Web Marketing & SEO news

Twitter lancia Twitter Stories: storie di vite cambiate grazie ad un tweet

2011-11-02T15:00:28Z

Twitter ha da poco lanciato un sito internet chiamato Twitter Stories con lo scopo di illustrare l’impatto che il servizio di microblogging ha avuto nelle vite di alcuni fortunati utenti che grazie ad appena 140 caratteri sono riusciti a fare qualcosa di straordinario.

Al momento il sito è ancora piuttosto scarno e si limita a riportare le testimonianze di alcuni personaggi celebri che dovrebbero fare da traino a tutti quegli utenti che hanno tratto qualche beneficio da un semplice tweet. La storia più incredibile e già molto nota è senza dubbio quella del musicista e produttore Chris Strout che grazie ad un tweet di pochi caratteri, “me**a, ho bisogno di un rene“, è riuscito a trovare un donatore ed ha potuto essere sottoposto con successo al trapianto.

O quella della Yuichi-kai, associazione giapponese di pesca che grazie a Twitter ha dato nuova linfa alla sua attività: ogni mattina i pescatori condividono foto e video dei pesci appena presi e danno la possibilità ai clienti di prenotarli fin da subito. Durante il viaggio di ritorno i vari ordini vengono smistati ed organizzati così da poter essere processati una volta rientrati in porto.

Twitter Stories è stato lanciato ufficialmente il 1° novembre ed è ancora alla ricerca di storie interessanti da aggiungere al database. Tutti possono partecipare alla selezione semplicemente spiegando brevemente il fatto e menzionando @twitterstories o utilizzando l’hashtag #twitterstories. In aggiunta, per illustrare meglio la storia, si possono allegare foto e video.

Ogni mese le storie più interessanti saranno pubblicate sul sito e tradotte in varie lingue, tra cui portoghese, turco, tedesco, francese, giapponese e russo. Se non avete storie da raccontare potete fare da spettatori e leggere le avventure altrui diventando follower di @twitterstories.

Via | Twitter

Twitter lancia Twitter Stories: storie di vite cambiate grazie ad un tweet é stato pubblicato su Downloadblog.it alle 16:00 di mercoledì 02 novembre 2011.

Yahoo Breaks New Ad Ground with Social Slider and Living Ads

2011-11-03T18:59:35Z

Yahoo has launched two new ad services designed to engage consumers in a more meaningful and fun way.

First is the Social Sentiment Slider. The slider is a sponsored poll that is attached to a piece of content on Yahoo’s site.

Here’s what it looks like:

We can’t see the article, but presumably it’s a news feature about the rise in luxury item sales, or something along those lines. People move the slider to express their opinion, the percentages change and then they can post that opinion directly to Facebook.

There’s no doubt that social engagement will help brand awareness, but there’s also a potential pitfall. The ad sponsor doesn’t get to choose the slider question, Yahoo does. In the above case, it can be disconcerting to see a high percentage to the negative side (Status) when you’re promoting a luxury car right underneath.

In the grand scheme, it’s probably a case of “no visibility is bad visibility,” since people can help but be aware of the ad as they chime in on the instant poll.

Living Ads

Yesterday, Yahoo introduced Livestand. This is an iPad reader app that presents you with content from a (not so) long list of news sources. It’s less about text and more about graphics. It’s about bringing you new information in a fast, easily consumed way.

To go along with that, they’ve launched Living Ads. These interactive pages walk and talk and tell a story. They invite the reader in for a look around and they allow the user to control the pace. Imagine a TV commercial where you can turn the corner and see what’s going on out of camera range, or zoom in on a record and play it.

They call it “where motion and emotion meet” and it’s an excellent way of drawing a consumer into the world of a specific brand. Again, it’s about keeping the reader on the page longer and for now, at least, these ads are so novel, they should work.

They better work — they cost around 500,000 and they don’t use clicks as a measurement of success.

The best thing about Living Ads is that they’re made for the iPad. They aren’t web ads that just happen to show up on the tablet. They’re a whole new animal that takes advantage of what the iPad has to offer.

Tablets are the only “active lean back” media. It provides the active engagement of a computer with the lean back, relaxed mode that is TV. For that, we have to design all new ways of providing content and advertising and Yahoo has taken a big step in that direction.

Want to see Living Ads in action? Watch a demo at yahoolivingads.com.

It's Apple's Sandbox, Developers Just Play In It

2011-11-03T23:00:00Z

Despite a number of cogent arguments against it, Apple is going through with the requirement for apps in the Mac App Store to be sandboxed. A number of Mac developers have already spoken up about the policy, but Apple's going through with it anyway. Initially set to go into effect this month, Apple has moved the deadline to March 1, 2012. Does Apple really know better than independent developers here, or is it just being a bully in its own sandbox?

Sponsor

The basic concept isn't bad: Apple wants to restrict applications to a "sandbox" that limits their access to system resources, as a security measure. If applications distributed through the Mac App Store are compromised, it limits the damage they can do to a user's machines.

So this sounds good in theory, but it's tying the hands of a lot of developers in terms of being able to distribute through the App Store. But is it actually going to work, is it necessary and will there be more restrictions down the road for apps not in the App Store?

What's Restricted

Apple is restricting most things by default, and only giving developers "entitlements" to a limited set of system resources. This includes things like access to a user's movies, iTunes folder, built-in microphone and/or camera, the Downloads folder, address book, calendar and so on. Essentially, the resources that Apple's powers that be have determined to be of most interest and valid targets for developers.

Note that all of these resources are "entitlements," which means that developers have to request access to them. It's not up to the user, it's got to pass muster before an app ships through the Mac App Store. More on that in a moment.

Pauli Olavi Ojala works on Conduit and Radi. Today he writes about the problems with the Mac App Sandbox and the kind of applications it will limit. According to Ojala, it will prohibit all manner of applications and plugins being distributed via the app store. (Plugins because they'd need to be placed in another app's container or directory structure, which is already a no-no.)

If an application wants access to, say, the Thunderbolt port? Nope, that's not allowed. It also means that backup software isn't allowed in the App Store, obviously. It will, of course, rule out apps like VMware's Fusion or Parallels. Of course, a lot of applications are already locked out of the App Store.

Dumb and Dumber... Apps

Even the "entitlements" that Apple has carved out are not guaranteed to developers. I see this as both good and bad. Having Apple as the arbiter of whether you can access a system resource or not is sub-optimal when developers have a legitimate need to access that resource. Then again, there's legitimate concern that some shops will ship software that goes peeking into corners that it shouldn't. Does a game need access to my contacts? Does a productivity app really need access to my microphone or camera?

But Apple's vision here seems to be a world of apps that don't and can't really talk to one another and that's, well, not optimal. As Andy Ihnatko writes about not being able to interact with the Preview app: "why on Earth wouldn't Apple's own utility for viewing, modifying, and converting images and PDFs be a superstar of scriptable apps?!?" Why indeed?

I'm wondering if, for instance, applications like Evernote will have to be pushed out of the App store – or completely hobbled to live in it. Evernote is a pretty popular app on Mac OS X. One of the best features of Evernote is the ability to grab Web pages. Evernote kind of has to "talk" to the other apps to be able to do that.

If Ojala is right, Evernote wouldn't even be able to take screenshots. At all. There's no entitlement for that.

Security Theater

All of these restrictions remind me a bit too much of the security rules for flying today. Only 3 ounces of liquid. No nail clippers. And so on. But you can buy a couple of bottles of high-proof alcohol (that would make for excellent weapons) in the duty free and take them on the plane.

So there's a lot of applications that are out there that can be exploited, and what's the protection from those? Worse, what's the protection from applications that are malware in the first place?

Apple's Way or The Highway

To sum up, Apple has gotten a lot of its users used to finding software via the App Store. First via iOS, then with the Mac App Store. Then the company has steadily tightened restrictions and grabbed for more revenue for the apps distributed via the iOS App Store.

Now the company is essentially dumbing down the applications that can be distributed via the App Store. I really have to wonder whether there will be a day when Mac OS X is like iOS: The only way to install applications on a stock system will be through the App Store.

I'm trying to avoid looking at this as a black and white issue, because it's not as simple as "restrictions bad, freedom good." As we've seen with Android, developers can and do abuse app stores. Having a gatekeeper is not always a bad thing. But this tips the scales. Apple is being overly restrictive, at least as far as I'm concerned.

We no doubt have quite a few Mac users and developers in the audience: What do you think about the new rules? Is Apple getting it right, or should they back off?

Discuss

8 things the web content optimization community can learn from Matt Cutts’s cloaking video

2011-11-04T00:51:56Z

For years, I have been answering questions about web content optimization (WCO) and search engine optimization (SEO). (See this post from earlier this year.) Recently, I’ve had several calls with customers who want a definitive answer to the following questions:

How does Site Optimizer handle bots?
How do we make sure we aren’t accused of cloaking?

In the past, we’ve worked with the Google team to get answers to these questions. Recently, Matt Cutts posted this video on cloaking, based on our discussions. (Shout-out to Patrick Meenan for his tireless efforts here. Thanks, Pat!)

Like most search-related answers, the video is a general overview of cloaking, but it contains all of the information we need to answer the questions above.

(Before I get into that, though, I have to mention how much Matt reminds me of Mr Rogers in this video. He seems so approachable and kind. I’d let him take care of my kids.)

Now let’s get into things. In order to analyze Matt’s points, I’ve transcribed the video to the best of my abilities and patience. I’ll be quoting Matt, and then interpreting his comments in the context of web content optimization.

Point #1: You cannot target the bot specifically, and you cannot serve it different content.

“Cloaking is essentially showing different content to users, then to Googlebot. So imagine that you have a web server right here and a user comes and asks for a page. So you know, here is your user. [He's drawing on the whiteboard here.] You give him some sort of page and everybody is happy. And now let’s have Googlebot come and ask for a page as well, and you give Googlebot a page. Now, in the vast majority of situations, the same content goes to Googlebot and users. Everybody is happy. Cloaking is when you show different content to users and to Googlebot and it is definitely high risk; that is a violation of our quality guidelines.“

I think he makes the basic principle very clear here: you cannot target the bot specifically, and you cannot serve it different content.

What is key here are two concepts:

What constitutes different content.
What situations outside of the “vast majority of situations” are acceptable use cases for sending different content to different browsers.

Let’s keep going as Matt expands on both of these concepts.

Point #2: Intent is important.

“Why do we consider cloaking bad, or why does Google not like cloaking? Well, the answer is sort of in the ancient days of search engines, when you saw a lot of people do really deceptive or misleading things with cloaking. For example, when Googlebot came, the web server that was cloaking might return a page all about cartoons, Disney cartoons or whatever, but when a user came and visited the page, the web server might return something like porn. And so if you do a search for Disney cartoons on Google, you will get a page that look like it would be about cartoons, you would click on it, and then you would get porn. That is a hugely bad experience. People complain about it. It is an awful experience for users. So we say that all types of cloaking are against the quality guidelines. There is no such thing as “white hat cloaking”. Certainly when somebody is doing something especially deceptive or misleading that is when we care the most that is when the web spam team really gets involved.”

In this section, Matt makes it clear that intent is important. The cloaking debate really centers around the issue of intentionally misleading and deceiving users. Like most Google initiatives, the purpose of banning cloaking is to ensure that the system has integrity and does no evil. When analyzing how web content optimization deals with bots, we need to keep this principle in mind.

Let’s keep going.

Point #3: Testing with simple hash comparisons won’t work for dynamic sites.

“Okay, so what are some rules of thumb, to save you trouble or help you stay out of a high-risk area? … Take a hash of a page — take all that different content and boil it down to one number [the hash] — and then pretend to be Googlebot. You know, with the Googlebot user agent. We even have a “fetch as Googlebot” feature in Google webmaster tools. So you fetch a page as Googlebot and you hash that page, as well, and if those numbers are different [i.e., the page hash taken from a browser versus the hash taken from the bot's perspective], then that could be a little bit tricky. That could be something where you might be in a high-risk area. Now pages can be dynamic — you might have things like time stamps, or the ads might change. So it’s not a hard and fast rule.”

Obviously, a simple hash of a dynamic page will not give you the answer to the cloaking question. Sites are so dynamic that this test in its simple form would simply not work for most pages. I tried this on 10 prominent sites and found that the hashes were completely different due to dynamic content such as ads and changing content. We need to keep searching for answers.

Point #4: Targeting the bot and serving it different content is a clear violation.

“Another simple heuristic to keep in mind is, if you were to look through the code of your web server [or in the WCO market, your friendly neighborhood automation vendor ], would you find something that deliberately checks for a user agent of Googlebot specifically, or Googlebot’s IP address, specifically? Because if you’re doing something very different or special or unusual for Googlebot — either its user agent or its IP address — that has the potential to, you know, maybe be showing different content to Googlebot than to users. That is the stuff that is high risk. So keep those kinds of things in mind.”

This provides good guidance for web content optimization. Any WCO solution that is targeting the bot specifically and serving it different content is clearly violating the rules. At Strangeloop, we don’t do this and I’m not aware of anyone that does in our industry. (I checked a number of other vendors while preparing this post.)

Next, Matt transitions to a few examples that are very relevant to our world.

Point #5: Serving different content to different clients, based on client needs, is okay.

“Now, one question we get from a lot of people who are white hat and who do not want to be involved in cloaking in any way, and who want to make sure that they stay clear of high-risk areas [that's me, and ostensibly, if you're still following along, it's you too]: what about geolocation and mobile user IDs, so you know, phones and that sort of thing? The good news, in an executive sort of summary, is that you don’t really need to worry about that [geolocation/mobile user IDs], but let’s talk through exactly why geolocation and handling mobile phone is not cloaking.”

In other words, addressing different client needs is not cloaking. He continues with his example, but it is important to note that serving different content to users based on capabilities is clearly defined as acceptable. Like mobile phones have different capabilities, so do different browser versions.

For more clarity, let’s examine Matt’s examples.

Point #6: Treat Googlebot like any normal desktop browser.

“Okay… so until now we have had one user. Now let’s go ahead and say this user is coming from France. And let’s have a completely different user, and let’s say maybe they are coming from United Kingdom. In an ideal world, if you have your content available on a dot-FR domain or dot-UK domain or different languages because you have gone through the work of translating them, it is really, really helpful if someone coming from a French IP address gets their content in France. They are going to be much happier about that. So what geolocation does is, whenever a request comes in to the web server, you look at the IP address and you say ‘Ah, this is a French IP address. I am going to send them the French language version or send them to the dot-FR version of my domain.’ If someone comes in and their browser language is English or their IP address is something from America or Canada or something like that, then you say, ‘Aha, English is probably the best message.’ Unless they are coming from the French part, of course. [I like the shout out to my friends in Quebec.]
“So what that is doing is, you are making the decision based on the IP address. As long as you are not making some specific country the Googlebot belongs to– ”GoogleLandia” or something like that — then you are not doing something special or different for Googlebot. At least currently, when we are making this video, Googlebot crawls from United States, so you would treat Googlebot just like a visitor from the Unites States. You’d serve up content in English and we typically recommend that you treat Googlebot just like a regular desktop browser, so you know, Internet Explorer 7 or whatever a very common desktop browser is for your particular site. So geolocation — that is, looking at the IP address and reacting to that — is totally fine, as long as you are not reacting specifically to the IP address of just Googlebot, just that very narrow range, and instead you are looking at what is the best user experience overall depending on the IP address.“

This example really helps us understand our role in web content optimization. The goal is to provide the best user experience, and this can change depending on country or browser. Matt is asking us to treat the bot like we would any normal desktop browser. Don’t do anything special for it.

His mobile example, next, provides further clarity.

Point #7: Case in point – Serving customized “squeezed” pages to mobile devices is fine.

“In the same way, if someone now comes in — and let’s say they are coming in from a mobile phone, so they are accessing it in an iPhone or Android phone — and you can figure out, okay, that is a completely different user agent. It has got completely different capabilities. It is totally fine to respond to that [mobile] user agent and give them, you know, a more squeezed version of the website or something that fits better on the smaller screen. Again, the difference is, if you are treating Googlebot like a desktop user, so that user agent doesn’t have anything special or different that you are doing, then you should be in perfectly fine shape. So, you know, you are looking at the capabilities of the mobile phone, you are returning an appropriately customized page, or you are not trying to do anything deceptive or misleading, you are not treating Googlebot really differently based on the user agent, and you should be fine.”

Matt clearly states that it is okay to give the user an experience that is tailored to the browser’s capabilities. This is strong endorsement of the fact that advanced web content optimization features, which only apply to one user agent, are perfectly legal and encouraged, so long as the bot is not treated in any special way.

He gives even more insight below.

Point #8: No, really, you can’t treat Googlebot differently than you treat users. Ever.

“So the one last thing I want to mention — this is a little bit of a power user kind of thing — is some people are like ‘Okay, I won’t make the distinction based on the exact user agent string or the exact IP address range that Googlebot comes from, but maybe I will, say, check for cookies and if somebody does not respond to cookies, or if they don’t treat JavaScript the same way, then I will carve out and treat that differently.’ The litmus test there is: are you basically using that as an excuse to try to find a way to treat Google differently or to try to find some way to segment Googlebot and make it do a completely different thing. So again the instinct behind cloaking is: are you treating users the same way as you are treating Googlebot? We want to score and return roughly the same page that the user is going to see. So we want the end user experience when they click on the Google result to be the same as if they’d just come to the page themselves.

“So that is why you shouldn’t treat Googlebot differently, and that is why cloaking is a bad experience, why it violates our quality guidelines, and that is why we do pay attention to it. There is no such thing as “white hat” cloaking. We really do want to make sure that the page the user sees is the same page the Googlebot saw.

“Okay, I hope that kind of helps.”

Thanks, Matt. This does help.

To summarize:

It is safe to provide different pages to mobile browsers, different locations, and different user agents, so long as the Googlebot user agent, its IP addresses, or its capabilities (i.e., no cookies) are not directly targeted.
Treating the Googlebot like a desktop browser with the basic acceleration treatments one would apply to any generic browser is fine and encouraged.
As I was just re-watching the video, another concept stuck out: content. Matt repeatedly says not to serve different content to Googlebot. The operative question here is: if Googlebot was a full-featured browser, would it see the same page (including images, etc.) as a normal browser? If we’re not changing the content itself and only manipulating the way the content is delivered (through techniques like inlining or MHTML or DataURLs or whatever), then we’re clearly not in violation.
Intent is key. Something that is geared toward speeding up sites, and that has no intention of deceiving users, is safe so long as it abides by Google’s rules and regulations.

I’m confident you are safe if:

You don’t target the bot or Google IP addresses specifically.
You don’t try to game search engines by using methods to treat browsers that don’t accept cookies or that don’t use JavaScript differently.
You provide the basic features that apply to all browsers to all browsers, including bots.
You save advanced features for the specific browsers for which they are built.
You don’t change the actual content (images, etc.) you serve to Googlebot.
Most importantly, your intention is to speed up pages and not do evil.

IFTTT e l’Automatismo che Mancava alla Rete (+ alcuni ottimi esempi di utilizzo)

2011-11-04T04:30:37Z

Di IFTTT, del suo impronunciabile nome e della sua potenzialmente enorme utilità avrei voluto scrivere già da un paio di settimane (grazie a Samuele). Poi le cose sono andate diversamente, ho avuto più tempo per testarlo e così eccomi qui alla fin fine a rimediare al tempo perso.

IFTTT, acronimo di “If This Then That” si presenta con un semplice claim: “Put the internet to work for you”. Fai in modo che la rete lavori per te.

Ti è mai capitato di pensare: “Hey, quanto sarebbe comodo poter legare insieme più social network?”
No, non mi riferisco ad abusate e semplici logiche di condivisione massiva che spesso tornano a galla, quanto piuttosto a vere meccaniche intelligenti in grado di valutare condizioni del tipo: SE accade questo ALLORA comportati in questo modo.

Ecco, IFTTT è un po’ tutto qui.
Semplice e disarmante al punto giusto da risultare utilissimo.

Tutto a portata di mano

IFTTT si divide in tre grandi porzioni: task, recipe e channel.

I Task sono esattamente ciò che ti aspetteresti, ovvero le condizioni IF…THEN che di volta in volta vai a costruire grazie al servizio.
Le Recipe (ricette) sono azioni precotte condivise da altri utenti e facilmente riutilizzabili a nostra volta. Ogni volta che creiamo un task possiamo renderlo “recipe” con un paio di click e donare così il nostro piccolo lavoro di ingegno al mondo.
I Channel sono poi gli oggetti con cui possiamo giocare. I canali disponibili spaziano da servizi meterologici a tutti i maggiori social network, così come DropBox e le Gmail, Instapaper e Google Reader

Ogni Canale (channel) è poi diviso in due logiche: Triggers e Actions.

I Triggers sono i responsabili dell’attivarsi della condizione IF. Il canale Gmail possiede uno specifico trigger che alza le antenne ogni volta ricevi una mail con un’etichetta indicata a priori.
Le Actions sono la diretta conseguenza di un Trigger. Sempre Gmail possiede come unica azione quella di, beh, poter spedire una mail a comando.

Trigger e Actions contengono poi i cosiddetti Addins, ovvero pezzi di codice (assimilabili alle variabili) in grado di spostare contenuti tra i diversi metodi. Gli addins sono il modo in cui possiamo parlare a IFTTT dicendogli per esempio: “Ogni volta che applico un preferito a una foto su Flickr, crea un Tweet che comunica al mondo il mio apprezzamento all’autore e link alla foto”.

Se tutto ciò ti sembra smisuratamente complicato, beh, non lo è nella realtà dei fatti. L’intero servizio è pensato per offrire opzioni a portata di mano e di navigare a vista anche senza dover conoscere una riga, dicevo, di codice.

Neppure gli Addins sono necessari da tenere a mente nella costruzione di un task. L’unica cosa che devi avere ben chiara in mente (sempre se non vuoi spulciare nelle ricette, o più in basso in questo post) è il risultato che vuoi ottenere. IFTTT più della metà delle volte ti verrà incontro proponendoti buona parte della ricetta.

Ora.

Moltiplica Trigger e Actions per tutti i canali disponibili e gli intrecci che puoi anche solo immaginare e otterrai una mole di automatisti a portata di mano, accessibili senza essere programmatori esperti, in gradi di parlare con metà delle API della rete abitata.

Un po’, per chi se lo ricorda o ne fa ancora uso, come in uno Yahoo! Pipes in veste minimale e a portata di utente.

Da dove iniziare?

Un servizio come IFTTT è utile quando è supportato da buone idee in grado di sveltire il nostro flusso di lavoro. Eccone alcune, tra Ricette già esistenti o create da me stesso mentre scrivevo questo post.

Queste, e molte altre azioni, fanno di IFTTT un buon partner per sveltire task che sarebbero altrimenti parecchio più complessi, se non del tutto inattuabili.

Insomma, un servizio che merita più di un’occhiata superficiale.
Che ne pensi? Curioso?

Scarica il mio eBook gratuito: "21 Cose che Dovresti Sapere (riguardo al tuo blog)".
(offerta bonus riservata agli iscritti al feed RSS).

Copyright: Francesco Gavello. Puoi ripubblicare i contenuti di questo articolo solo in parte e fornendo un link all'articolo originale.
Link al post originale: IFTTT e l’Automatismo che Mancava alla Rete (+ alcuni ottimi esempi di utilizzo)

7 Content Marketing Tactics To Rank Higher In Google’s New Fresh Results

2011-11-04T11:16:24Z

If you haven’t heard about Google’s “Freshness Update” by now, I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it much more. The short story is that Google is now “Giving you fresher, more recent search results.“. Marketing Pilgrim took a look at this update as well. So what’s next?

Well, “new” content is now ranking higher for many searches.

Looking around at various search results across the board, some of the results are astounding. As Rand Fishkin pointed out, a Google query for “Top Chef Texas” is almost entirely composed of content that is just days old. Changing the number of results to 100 doesn’t help much, either.

So how do you leverage this? What can you do to try and ensure that you have a shot at “fresh” rankings?

The solution comes down to having new content. But if you’re selling something like iPads that don’t change often, how do you ensure that you have “fresh” content about iPads? Sure, you could write blog content every couple of days, but, really, what are you going to write about 100 times a year?

Here, I’m going to show you a few different options that you might not have considered, plus, I’m going to include links to software comparisons that you can use to get started publishing new, fresh content.

1: Cover Your Bases by Getting into Google News

Judging by the results, it looks like getting into Google News might help push you up to the top block of news results.

Beyond that, though, because the purpose of Google News is to organize and make new information searchable, it makes sense that being in Google News might also get you higher in the following results.

Here is Google’s article on news quality guidelines and technical requirements.

Once you’re all set there, suggest your site to Google News.

2: Use Proper Time-stamps in Your Content

As you begin to look through the “fresh” results, you’ll notice that they’re time-stamped. In other words, a clear publication date is found within the content and Google is displaying this in the search results.

At this Google News support item, they even go so far as to say that if they are unable to determine the publication date of your article, that it qualifies as a “crawl error.”

Here, you’ll see how to create a news timestamp for Google News, but they require that you be included in Google News, first.

This article is helpful, however, as it shows the kind of date format that they prefer, which is YYYY-MM-DD, or “2008-12-23″, for example.

If you don’t think your readers prefer this kind of time stamping, as someone who has written his own programs to extract dates from content, the best thing you can do is to have your date clearly displayed on a single line, preferably beneath the title of the article.

3: Blogging

Yes. Blogging. I had to include it.

It’s a technique that, if you’re a frequent reader of marketing blogs like Marketing Pilgrim, is so obvious that I’ll pass on extolling the virtues of blogging. You know what to do here.

Have Your Community Build Content for You

How do you write content every day about iPads? I don’t know, but a community of like-minded folks might be able to figure it out.

Building a community is a logical next step for us at Ontolo that we expect to begin undertaking in 2012. I don’t recommend it for every kind of company, but if you think it might be right for you and your customers, take some time to really think through the best way to set one up. As the old adage goes, “What you stick with, you get stuck with.”

4: Add Forums

Forums…the original social network. The benefits are the fluid conversations that happen. The downsides are that forums require a fair amount of work to be managed. Choose this option carefully.

Software: Comparison of forum software on Wikipedia.

5: Add Question and Answers Section

Yahoo! Answers first brought this idea to the mainstream. Quora made it respectable. StackExchange is bringing it to a multitude of technical niches.

Software: View this comparison on StackExchange. I can say that I’ve setup Question2Answer and it’s very easy. It also integrates very well with WordPress’s user database, right out of the box.

6: Add Your Own Social Network

If you think that forums are a big undertaking, try setting up your own social network. For this to work with “fresh” content, you’ll need to let your users contribute via their own blogs or to a community blog.

Software: Comparison of social networking software on Wikipedia.

7: Add Your Own Social News Section

Sites like Digg and Reddit have pioneered community news curation. News gets posted, voted on, commented on, etc. New content, all day, every day. Will this kind of site get into the “fresh” index? I don’t know, but it can afford you a stream of time-stamped content.

Software: The only software that I’ve seen that’s stood the test of time here is Pligg.

Wrapping Up

If Google is serious about this bet on fresher content being more relevant to searchers than more perennial resources (and it looks like with many things, they are), then our jobs as SEO’s shifts, too. Not only must we create great content, we’ll also need new content to continue ranking well.

About the Author
Ben Wills has been an SEO and link builder for over 10 years, directing the efforts of more than 1,000 clients. In 2008, he started Ontolo, a suite of web-based link building tools that helps you quickly find more relevant and valuable backlinks.

Google Places Data Needs To Be Fresh Too

2011-11-04T12:17:26Z

While there is plenty of conversation surrounding the new “Fresh” update from Google regarding search and even some early solutions being offered there is another change happening in the SERP’s as well. It’s around local results and local SEO”s are going to need to pay close attention.

We reported about expanded local search results for branded searches the other day. The new look of a search for a specific place or business now places Google Place Page data on the search result page itself thus alleviating the need for the searcher to click through to place page which, in the past, was not always well done from a user’s perspective.

Now, in addition to this new look, Google has changed the traditional red pin map approach and turned the little buggers gray! Don’t worry though, they don’t stay gray forever. Google has now made it that when you mouse over the result the pin gets “happy” and turns red! Here’s a look. Notice too where the address information is occurring. (Click image to enlarge)

Google is now realizing that the visual cues it offers its users could very well lead to a click. When you mouse over a local result and something about that result, in essence, lights up then you have an eye catching experience which could mean conversion.

The final piece of the puzzle is what can happen if a local business is not keeping its place page information fresh with photos etc. You are leaving opportunity on the table because the new local search result layout is showcasing the data a business has in its place page information. Look below at what opportunity exists below to add more photos, hours of operation etc. (Click image to enlarge).

That is essentially the week in review for local search. Are you paying attention?

Pin Image Credit – Blumenthals

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Euclid Offers “Google Analytics For The Real World”

2011-11-04T14:48:14Z

Yesterday Euclid Elements, a relatively new firm founded by some of the people behind the product that became Google Analytics, announced a $5.8 million first round of funding. The company is seeking to enable retailers and business owners with physical locations to measure things like foot traffic...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google’s New Freshness Update: Social Media Has Changed the Expectations of Searchers

2011-11-04T15:01:45Z

Timing is everything. On Monday, I was asked if I would give a presentation at the Internet Summit 2011 in Raleigh, NC on November 15th and 16th on an advanced SEO topic. I thought about it, and agreed, and decided to give a presentation on how social media has been transforming search on Tuesday [...]

Analyst: Android Fragmentation Costs Carriers Billions

2011-11-04T19:30:00Z

We've written here before in ReadWriteWeb about the bad side of Android platform diversity: multiple phone manufacturers with one or more carriers apiece, simultaneously supporting more than one active version of the operating system. One can't help but think that Microsoft has handled Windows platform transitions better than this, but then again, Windows doesn't have to appease the interests of carriers and manufacturers.

Now, an intensive 12-month study by mobile communications analysis firm WDS Global has come up with a quantifiable metric for the cumulative effects of platform fragmentation on carriers, and subsequently on consumers, based on estimates of 2011 Android smartphone shipments: The frustration from customers who have been unable to resolve their hardware and software issues through customer support, and end up returning their phones for replacement, ends up costing U.S. carriers a combined total of $2 billion annually.

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Contrary to numerous reports, the WDS report published yesterday did not say that Android-based smartphones were more susceptible to hardware failures or problems. In fact, the report explicitly states, "Android devices are no easier, nor more difficult, to troubleshoot than a comparative product from an alternate OS vendor." What the report states is that Android smartphones (excluding tablets), by virtue of the multiplicity of versions actively in the market, incur more carrier costs with respect to time spent conducting customer support, coupled with the wide array of brands both large and small that carriers find themselves supporting.

"At the point-of-sale many consumers (and retailers alike) are assuming a degree of consistency across Android devices that in some cases doesn't exist," reads the WDS report. "Even migrating from one Android device to the next can bring about problems as consumers' expectations for performance are dismantled by a different hardware build and by potentially resource-hungry operator and manufacturer overlays."

Monthly fragmentation of actively supported Android versions since March 2010. [Courtesy WDS Global]

For instance, first-time customers of the Android Market end up learning (often the hard way) that certain apps will not work with their specific build of Android. In some cases, modifications and permissions made by carriers themselves end up conflicting with installed apps. And when carriers' support representatives help their customers upgrade to newly supported Android versions once it does become time, customers discover a few extra, unanticipated surprises.

"In one example from 2010, a UK operator was forced to apologize to its customers after fielding a storm of complaints from users unhappy with the addition of 'bloatware' - unnecessary software added by the operator that couldn't easily be removed, in an Android 2.1 update," the report preaches to the choir. "Customers complained that the additions slowed their devices and inhibited some functionality (including SMS notifications)."

Do we know the additional costs carriers may be incurring during the customer support phase itself, before customers turn in their phones for replacements? RWW asked Tim Deluca-Smith, WDS' Vice President for Marketing: "As for additional support center costs, the actual cost of supporting Android in the 'traditional' sense is no different to other platforms - i.e., the duration of a tech support call, and the propensity for a customer to call with a problem is consistent with other platforms," Deluca-Smith.

"The real cost comes in the fact that hardware faults add logistics costs," he tells us. As the firm tries to make clear (but may be having a hard time accomplishing), it so happens that smartphones that happen to run Android are the ones with the hardware troubles. Android itself, WDS believes, is not the reason.

"While Android deployments may show a higher propensity to hardware failures than rival OS platforms, analysis of these hardware faults shows no principle defects on the platform; i. e., the platform is not predisposed to one particular hardware defect," the report reads. "Instead, the distribution of hardware faults against weighted averages deviates by less than 1% in all categories. In this instance, Android actually benefits from deployment across multiple reference designs and component variants. This means that the brand is unlikely to be associated with a specific hardware shortcoming."

Two of the metrics the WDS team examined were average handle time, which refers to how long it takes customer support at any level to devote to a customer issue; and propensity to call (PTC), which refers to the likelihood that a shipment batch of 10,000 or so devices will generate support instances at a high, "tier-3" level. While AHT is typically a function of the quality of customer support, PTC is a function of the complexity of the hardware and its supporting firmware, and is tallied as the ratio of phones returned to phones shipped. If PTC eclipsed the 15% mark, carriers would attribute that figure to defective phones. As it stands for 2011, WDS estimates PTC for Android phones at 14%, and the ratio of incidents actually attributable to hardware failure in the end at 12.6%.

By contrast, Windows Phone 7 PTC rates for the year are about 11%, with hardware failure at 9.3%. Apple iPhone failure rates for the year are likely to top out at 8%, and for RIM BlackBerry, 5.5%.

"You could make the assumption that, while traditional support costs are consistent," says Deluca-Smith, "the average profitability of a batch [shipment] of devices is reduced because of the reverse logistics / repair costs."

Quarterly breakdown of carriers supporting Android since Q1 2009. [Courtesy WDS Global]

Android has helped smaller manufacturers enter the industry sooner, and make a dent in the market. The result is what the industry calls the "long-tail effect," using a term that may have spread with the help of a July 2009 WDS report (PDF available here). That report suggested carriers could create competitive mobile e-mail service alternatives to then-leader BlackBerry, and go with less expensive, but still compelling, competitive models. Android wasn't a factor at that time.

WDS' Deluca-Smith tells RWW he believes carriers must adapt now to the new reality of the long tail, suggesting that at this point, the only ones who can resolve the rising costs of supporting Android are the ones doing the supporting.

"Android has done great things for the industry, even low-cost product," he says. "However, carriers must be better at bringing the variety of Android builds onto their networks. Low cost has its place. It shouldn't be used across all customer segments as a means to reducing subsidy costs."

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Weekly Wrap-up: Google Reader Has No Alternatives and More

2011-11-05T02:00:00Z

Many big stories this week, but the biggest for our readers surrounded the Google Reader changes, and the lack of alternatives therein. There was also much discussion around the Internet of Things and Google's indexing of Facebook comments.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Internet of Things - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

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Top Stories of the Week

Alternatives to Google Reader? Don't Bother, You're Not Going Anywhere...

Google+ is getting added to lots of Google products and Google Reader, a favorite RSS reader, got plussed this week. The changes caused some readers to lament the loss of a beautiful workflow that was no longer possible sans multiple sharing options. And, by the way, sorry, but there are no real alternatives to Google Reader, though readers did point to several that were worth a look (see the comments on this thread).

Tristan's response sums up most of the comments I saw. It's long, but it's a good example of how people were using Google Reader and why they are disappointed with this change.

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X-Factor and Twitter Make a Powerful Pair

2011-10-26T20:59:40Z

TV executives have discovered the power of Twitter. At first, they used it to just to send promotional messages to fans. Then they found it was a useful tool to gauge viewer reactions and interest in a show. Now, they’re using Twitter to make people a part of the show and that’s where The X-Factor comes in.

Simon Cowell’s American Idol look-alike series is about to break new ground by giving viewers the option of voting by Twitter. Cowell, once a Twitter scoffer, now takes the social media site very seriously. An article in the New York Times states that Cowell not only reads the Twitter comments about his show, he also acts upon the feedback immediately in order to satisfy the biggest audience. With the new, Twitter voting system, Tweeters will have more power over the show than ever.

The article states that The X-Factor tie-in didn’t cost Cowell’s company a cent. It’s Twitter’s belief that the additional press for them is worth the cost of any maintenance on their end. It’s a good bet. With Twitter handles popping up on screen and online for every show on television, resistance is futile.

In a similar vein, GetGlue just added a Conversations tab to their pages which updates in real time. When you check in to a show, the tab presents you with a way of writing a continuous stream of comments and it also returns a filtered list of comments from Twitter. “So you can stay on top of on what is going on Twitter without leaving GetGlue,” says the company blog. Smart.

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Twitter is the perfect TV companion app because it allows you to tell the world what you’re thinking the moment that you think it. Forget writing a six paragraph review on your blog, make your point by posting to Twitter every five minutes throughout the run of an episode. (And if you think no one really does that, let me introduce you to my friends.) In this instance, micro-blogging refers only to the length of each line, not the overall submission.

The tricky part of all of this is turning a one-way stream into a two-way conversation. Despite attempts to make it so, communicating back and forth on Twitter isn’t easy. GetGlue hopes that their new system will make it so, but it has a ways to go. Right now most people are still posting one-off, unrelated messages but it’s a new concept, so give it time.

From a marketing perspective, it’s all about putting the brand name in front of as many people as possible, and for that, Twitter is king.

Non-Interaction Events! Wait... What?

2011-10-26T18:30:00Z

Hey event tracking friends, we are really excited to announce a new feature to the Analytics event tracking landscape: non-interaction events. “But wait!” you ask, “How can an event—which measures user interaction—be non-interactive? And why would I want that anyway?”

The answer is simple: sometimes you want to track passive events on your pages, like images from an automatic slide show. In this case, you want such events to be excluded from bounce rate calculations because they don’t track visitor interaction. Now, you can mark these events as non-interaction events, so that they don’t affect the bounce rate for the page.

Let’s illustrate. Suppose your home page has an image slide show that automatically serves up 5 images in rotating order. Like so:

You want to apply an event tracking call with each movement of the slider, so that you know which images are being seen most by visitors to your home page. However, there isn’t really any interaction required on the visitors’ behalf to engage with this slider. You know that in the past, event tracking for this slider would make the bounce rate for your home page drop dramatically. Better to exclude these events from bounce rate calculation, so that the bounce rate for your home page is calculated only from pageviews for the page and not events.

How do you use it? Add our new non-interactive parameter with the _trackEvent() method like this:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'ImageSlider', 'Home', 'Image1', 1, true]);

To read the details, check out our Event Tracking Guide or our Reference doc on the _trackEvent() method.

In the past, you had to trade off bounce rate signals for event tracking in some situations. Now, with the ability to designate an event as either interactive or not, you can have your events and bounces too.

We hope you think this features is as nifty as we do. Tell us some of your great applications and uses below!

Posted by Patricia Boswell, Google Analytics team

Mobile SEO is a Myth

2011-10-17T13:00:51Z

I hate the term “Mobile SEO.” What exactly is it? Besides being a buzzword thrown around at every conference, seminar, and new business pitch it’s a topic that nobody seems able to accurately explain. Google it; the results are all over the place. In a perfect world, there would be no need for mobile SEO at all.

It’s an emerging topic that, thanks to smart phones, is dying off quicker than it emerges.

Like most buzz words though, I don’t think the concept of mobile SEO is going to go away anytime soon.

So if we’re stuck with it, we might as well attempt to do it right – by not really doing anything mobile specific at all.

For starters, we need to stop confusing the terms mobile and local. While related, they are very different things – especially when it comes to SEO. It is true that local search is mostly done on mobile phones, but it does not mean mobile and local SEO are the same thing. They are not and that is where the industry confusion comes in.

When people say mobile SEO they usually mean local SEO. Sometimes they actually mean search results on a mobile phone. Most of the time though, they have no idea what they mean and are simply trying to shift their paradigm and leverage as many buzzwords as they can to help synergize their sales pitch. (see how successful that is?)

So let’s clarify:

Mobile Search refers to search done on a mobile device. That’s it.

Local Search deals with results specific to a location. This usually also includes place pages, maps, and other things that help augment local search.

Part of what helps sustain the mobile search myth is this whole multi-screen concept that is somehow gaining popularity. If you look hard enough you’ll find studies that show mobile phone users use their devices differently than tablet users who use their devices differently than ordinary computer users. I’m recalling a presentation I once sat through where somebody in a cheap suit defined 1st screen, 2nd screen, 3rd screen, 4th screen, and 5th screen and how we should have a strategy for all of them. That type of thinking achieves billable hours but not results.

The whole “multiple screens need multiple sites” theory just doesn’t make sense. We have never designed separate TV commercials for 13″ CRT screens and 70″ plasmas – even though people watching them are usually in very different places/situations. When it comes to viewing a website, my 10″ tablet isn’t much different than my 13″ laptop. Sure it does not support flash, but that is not a reason to design a different site – it is just a reason to learn HTML5.

Mobile screens are nothing more than smaller computer screens. There are some minor differences now, but look at how fast phones are evolving; within a year or so there won’t be any difference at all. With browsers (like IE6) there came a time when we collectively decided to stop supporting old technology. That time for mobile sites is now. In the 90’s we designed websites for various resolutions. Today we use fluid layouts. It is time we apply the same approach to mobile.

The best Mobile SEO strategy is to not have a mobile SEO strategy.

Apple does not have a mobile strategy and they practically invented the modern mobile device. Apple.com is a great example of how to handle mobile site design. Apple shows the exact same site to mobile and “wired” visitors. It is even on the same URL. Sure, there’s probably a different style sheet involved, but that’s it. The experience is the SAME.

Even better, since it is the exact same URL they only have one site to optimize. All of the SEO work they have done to their wired site also applies to their mobile site – because they’re the same thing! They do not need a mobile search strategy because they do not technically have a mobile site.

It is not just Apple either. Google does the same thing, only the little promos below the search box change.

This is a best case scenario though, and various technical decisions made in the past might not make it applicable to everybody.

If you really MUST have a different site, use device detection and canonical tags.

Creating a separate site can open you up to all kinds of SEO problems. Having two different domains with similar content is something most SEOs strive to avoid. The last thing you want to do is create a mobile version of a site that competes with your existing site in search. Luckily, there are several ways to avoid this.

If you can’t go with using the same domain then the next best choice is m.yourdomain.com It does not really provide any SEO benefit, but “m” has sort of become the industry standard. In a best case scenario you would be able to keep all of the URLs exactly the same except for the “m.” subdomain. That way, at least it will keep things simple for users.

Remember when I said the best mobile strategy is no mobile strategy? The trick is to leverage device detection and canonicals so that your “wired” site is always shown in search results regardless of what device the searcher uses. As John Mu from Google describes the best thing to do is to slap a canonical tag on that mobile site and point it back to your wired site.

Using this strategy, search engines will always show the wired version of the site in results, but users will be taken to the proper “canonical version” that best fits their device. It is also a good idea to include a link to the full version just in case.

If you truly want a different experience, build an app.

I can hear your argument now: “a mobile device is a different experience. It has got a touch screen!” So what? We are talking about a web browser here. Touch screen, trackpad, mouse, joystick – they are all just methods of pointing and clicking. My art director on the 2nd floor uses a pad and stylus and he has not once asked for his own version of a website. If you really want to use the device’s capabilities you don’t need a mobile website – you need an app.

If you want something that is really native to a device, an app is definitely the way to go. Apps can access multi-touch features, rich media, in app purchases, gps, camera, and other aspects to provide a truly unique experience that a website cannot. But don’t just stop there. Use that same device detection to show an interstitial on your mobile site advertising the app. How is that for leveraging pre-existing SEO? Let your site’s pre-established authority work for your mobile version and help you sell apps!

TL;DR

The best mobile strategy is to create a site that works on all devices.
Otherwise use m.yourdomain.com, device detection to redirect (both ways) and canonical tags.
Always provide a link for me to switch to the full version.
If you want a true “device experience” then create an app.
Stop saying “mobile SEO” when you mean “Local SEO”

By day Ryan Jones works at Team Detroit doing SEO for Ford. By night he’s either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world – which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com

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Scelta e architettura dell’informazione: linee guida

2011-10-23T22:03:26Z

In breve

Molti studi dimostrano che il tempo e lo stress da scelta non dipendono tanto dal numero delle opzioni disponibili, ma soprattutto dal modo in cui le scelte sono organizzate e presentate. Il paradosso della scelta è quindi un problema di qualità più che di quantità che investe direttamente l’architettura dell’informazione.

Il mercato attuale, dominato dal modello della coda lunga, vede un aumento crescente della varietà di prodotti, servizi e informazioni disponibili, sia nel mondo fisico sia nel web. E se da una parte questa disponibilità è una ricchezza a cui difficilmente rinunceremmo, è anche vero che l’eccesso di scelta rischia di tramutarsi in stress; e lo stress, a sua volta, in non-scelta o mancato acquisto. È il cosiddetto paradosso della scelta.

Linee guida (euristiche)

L’intervento a Smau (Milano, 19 ottobre) con Stefano Bussolon e Andrea Resmini è stata l’occasione per fare una sintesi sul rapporto fra architettura dell’informazione e scelta e proporre alcune linee guida operative (o euristiche).

Progettare per le diverse strategie di information seeking.
Obiettivi, stati e contesti diversi determinano diverse strategie di ricerca dell’informazione. Molto spesso, le persone non sono chiaramente consapevoli di cosa hanno bisogno o non cercano direttamente o attivamente qualcosa. Non esiste quindi una risposta univoca al problema della scelta: occorre invece far sì che un sistema possa adattarsi agli eterogenei bisogni e modalità di ricerca dell’informazione. Tenendo presente che le persone sono pigre e nella maggioranza dei casi aspettano che sia l’informazione a raggiungere loro anziché viceversa.
Coerenza e ordine conveniente.
Organizzare ed elencare le scelte secondo un ordine conveniente — utile cioè all’utilizzatore, ed evitando di mescolare più criteri logici contemporaneamente — è un modo per favorire la scelta. Sono diversi i modelli che suggeriscono questo approccio: fra questi, il principio della helpful sequence di Ranganathan (Prolegomena to Library Classification, General Canons, 143).
Profumo dell’informazione.
Questo concetto rimanda alla teoria dell’information foraging, e in particolare al lavoro di Peter Pirolli. Il profumo dell’informazione è la capacità di un’etichetta (categoria, voce di menu, link) di suggerire il contenuto che questa contiene — nel caso del web, ciò che si troverà cliccando su di essa.

From findability to choosability?

Siamo tutti informavori. Ogni animale ha bisogno di informazioni per sopravvivere, ma raccogliere informazioni ha un costo — cognitivo, anzitutto — ci spiega l’information foraging. L’architettura dell’informazione, in questo senso, ha l’obiettivo di massimizzare la quantità e qualità dell’informazione e minimizzare il costo e lo sforzo per trovarla.

Tuttavia, trovare non basta. In effetti, l’obiettivo dell’architettura dell’informazione è aiutarci a trovare l’informazione giusta. Quella che risponde cioè ai nostri bisogni, e questo ha a che fare con la scelta. La stessa azione di cercare comporta continuamente delle scelte: cosa cercare, come, con quali strumenti? Fra l’altro, spesso, neppure siamo consapevoli di cosa abbiamo precisamente bisogno, o perché non sappiamo o non ricordiamo il nome dell’oggetto cercato, o perché non sappiamo dove cercarlo o con quali strumenti, o infine perché il nostro stesso bisogno è sfocato. Quindi trovabilità e scelta vanno sempre insieme: la findability presuppone e porta inevitabilmente con sé la choosability.

Per un riepilogo sul tema

Articoli sulla scelta pubblicati via via in questo blog.

Per approfondire

Ariely, D. 2010. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Harper Perennial.
Iyengar, S. 2011. The Art of Choosing. Twelve.
Resmini & Rosati. 2011. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Morgan Kaufmann. Ch. 7. Reduction.
Rosati, L. 2007. Architettura dell’informazione: Trovabiltà dagli oggetti quotidiani al Web. Apogeo. Cap. 5. Quando il troppo stroppia. Il paradosso della scelta.
Schwartz, B. 2005. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial.

People Who Own Tablets Are Glued to Them, Read More News

2011-10-25T15:24:42Z

The so-called tablet revolution in computing may still be young, but early research into how the devices are being used can tell us a lot.

About 11% of American adults now own a tablet, according to recent data from Pew's Project For Excellence in Journalism. A large majority (77%) of those tablet owners use them every day and more than half consume news content from the devices.

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The study has a number of interesting details for those who are interested in the news and publishing industries. Reading news is a huge part of what people use their tablets for, and as Pew's report points out, those users are more engaged and often consume more news content than they did before. Tablets are beginning to supplant PCs and, to a lesser extent, print media as a source of news and long-form content.

Lessons Beyond the Media Industry

Even though Pew's research is geared toward the media industry, it has instructive lessons for others as well.

First and foremost, tablet owners are clearly more engaged when using the devices. Whereas the desktop has myriad distractions popping up left and right, tablets tend to be best for doing one or two tasks at a time. This is good for publishers, who struggle to keep the fractured attention of readers, but it's also good for other brands.

As tablets appear poised to outsell PCs at some point in the next few years, people's attention with be focused more on these devices than on desktop computers. Even in these early days of the tablet explosion, we've seen substantial growth in tablet-based e-commerce. This trend can be expected to accelerate when Amazon's $200 tablet, the Kindle Fire, begins shipping in a few weeks. That device, which is more or less designed to encourage consumers to buy things, will also likely have the effect of helping to bring down the price of competing tablets. Most notably, Apple's dominant iPad will likely see its price drop, even if it's not necessarily a direct competitor to the Kindle Fire.

Native Apps vs. Web Apps

One noteworthy tidbit from the Pew survey, which may or may not have an impact on other industries, is the break-down of users who get their news from native apps as opposed to browsing to content on the Web.

Interestingly enough, 40% of respondents said they used the Web browser to access to news, compared to 21% who exclusively used apps. Many bigger publishers have made developing native apps a priority, believing that they will be easier to monetize than browser-based content. Indeed, some publications have seen an increase in readership after launching HTML5 Web apps than native applications could deliver.

How the native vs. Web app debate will shake out for brands generally is yet to be determined. For the time being, those that can afford should probably invest in building both. According to Pew's research, 31% of tablet owners use both native and Web apps to consume news.

Discuss

More data, more transparency around government requests

2011-10-25T14:57:00Z

How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online.

Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. We also recently released the raw data behind the requests. Interested developers and researchers can now take this data and revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online.

We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago—long before the average person had ever heard of email. Yet at the end of the day, the information that we’re disclosing offers only a limited snapshot. We hope others join us in the effort to provide more transparency, so we’ll be better able to see the bigger picture of how regulatory environments affect the entire web.

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst

Meaningful Transitions: A collection of transition patterns

2011-10-25T15:37:35Z

Meaningful Transitions is the thesis project of Johannes Tonollo, an interface design student at the FH Potsdam, Germany. Johannes wrote his Thesis on "Transitions in the User Interface," in which he analyzed how motion in the user interface can be a helpful extension to static elements to enhance the user experience.

The collection of transitions is clustered into 6 different categories: Orientation, Spatial Extension, Awaking Controls (Awakening?), Highlight, Feedback, and Feedforward. His description of the effectiveness of each transition forms a pattern-like-library for motion in interface design. Each transition provides a short summary and abstract animation on the category overview. Be sure to click each item to view a detailed view that provides a description of the transition, explanation of when it can be useful, and a description of the benefits for using that transition as a design solution. Several items also provide a real-world example of the solution in use.

Excellent stuff, and impressive execution. Check it out. The thesis is also available in a downloadable PDF in German.

Solving New Content Indexation Issues for Large Websites

2011-10-25T09:59:28Z

Posted by abukhimani

Heya SEOmoz Community! This is my first post here trying to share my experience with the most widely read and respected SEO blogs, so please be easy on me.

What I want to share today is a little technical and I am sure most you may have done something similar. In my own personal experience with working on SEO projects over the last four years, there have been numerous instances where a website undergoes a major revamp or you take up an ongoing SEO project and discover content indexation issues. The case I am specifically referring to is when you have a large number of old website pages that were not 301 redirected or removed using a 404 (not ideal) or just plain old content that lingers on in Google's index because it was just only delinked from the website's internal linking schema (we've all been there, right?). If a large number of such pages get collected over a period of time and are just forgotten about without realizing that they continue to reside in the Google index, you will very soon discover indexation issues with new content. Bear in mind that this would likely be the case for very large websites with hundreds of thousands of pages. With that as a background let's dive in!

To identify such pages, I'll break this post into three major parts and go into minute details.

Part 1: Create a list of all pages (or a sub-section of the website) on the website that would be discoverable by crawling the entire current internal linking structure/navigation schema. Xenu's Link Sleuth tool and Pivot Tables come in handy here.

Related reading: Here is an excellent post by Tom Critchlow: Xenu's Link Sleuth – More Than Just A Broken Links Finder and Distilled's Excel for SEO guide.

Part 2: Create a list of all pages (or the sub-section under consideration) of the website currently present in the Google index. The "site:" operator and SEOmoz’s SEO toolbar come to help here.

Related reading: Post by Rand Fishkin on Indexation for SEO: Real Numbers in 5 Easy Steps and another one here by Kate Morris on Data Inaccuracies in Indexed Pages Lists.

Part 3: We'll put the two datasets from above together and use the VLOOKUP function in excel to identify all such pages that are present in the Google index but not discoverable in the current internal linking/navigation schema. These are the pages we are after that might be preventing new content from being indexed.

Ideally, you'll want to 301 redirect all such pages to the most relevant current page on the website or the next best option would be to redirect to the home page. If redirecting a large number of pages creates a technical hurdle, a 404 or URL removal request in webmaster tools might be another option. If you still want to maintain an archive of these pages for your users, you can create an archive section for these pages and use the "nofollow" attribute on links to these pages and "noindex" in the meta tag for these pages.

Related reading: Excellent post by Adam Audette on SEO Techniques for Large Sites (Orders of the Work: Expired Pages).

Now for the details…

Part 1:

Let's just take a random live example for the purpose of this demonstration. I just thought about a random keyword "data warehousing appliances" and picked up the first website after Wikipedia. So, our example for this post for demonstration purposes only will be Netezza.

For the purpose of this post we will only use a section of the Netezza website – all pages under the sub-directory "data-warehouse-appliance-products".

The following steps in Part 1 are how to get just the HTML pages from that specific directory into an Excel file.

First head to the Xenu tool to index a list of current pages on the website. Here is how you do it.

Enter the website address and uncheck "Check external links". Once you have this report ready export it to a TAB separated file and save it.

Now, import this data into an excel spreadsheet by going through the following steps.

Open a new excel spreadsheet and select the file that you just saved from above. Then:

Keep everything as show above and click Next.

Keep everything as shown above and click Next.

You want to keep the Address and Type columns. For all other columns, select "Do not import column (skip)", then click Finish.

Under the Insert tab click on Pivot Table, select the entire dataset and choose where you want to place the output.

Now under the field "Type" only check "text/html".

Under the field "Address", go to Label Filters and select "contains".

Enter the name of the sub-directory you want to check. In this case, we will enter "data-warehouse-appliance-products" as shown below and click OK.

Now check the field "Type" first and then followed by "Address".

Now what you have is Part 1 of your required dataset.

Part 2:

You want to find all URLs in this sub-directory that are currently present in the Google index. To find this list, use the "site:" operator in Google as shown below.

Either append a "filter=0" in the SERP URL or click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included" at the bottom of the SERPs to make sure Google gives you all URLs from this sub-directory in its index.

Now use the SEOmoz toolbar to export all pages into a CSV.

Again, import the data into an excel spreadsheet as done above but make sure to check "Comma" as the delimiter this time. You only need the heading "URL" so keep it and delete the rest.

Now what you have is Part 2 of your required dataset.

Part 3:

Now open a new worksheet and enter the URL list from Part 2 (Google's index) on the left and the list of URLs from Part 1 (current URLs on the website) on the right. Use the vlookup (see the formula in the screenshot) function in excel to find all such URLs (with N/A under the heading "URL Found?" in the screenshot) that reside in the Google index but aren't currently discoverable in the internal linking structure of the website.

The URLs in the "URLs from Google index" that correspond with an N/A in the "URL Found?" column is your list!

I'd love to hear if you have any feedback or have experienced any similar issues and solutions you might have devised.

Another couple of related articles to consider on this topic:

Rob Ousbey's Post on Indexation Problems: Diagnosis using Google Webmaster Tools and Kate Morris's post on Multiple XML Sitemaps: Increased Indexation and Traffic.

+Abdul Khimani is a Senior Search Strategist at gyro – a leading global B2B marketing agency.

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Q3 MobileMix: iPad Impressions Up 456 Percent

2011-10-25T19:19:33Z

It’s time for another Millennial Media MobileMix report. This time it’s all about Q3 of 2011 and again, I give thumbs up to the cover art. They slay me every time.

It all begins with the smartphone. Ownership is up 7% over last quarter, 37% year-over-year. And since every other commercial on TV is about the iPhone, you probably think they’re leading the way for impressions, but they’re not.

Android still takes the top spot with 56% of all smartphone impressions. The MobileMix says this is due to largely to the fact that Android technology is being used by a variety of manufacturers, and more importantly, being offered at a wider variety of price points.

But Apple isn’t shedding any tears over the number two spot for impressions. They’re up 60% year-over-year and when you add in the iPad, they’re number one for connected devices.

46.7 million iPads will be sold in 2011 and that’s given them a 456% rise in impressions year-over-year.

When it comes to apps, Android is battling back with 20% growth over last quarter, giving them 49% of the market. Apple is right behind them with 41%. Gaming applications are the most popular choice accounting for 34% of all app impressions. Entertainment and mocial round out the top three. Weather apps dropped a notch in popularity, and productivity tools made the top 10 for the first time. That’s probably due to the rise in tablet use.

Where will we be at year end? Will Apple rise about Android in apps? Will iPads blow every other tablet out of the water? Will anyone still be using their phones just to call people? Stay tuned and find out.

Web Marketing & SEO news

Twitter lancia Twitter Stories: storie di vite cambiate grazie ad un tweet

Yahoo Breaks New Ad Ground with Social Slider and Living Ads

Living Ads

It's Apple's Sandbox, Developers Just Play In It

What's Restricted

Dumb and Dumber... Apps

Security Theater

Apple's Way or The Highway

8 things the web content optimization community can learn from Matt Cutts’s cloaking video

Point #1: You cannot target the bot specifically, and you cannot serve it different content.

Point #2: Intent is important.

Point #3: Testing with simple hash comparisons won’t work for dynamic sites.

Point #4: Targeting the bot and serving it different content is a clear violation.

Point #5: Serving different content to different clients, based on client needs, is okay.

Point #6: Treat Googlebot like any normal desktop browser.

Point #7: Case in point – Serving customized “squeezed” pages to mobile devices is fine.

Point #8: No, really, you can’t treat Googlebot differently than you treat users. Ever.

To summarize:

I’m confident you are safe if:

Related posts:

IFTTT e l’Automatismo che Mancava alla Rete (+ alcuni ottimi esempi di utilizzo)

Tutto a portata di mano

Da dove iniziare?

7 Content Marketing Tactics To Rank Higher In Google’s New Fresh Results

1: Cover Your Bases by Getting into Google News

2: Use Proper Time-stamps in Your Content

3: Blogging

Have Your Community Build Content for You

4: Add Forums

5: Add Question and Answers Section

6: Add Your Own Social Network

7: Add Your Own Social News Section

Wrapping Up

Google Places Data Needs To Be Fresh Too

Euclid Offers “Google Analytics For The Real World”

Google’s New Freshness Update: Social Media Has Changed the Expectations of Searchers

Analyst: Android Fragmentation Costs Carriers Billions

Weekly Wrap-up: Google Reader Has No Alternatives and More

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

X-Factor and Twitter Make a Powerful Pair

Non-Interaction Events! Wait... What?

Mobile SEO is a Myth

Like most buzz words though, I don’t think the concept of mobile SEO is going to go away anytime soon.

So let’s clarify:

The best Mobile SEO strategy is to not have a mobile SEO strategy.

If you really MUST have a different site, use device detection and canonical tags.

If you truly want a different experience, build an app.

TL;DR

Scelta e architettura dell’informazione: linee guida

In breve

Linee guida (euristiche)

From findability to choosability?

Per un riepilogo sul tema

Per approfondire

People Who Own Tablets Are Glued to Them, Read More News

Lessons Beyond the Media Industry

Native Apps vs. Web Apps

More data, more transparency around government requests

Meaningful Transitions: A collection of transition patterns

Solving New Content Indexation Issues for Large Websites

Q3 MobileMix: iPad Impressions Up 456 Percent