Facebook And ‘Like – Link’ Buying

by admin on September 2, 2010

Facebook And ‘Like – Link’ Buying

Facebook And “Like – ‘Link’ – Buying”  Facebook may be vacant through some of the growing pains that Google went through earlier in its life. Google has always had to deal with link farms and link buying, polluting its search results, and has gotten better and better at keeping this under control over the years.

Now that Facebook “liking” is taking the place of linking in many cases, Facebook may have a similar issue on its hands. Like farms and like buying aren’t completely new concepts, but since Facebook’s developer conference, where it unleashed the open graph and social plugins like “like” buttons all over the web, they have become more of an issue, and will probably continue to do so except Facebook does something about it.

Why would you buy likes?

When a user “likes” a cut of content, it shows up in their friends’ news feeds. The more friends they have, the more people that “like” will be exposed to. The more friends a self has, though, and the quality of those friends, may place more value on those “likes” from the perspective of those doing the buying.

The problem with this, is that those same factors that increase that value may also affect how Facebook provides its search results, and Facebook is vacant to want to improve that search experience, particularly as competition with Google (in general) heats up.

Farming Likes

A couple months ago, AllFacebook had a pair of articles taking a deep look into the gaming of Facebook search results and the rise of the like farm. The theme has been brought up over again this week by Nick Saint at Silicon Alley Insider.

“In the end, these sites are enabling the equivalent of Twitter hash tag jokes on Facebook; people see amusing sentences pop up in their streams, and indicate their approval by liking them,” writes Saint. “This is the Facebook equivalent of retweeting, since all of your friends are told that you liked the blurb.

Many of these entries have been liked by tens of thousands of users, all of whose friends see the updates, which links to the sites, so this is no doubt generating non-negligible ad revenue despite requiring zero effort on the part of the sites’ creators.

The largest we’ve seen, Likey.net, is already seeing over a million uniques per month.” “Once an update has enough likes, it can spread completely on Facebook,” adds Saint. “But to get the administer started, someone has to have gone to the site and submitted it in the first place. It’s hard to say why — unlike on Twitter, the original poster of these updates isn’t referenced or credited in any way.

And the sites look and feel extremely spammy. At least one of them has already been flagged as an hit site by Google, though it’s not clear whether the site is itself malicious, or merely the target of third-party attacks.”

Like farms stand to have implications on Facebook’s search functionality, and Facebook’s share of the search market stands to grow along with the proliferation of Facebook itself – not necessarily to Google-like proportions, but for particular kinds of searches – and with Pages becoming more heavily marketed (not to mention the potential of Places), people will search for businesses on Facebook.

“Even as users are mostly searching Facebook for their friends currently, users will start to search for more generic topics as Facebook slowly changes user behavior,” wrote AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill back in June. “Right now, showing up for the phrase ‘discount travel’ won’t necessarily benefit you, though as Facebook improves their search product and users start to be with you that they can search for things other than their friends, ranking high on various keywords will become increasingly vital.”

“In the meantime, the numerous ‘like farms’ that are spamming Facebook with random quotes and phrases (like Likey.net, LikeItPage, and others) will continue to proliferate until Facebook develops a system that determine which add value and which are just spam generators,” added O’Neill. Like It Page - Like Farm

Back to Like Buying

As far as “like buying” is worried, it’s a similar situation. This has the potential to hurt the Facebook user experience, and if Facebook were to castigate Pages similar to how Google does, it could make a huge impact. Inc. just ran a tale about how Google cost Ryan Abood’s GourmetHandBaskets.com $4 million by penalizing the site for link buying right before the holidays.

As Facebook becomes one of the main marketing vehicles of the web, much like Google has been for years (despite the differences in how the two sites operate), it is a situation that his vacant to have to be looked at and assessed. Right now, it’s unclear what Facebook’s policies are on things like “like farms” and “like buying”.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment, and will update when we receive it. The top is that Facebook isn’t just a way for college kids to look at pictures of each other anymore. People are counting on it for business, and how delicate situations like these are handled will be crucial to operations. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t have the greatest track record for handling delicate situations.

Facebook likes and Twitter retweets have replaced links in many instances. That’s not to say that links are dead by any means, but a lot of people will austerely retweet a cut of content or “like” it, rather than blog about it and link to it. This “cannibalizes” the link graph from the search perspective, as Rand Fishkin and our own Mike McDonald discussed a even as back, and that makes Facebook and Twitter even more vital to pay attention to from the marketing perspective – when some of that juice is vacant away from search engines and into social networks.

source:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/08/31/does-facebook-face-a-google-like-issue-with-like-farms-and-like-buying

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SEO And Google’s Realtime Search

by admin on August 30, 2010

Google has given its realtime search feature its own homepage at google.com/realtime. Searches from this destination still take you to the updates section of a regular Google search.

While realtime search on Google itself isn’t new, there are still some new features Google has revealed along with the homepage. Product Manager Dylan Casey writes:

On the new homepage you’ll find some great tools to help you refine and understand your results. First, you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. So if you’re traveling to Los Angeles this summer, you can check out tweets from Angelenos to get ideas for activities happening right where you are.

In addition, we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance. We organize the tweets from oldest to newest and indent so you quickly see how the conversation developed.

Google has also added “updates” content to Google Alerts. You can now create an alert specifically for updates to get an email anytime a keyword appears in Twitter or other sources Google uses for realtime search. You can also set them to email you once a day or once a week so your inbox doesn’t get flooded.

by Chris Crum

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Google Changes That May Impact Your SEO

by admin on August 28, 2010

Google Algorithm Changes And Your SEO

There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search.

This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query.

Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”

Google Tweaks Algorithm

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. “Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming,” one person commented on our story about it.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury’s still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we’ll see.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, “. their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site… I’ve never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip’s but there was like 10-20 of them running at once.”

Acquisition

Google acquires Like.com The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it’s unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

by Chris Crum

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SEO And Your Web Page Title

by admin on August 23, 2010

Writing a Web Page Title For Better SEO

Titles are everywhere. Some people are defined by titles, some people loathe titles, and others like giving titles. Why do we do this? With so much information getting processed by our minds everyday, we need a way to categorize these groups of associated content in a quick referencing way.

This is the same methodology a search engine applies when it crawls a page. When you title a page, you are telling a search engine or user what the page is supposed to be about. We’ve all seen the one sentence summaries of television shows on the T.V. Guide. It allows for quick referencing and decision making by telling us what the show is going to be about.

This is part of the reason why naming your page titles is so critical to getting your site ranked. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a site that had one of the following two titles throughout the entire site: “untitled” or “company name”.

While having the company name on all the pages could be a potential branding strategy, chances are, most visitors to your site don’t know your brand name yet and are looking for the product or service that you’re selling. You could incorporate the company name into the title, but it should be placed after the main message you want to convey about that particular page.

Every page should have a unique title. While you may have a subject that needs to be explained over a few pages, you should use the page title as an index of information for the reader. Sites that sell multiple products should have a unique title for every product. If you can’t make the time to make each page stand out, why would you expect that page to ever appear in a search engine?

If possible, you should try to place your keywords in the title, since this will help the search engine determine where your page should be ranked. Remember, the search engines rank each page individually, that’s why it’s so important to use proper naming methods.

When you determine which keywords to use, go for a 4 to 6 word title when possible. After 58 characters, the title in the search engine results page will be truncated and will not be visible to the reader. Also, the longer the title, the less weight is given to each word.

The entire time you are conjuring up titles, always keep the reader in mind first. While some phrases may rank well in the search engines, a reader may never enter that phrase and you’ll lose that targeted traffic you were trying to reach. Sometimes the phrases work out well for both the user and search engine, and in those cases success is usually quick to follow.

by:Paul Bliss

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SEO Semantics – Keyword Research Techniques

by admin on August 19, 2010

SEO Semantics – Keyword Research Techniques

Web Seo Solutions

Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query.

However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA.

Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.

source:http://www.swellpath.com/2010/06/semantic-seo-5-keyword-research-techniques-tools/

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