full ads-free version costs only 0,69£. This browser will let you access Adwords from your Ipad or Iphone with no issue.

I really hope this tip can help all those users who are despairing for this Safari issue… that hopefully one day will be resolved by Apple – or Google.

Currently I can’t figure out who is to blame for this problem, but I think it’s a shame that the world most sold tablet and mobile smartphone can’t access the world most famous advertising platform… a big issue for all Marketers that bought the iPad to work in mobility – like me.

Download Mercury Browser.

Simone

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’m going to answer to a tough question that I’ve responded on the Google Webmaster Forum today, that seems to harass many webmasters: “Are the paginated pages an issue with the Google Panda update?“.

The answer is “are you sure you want paginated pages to be indexed any ways?“. I know that it’s not polite to answer to a question with another question, but let me explain…

I’ve read a lot about this on blogs, Google’s official resources and forums and I never found a real “clarification” from Google but I have found some useful info that made me come with a conclusion. If a site has tons of “paging” pages with an important percentage of duplicated content (for example the introduction text, the headings, titles and meta descriptions) it could harm rankings if they are not excluded from the indexing process. The Panda update made this situation even clearer.

However, the problem is a non problem in any case, because you don’t want paginated pages to be indexed.

Why? Simple. Would you want a user to land on a page 13 instead of your first page in a certain category? No you don’t. The user would have very little value from that page and bounce rates will rise like mad!

So how to avoid this type of problem?

Some SEO Experts suggest to add a canonical tag on the “paging” pages linking to the first page, to avoid duplicate content penalizations, but this is not the best practice. The Google employee Maile Ohye talked about this on the Google Webmaster Central Blog saying:

“I would not specify the canonical URL as the first page of listings for paginated content. Why not? As mentioned earlier, rel=”canonical” does not accumulate text contents from various pages — so it should only be used in situations where the content is identical or nearly identical. In a paginated series, each page contains entirely different content/items so they shouldn’t be grouped as one URL.”

The best practice is to use a “noindex,follow” in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (page 2, 3 and all the remaining). Doing this search engines will no index all the “paginated” pages yet crawling on to the pages that are behind the listings passing link juice (i.e. products, articles and so on),

“Noindexing” paginated pages is a good practice also because it allows you to avoid users to land on a different page from page 1 from a search engine search. Said this, as you can see it’s not only a problem of Panda and duplicate content issues. It’s a best practice in any case.

Hope this helps,

Simone

I have to start this article saying I’m very surprised of what I’m going to talk about today. I’m a very big Google fan as this incredible company nourishes my business as a SEM consultant and especially because Google changed the world, from many points of view. But when Google does it wrong… it’s wrong even if they are Google.

I’m talking about the iPhone application Google Shopper, an incredible and very useful idea, but completely useless to many users that are complaining badly on iTunes.

Before writing this post I wanted to check if the feedbacks left from the users of Google Shopper App were true or not, and unfortunately they are! The app crashes all the times on iPhone 4 and on iPad!

A screenshot of iTunes App Store

And other customer comments:

There are 3 pages of negative comments on the app store which you can see here or directly on iTunes.

Now my question is, how can a such big company like Google, the same company that has revolutionized the world,  launch in the market an app that is completely unusable for many users and even worst, how can Google not listen to its customers feedbacks? I would have expected that the app would have been suspended from the App store for a while trying to release a more reliable version. That would have been a much more professional move.

I don’t think that this bad move is going to spoil it’s mobile market, but for sure it will help decrease a bit the overall brand reputation, especially on Apps for mobile.

What are your thoughts on this?

I must say again, I’m surprised and a bit disappointed. Maybe mobile market isn’t that important for them? I leave it to your thinking…

Simone

How to Delete query parameters (_from_store) when switching store views in Magento

Every multi-language magento site installed with multi-stores will have the “_from_store” query string generated in every URL when changing a language (store) to another. This can be an SEO issue and sometimes be confusing when studying the web analytics. To avoid this problem, follow this 2 step guide:

1) Open the “languages.phtml” file. (The path should be: /app/design/frontend/default/template/page/switch/languages.phtml)

2) Find line 41 and change it from:

echo $_lang->getCurrentUrl()
to this:
echo $_lang->getCurrentUrl(false)

This small change will force the store model in Magento to generate these URLs without the query parameter.

Hope this helps! Enjoy.

Tracking Facebook pages traffic is very important, especially when those pages are used for marketing activities. The tools available inside Facebook, insights, is relatively poor in terms of data.

Fortunately there is a way to use google analytics on Facebook. At the moment Facebook is not allowing any tracking code in it’s FBML but there is a workaround that I have learned from a company in London called Webdigi, which I want to thank for it’s help.

Here is a quick guide.

Setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages in 3 easy steps:

Instead of using javascript to include the google analytics code we have to use an image, as the FBML does not offer this possibility. In 3 steps:

• Setup your Google Analytics account and create a new website profile. Usually it’s easier to name it something like facebook.com/your-page-name. Get your tracking code that you will need in the second step.

• Create your custom img tag for each of your Facebook tab pages you like to track on Google analytics. Eg: contact form, welcome tabs, etc. You can use this open source tool created by Webdigi to create the Google Analytics link generator for Facebook pages. It’s completely free!

• Add the entire custom image html tag from step 2 to the bottom of each Facebook fan page that you need to track.

That’s it! Remember that Google analytics is not real-time so give it some time to get the data. Usually 24 hours is enough.

Hope this helps.

Update: Some of you asked me if it’s possible to track facebook walls and “default” sections not created with FBML. The answer is unfortunately no! Since Facebook removed boxes, there is no other way to track these parts. But the good news is that you can add a FBML page as the default landing page. That way you can track access to you page, even if the user doesn’t use the wall!

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For some quick analyses, SEO professionals need to disable the Google personalised results to analyse the “real” ranking of certain keywords.

Google gives you the option to disable the personalised results for all web searches, but sometimes this is too much. In most cases, I want to disable the customised results only for certain queries, useful for my SEO analysis.

There are to ways to disable the personalised results on the single query, and these are:

1. Add “&pws=0″ parameter to your Google search URL
2. Use Chrome browser,  and open new incognito window (default ctrl + Shift + N).

Easy enough I would say. Happy SEO.

Simone

Contests are a great tool to enhance user engagement and achieve fans. Here is a list of 3 nice ideas that could help accomplish these goals.

Idea 1: Hunting Contest

This is one of the most engaging contests, in my opinion. The contest consists in posting a small list of things that your fans must know about your brand searching on the website. For example: The year the brand was established, the name of the CEO, the cheapest product on the site… and other nice info.  The first person to list the answers correctly will win. You decide the award! It can be a voucher to spend on your e-commerce, a special gift or whatever you think can be appropriate.

This contest generates a high level of engagement because the users must research and learn more about your brand.

Idea 2: Best Caption Contest

This contest is another nice and engaging idea that could be considered funnier to do than the first one.  It consists in posting funny pictures that have a specific theme. For example, it could be pictures with the brand written somehow on the body… or other funny things. It’s all up to you imagination! Who should win the contest? The picture with more likes, of course!

This contest is easy to carry out.  The awards could be again vouchers, merchandising products or whatever you think is suitable.  Just remember that it should be something that attracts users to enter the contest!

Idea 3: The Story Teller Contest

This contest could result a bit more difficult to understand and to carry out, but it’s very interesting. It consists in finding a couple or more images and ask your users to comment them with a little story that can tie them together. Who wins? The story with more likes! This type of contest is probably suitable for certain types of industries. For example it’s perfect for a professional photographer or an agency.

Those are just 3 of the many ideas that could create a very engaging contest. Remember, the objectives of a contest are mainly 2: User engagement and Branding.

You should consider starting a facebook contest when you have at least 500 fans, otherwise the result could be no participation! No participation could also create a very bad impression with your facebook fans.

Need advice on Social Marketing Activities? Contact Optimise Internet and Studio Web Luciani, through the form.