Last year when Facebook opened up it’s Open Graph Protocol to website owners and developers, the impact was huge.  Up until then, social media mentions were just done on social media–with Open Graph, we in essence, never left Facebook–when we went to another site, if we liked the content, all we had to do is click the like button and it was noted on the target site, but more importantly, it was also posted to the persons Facebook account which gave it exposure to many people who wouldn’t have to opportunity to see the post or page.

The possibility of good content going viral was even made easier with this protocol.  It really brought word of mouth recommendations to reality on the internet.

In December, Matt Cutts (Google’s search guru)  indicated that they do use social links as part of their rankings algorithm.  Here’s the video he released.

Now, this has been taken a bit further. Bing, in association with Facebook, is using Facebook Likes count in their search results.  With Bing gaining ground with search, this is something to take note of.

Now, less than two weeks prior to writing this post, Google has added it’s own version of the Like button, called +1.  Now in the same way the Facebook Like count is added to Bing results, the +1 counts are being added to Google results.  I have some suspicions on what this will mean to search optimization and Google results.

Be a part of my experiment

It is my educated guess that the +1 count on a site will have a dramatic result on search engine rankings.  To test this, I have set up the +1 button on one of my sites.  It ranks number 5 for the term ppc management.  I would like for all of you to go to the site and press the +1 button and I will in turn watch the change in its search results and report back to you what occurred.  Just click on the picture of the site to go there.  You can see a red arrow where you would click the +1 button.

How to add to your own site

If your site is on WordPress, all you need to do is search for a +1 plugin.  If you don’t, just click here to get the code you need to add to your website, it’s pretty simple.

Who is going to win the war?

It’s really hard to say–Google does search well.  It hasn’t done social so well–remember Google Buzz?  Google Wave?  These experiments did not fare as well as they likes.  Facebook on the other hand owns social media.  Now if Google puts more weight on +1 over likes, it will effect search one way, but social another.

My recommendation would be to do both rather than wait–it takes virtually no time and you surely don’t want to be behind the curve!

Yes, Facebook disabled ME!

What am I, Facebook chopped liver?

About two weeks ago I found myself exiled from Facebook. I went to login as I do several times a day and I discovered my account had been disabled for violating the terms of service. At least that’s what the cold screen said. There was a link to click if you disagreed and a form you could fill out to their appeals department.  Once you’ve filled out the form you got an e-mail that stated that they would consider your request if you replied to the e-mail sent thus proving who you were. You were warned in this e-mail not to create another Facebook profile because that also violated the terms of service. They also let you know that they wouldn’t specifically tell you what specific term you violated, just that you violated it and that if your account was restored you shouldn’t do it again.  They also stated that it’s very likely that your violation was egregious enough that they would never restore your account and that to e-mail more than once was pointless and would not speed up their review process.

Facebook Disabled screen

That kind of freaked me out so I did little research online as well as with the Facebook FAQs. I found that I was not alone. There’s a whole world of Facebook rejects politely asking to be let back in. Some of these people have been waiting months without an answer. Truth be told, I didn’t violate the terms of service, but I did take a closer look at those terms and I discovered that there are lots of violations of the terms of service that are happening and I suspect many of you are violating these. First of all, Facebook is very clear that an account is for an individual so those of you who are calling yourselves by your company name are actually violating the terms of service. Businesses need to have their own page and the rules for those pages are different than that of individuals. It’s also pretty clear that you should actually know the person that you are asking to be your friend. I know that that is violated a lot but we should always remember what our mothers told us don’t talk to strangers.  People should also not be continually inviting people via direct messaging to like their page, go to their event, nor bulk message all their friends about some business based thing. In short, Facebook doesn’t want you to spam.

You know I’ve been on Facebook for about three years and have close to 2000 friends so I consider myself fairly savvy when it comes to Facebook, but I’ve even had several people quote “friend me” only to find they were somewhat insane – in fact I got two rather interesting proposals even though I’m happily married. That’s not really the subject matter of this article though. When I was disabled by Facebook I discovered several really important things. First of all, I realized how addicted to Facebook I was. Secondly, I use my Facebook login for all sorts of other services and they were mysteriously disabled as a result too. Not only that, I was very disconnected from some people who I really, really care about. It was so crazy that I actually got some phone calls from family members asking me if I was okay because they couldn’t find me on Facebook.

Now I might be older than a lot of you guys reading this, but in the 1970s there were several science fiction pieces that went like this: sometime in the future we will live in a world where we are all identified by numbers and all our identities are on the main computer that runs the world. Anyone who doesn’t agree with policy will just be erased from the database. In fact I think there was even a movie with Sandra Bullock that changed her identity in the central databases of the world.  Once one was erased, their key card to their home no longer worked, their credit cards didn’t work, they couldn’t travel, they became nonentities. On a smaller scale, that’s what I experienced. I could no longer manage my clients Facebook pages, share my links, look at my own photographs, my own videos and I was disconnected from the 53 million other people who were in Facebook’s good graces.

I’ll tell you, it was a rough five days.   I wasn’t just going to Facebook withdrawal, I was grieving.  I’m lucky though. I was able to call someone who handles advertising for agencies (he called me early in the year and I was smart enough to keep his phone number) and he got in touch with the right department and within a few hours my account was restored. Interestingly enough during those five days  I discovered that I got way more work done without Facebook. So going forward, you won’t see me on Facebook quite as much as you did before as I now only go online at specific times of the day. There are several advantages to this: one is that I will not get sucked into the medium as I have before and secondly, I find I’m more productive without it.  I’m also working on other networks, so if Facebook decides that I’m a non-entity again, I won’t lose all my information. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Facebook is a great way to build business, but once you build some business, you need to make sure that you’re managing your time well.

I have had several of my students to contact me over the last few weeks because they’ve thought some of the links they have built to their websites have been lost.

Typically in SEO, one of the ways we can tell which links we built are indexed by the search engines is by is by checking the links to the domains in Yahoo. Although this hasn’t been entirely accurate as we know there are many more links than what we can see in Yahoo, the technology change that has occurred recently with the Yahoo/Bing search alliance is that the links showing in Yahoo are dramatically less than what they were even a few weeks ago.

No one has lost their links so don’t worry that your links have disappeared. At this point it however, it will be much more difficult to see what links your competitors have and that will make SEO a bit more difficult until this is sorted out. There are other tools such as Majestic SEO that have a copy of the Internet (I know that sounds weird, but they have been indexing pages for some years now) and you will get a much more accurate report of links using this service.

Of course, comparing many different websites to see how many links and where their links come from is more difficult this way.

My advice would be to continue building links as you have been and monitoring your search positions. I have seen no change in your website rankings as a result of this.

I know I’ve always been telling you about all the Google changes–sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t. For example, I don’t like Google instant, the new change that shows search results before you’re done making a query. In fact, I’ve turned that off as I found bothersome. I am though, very interested in all of these changes and how they affect search and search results.

Recently I saw a blog post by one of the Google executives showing a new experiment where an image of the destination website shows up on Google as opposed to individuals clicking through to be able to see it. Although I think it’s a cool idea, I do wonder how it will affect web traffic and conversions.

I will keep you posted as I know more about this proposed change in Google. You can read about the current experiment here:

Why SEO costs what it does and why you should never hire someone who fills out your lead form and gives their address as @gmail.com

I need to go on a rant here for a minute.  Has this ever happened to you?  On four separate occasions in the last three weeks someone with an e-mail address@gmail.com with the phone number of 010101 and no website or company, filled out a lead form on my site with a message that went something like this: Want more traffic to your website? We can make your site number one on Google.

My first question to people like this is “What is your website address and where do you rank on Google?”  My second question is “What other clients have you done this for successfully?” My third question, “if you’re so good at this why are you wasting my time filling out my lead forms? If you were truly that good, wouldn’t people be calling you? Wouldn’t they be finding you with all your number one positions on Google?”

I hate the fact that there are so many unethical vendors out there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to help someone who called me for help because they were ripped off by one of these supposed  ”SEO” experts that have no clue what they were doing.

Of course the easiest thing you can do is simply hire Yada Yada marketing, if you really want to do a good job of due diligence, these are a few things you need to ask any SEO company before you hire them so  in order to properly assess their reliability and expertise.

Things you should ask any SEO Company before hiring them:

1. Can you show me some examples of search engine positions that you have achieved for yourself and for your clients?
2. Do you have any clients that would be willing to take a call to recommend you? Sometimes high-profile clients are unwilling to take calls, but you can be shown examples of what has been done, and any written testimonials by the clients. Regardless, they should have at least one or two firms they’ve succeeded with who would be willing to speak with you.
3. Do they do enough research before telling you what they can do for you?
4. Are they a member of the Better Business Bureau? And if so, what is their rating?
5. Are you able to reach them easily?
6. Are they easy to communicate to?

If they pass these tests, you are probably dealing with a reputable SEO firm.