Bloggers start and develop in an industry that’s already saturated. And when you’re super talented and authoritative in the area that you’re blogging about, you need to put yourself out with self promotion and hope others find you promotion-worthy as well. The only problem is that as a great blogger, you’re mixed in with all these so-so bloggers and ones that won’t even peek out from behind their persona mask.

When you’re doing a search query for something and you get a bunch of results that all look the same, you’re more likely to just start clicking from the top (so long as it’s relevant) down the page until you find what you’re looking for.

Nothing is there to distinguish a good blog post from just another one in the mix.

If I was searching for Android Fragmentation (I have no idea what that is but this results page was an awesome example of the markup at work) I would definitely be more apt to click the posts first that have a bio picture next to them. You’ll notice that there are other sources that could have great information on Android fragmentation, but they’re less likely to get clicked because of the generic looking result.

What increases CTRs? Credibility. Relevancy. Trust. Placement. And now, authorship.

There are two ways to distinguish yourself to users and to the search engines; you can use both the rel=”author” markup, and the rel=”me” markup.

Rel=”Author Markup”

One great way for bloggers to take ownership of their posts and gain credibility in the space is to use the rel=author markup, which would look something like this:

<a rel=”author” href=”http://www.blueglass.com/team/selena-narayanasamy" title="My BG Post">Selena Narayanasamy</a>

This doesn’t have to point to an actual author page, an about page will be just fine. The rel=author markup HAS to be pointing to another page on the same domain though- you can’t use this to point off-site.

The idea is that this creates a relationship between the blogger and their author/about page- which then allows Google to pull their bio picture in to the SERPs when showing their post in the results. Having a real life person next to a result can increase the CTRs and in the long run, might have a good shot at becoming a ranking factor.

The more posts that bloggers publish with high CTRs could potentially start showing up higher because they appear to be a trusted and popular search.

Rel=”Me”

Rel=”Me” is sometimes confused with the Rel=”Author” markup. The main difference with the Me markup  is that you use it to link to an external site that’s also yours.

<a rel=”me” href=”http://plus.google.com/113536282425581949756/about">More about Selena"</a>

This establishes that there is a link between your post and other external sites that also have your name. This way, you can make sure that your social profiles are linked to you as an author as well. And others won’t be able to lie and link their posts to your profile to ride the coattails of your credibility without your permission.

In order to do this, we’ll need to get a reciprocal link from our Google + profile letting the engines know that they can trust that these two are connected.

This way, I can’t try to write a post and say I’m Annie Cushing by pointing to her Google + profile. She would have to agree that I’m her [and good luck with that one].

This is a little trickier than the “Author” one. We’ll use Google + as an example since we’re already on the subject… let’s say that you’ve added the Rel=”Me” markup to your post using your Google + profile as a site that’s also owned by you. You’re going to have to go to Google + and confirm that this is, indeed, you.

When you’re on your profile page, go up to the top right and click “Edit Profile”

Once you click that, you’ll be taken to a place where you can edit the links in your sidebar. Click that.

Once you’re in there, you’ll see that there’s an option to add a custom link. You need to do this in order to set this up. You’ll then see a box that has an option you can check called, “This page is specifically about me.”

After you enter in all the necessary information (your website name and your website URL) and Google + can now reciprocate that this is, indeed, me marking myself as the author of that blog post.

Utilizing both of these tactics will not only help get your posts visibility in the SERPs, but can also coin you as a credible author. It’s easy to have a pen name. It’s easy to write a post. It’s harder to stand behind your name with a strong and compelling post- taking full ownership of it.

It’s also easy to remember someone’s name when you’re reading a post, but it’s harder to forget their face. It’ll also encourage them to search up more posts written by you because you’re pretty much burned into their brains now.

If you’re interested in how to work the Rel=”Author” markup with WordPress, there’s a great and concise post by Yoast about Highlighting WordPress Authors in Search. And of course, you can check out the Authorship markup video with Matt Cutts.

A lot of sites use Google Custom Search for site search. Nothing new and shiny there. But did you know you can use custom search engines (CSEs) for all kinds of cool purposes? I seem to have this inexplicable compulsion to take tools designed for one purpose and contort them to fulfill a more creative agenda. It’s like my Catcher in the Rye.

With a CSE you can restrict searches to a particular list of sites, pages, or a combination of both. For example, I have a CSE of sites that regularly have Excel tutorials that swing more SEO/analytics. I spidered through all the posts and tutorials I’ve saved in my Evernote and Delicious over the years and compiled my list from those.

I went on a CSE shopping spree for a while and created a bunch of them. But my fave one has been one I just created a few weeks ago. It searches all episodes of Web Analytics TV with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski — who, I might add, looks and acts like Jim from “The Office”, right? (I feel your pain, Nick. I had to deal with being compared to Caroline from “Caroline in the City” all through the 90s.)

But back to our regularly scheduled blog post …. Here’s what it looks like embededed:

(If it doesn’t load in your browser, you can check it out here.)

The reason this works is the guys include detailed notes for each episode. (See an example of awesome on a stick.) Now when I get stuck on something with Google Analytics, instead of wading through pages of posts, I just pop my search into my CSE.

How to Build a Custom Search Engine

To get all the details on building CSEs you can go right to the source with this tutorial. I’m just going to hit the essentials to building a CSE that’s not for your website.

First, go to www.google.com/cse/ and log in to your Google account. Click the Create a Custom Search Engine button. I’ll let you figure out the Describe your search engine part.

Now you’re going to define your search engine. (This is where the fun starts.) You’ll see a text field, Sites to search. This is where you’ll list your sites or specific pages.

Just below the text box is a link to learn more about URL formatting. Essentially, what it tells you is that you can use the asterisk character (*) as a wildcard. I used this when creating my CSE of Web Analytics TV. To use this feature, just look and see what different URLs have in common and fill them in with asterisks. For example, here’s a typical URL of a WATV episode:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/web-analytics-tv-19-most-productive.html
I’ve emphasized the parts of the URL that are consistent among all of the posts since February 2010. (Before that it was called Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q&A with Avinash and Nick. Good call switching up the name, guys!) So, to capture all of the URLs, I put this in the field:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/*/web-analytics-tv-*

And then to capture all of the Rapid Fire episodes, I entered this:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/*rapid-fire-web-analytics*

From there, you just follow the prompts, like pick your colors (I’d stay away from Bubble Gum), then grab the embed code. Bada bing bada bang bada boom — you’re done.

The URL formatting is what adds finesse to Google’s CSEs because you can really hone in on just the pages you want from a site. For example, one of the URLs I have listed in my Excel for SEO CSE is

searchengineland.com/*excel*

This just says, “Grab any URL from the Search Engine Land site that includes excel anywhere in its title.” Obviously, I’ll get some stray pages that talk about things like how to excel at PPC, but those pages aren’t liable to show up in a search for how to use the OFFSET function anyway.

Uses for Custom Search Engines

There are so many ways you could leverage CSEs to refine your searches, but here are just a few examples of sites you might want to bundle together to search:

• Video hosting sites
• Social sites you participate in, including one for bookmarking sites
• Photo sharing sites
• Answer sites
• Torrent sites (tsk tsk)
• Deals sites
• Niche blog sites
• Job/networking sites if you’re job hunting
• All of the sites associated with a particular university, company, organization, etc.

Plugin Goodness

You can easily add new sites to your CSE(s) with the Google Marker plugin. The bizarre thing is Google only makes the plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Talk about the cobbler’s son has no shoes. It’s a cool little plugin, nonetheless, when you’re on the prowl for new sites/pages to add to your CSEs.

Really Dial Up Your Search

If you really want to go beast mode in your search workflow, combine custom search engines with these tips to search right from your browser’s address bar.

Hat Tip: Kudos go out to Meg Geddes (NetMeg on Twitter) for her help and insights into some cool uses of custom search engines when I was researching for this post! You should also follow her on Twitter. She’s snarktastic and really knows her stuff. And she rarely bites.

But while you’re at it, follow BlueGlass on Twitter too — and me. I tweet a lot about SEO, analytics, cool tech stuff, and shoes.

You can also connect with us on Facebook. So many options, so little time.

If you’re anything like me, you were probably up into the wee hours of the morning the night you got your Google + invite. You’ve also probably noticed that it’s extremely filled with early adopters without much noise from the average everyday user. This won’t be a review, because we’ve seen review…after review… after walk through.So I won’t bore you with that. If you’re looking for a bland walk through then you may want to look somewhere else.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out some things I’ve noticed and what I think about it.

What happened when the +1 button came out? All of us went up in arms saying, “WHAT THE HELL! What is this stuff about Google trying to be social? They’re going to fail miserably. There’s no substance to this.”

Yep. That was me. But I’ve come to see that they’ve integrated this so nicely into Google + that you can’t help but admire the interface and sleekness that they’ve come barreling through the door with.

Personalization & Privacy

First off, my normal concern comes along with using anything that Google offers. Privacy. One thing Google has done right here is that while we know Google is collecting our data, at least we know that we have control (for right now) over whether users can see our +1s. And Sparks are private.

With the new shift in how we’re consuming information online, there’s also the awesomeness/concerns that come along with personalization. I lovehate personalization. There is something great about having information tailored to what you’re interested in, but for anybody who has listened to the TED talk on the Filter Bubble can understand where personalization can bring some concerns.

Google not only knows our search habits and location, but also our interests. So no longer are we just being served results according to where we are and what’s being stored, but I think we might start getting our results drilled down further depending on what our interests are and how they’re reflected in that search. I made this comparison before when talking with someone, but think politics. Each city and state has a different political affiliation. But imagine within those cities, there’s split affiliations and each person is getting results served to their location and affiliation- and not just their location anymore.

With that said, one of the best and strongest aspects of Google + is personalization.  For instance- you can upload interests with Sparks to get a RSS feed of relevant links to sift through.

These Sparks aren’t visible to anybody in your Circles which is nice because it really makes you feel like Google + is catering to you with both a private platform and a sharing platform.

On the +1 front, you have the ability to catalog your+1s for later reference privately, or you can share what you’ve +1ed across the web.

Sharing Segmentation

One of the first and foremost things to point out is the ability to segment users into circles and share. One of the areas that Facebook fails majorly in, is the ability to pick and choose who you share with which results in people hiding your posts, or maybe even you completely, from their stream because they don’t have the heart to delete you.

While Facebook has a blanket privacy option, Google + does it right by allowing you to build circles how you see fit without others seeing your lists.

Do you secretly enjoy sharing LOLcats or Cats that look like Hitler and have a small circle or cat loving friends too? Perfect. Make a crazy cat lady circle and share away. You won’t pollute your stream like you normally do with your other networks and risk forcing your friends to make that awkward decision to hide you yet keep secretly stalking your profile. You can keep relevant information just where it belongs- with the group of people who care.

Will circle filtering and sharing certain links with certain people/groups signal Google that these people should start being associated with these interests as well? It’s an unlikely scenario but I’m curious how the social aspect of this as opposed to voluntary searching will weigh in. On the flip side, will what we share and +1 start affecting the results that we’re seeing as well and tightening the bubble around us?

The Shift Towards Sharing Links

What I like about Google + is that my stream has been happily filled with links. The links to status update ratio is probably 10:1 and that makes me not want to strangle my feed.

It seems like right from the get go, users on there gravitate more towards sharing links and information rather than a place to share status updates like Facebook. The line has been drawn where Google + seems to borderline more of a professional sharing environment that Facebook has been struggling to offer for years. It was even announced the other day that there’s going to be options for businesses on + to get analytics and sync up with other Google products such as Adwords. That’s giving them leverage over the regular Facebook brand pages already.

Great Potential for Bloggers

I  have a Facebook Page for my blog. With Facebook, tons of my friends have “liked” my blog page… not because they actually care about the content and links I’m sharing from that page, but just because they’re my friends and didn’t want to hurt my feelings.  Google + is an awesome opportunity for blogs to hop on board and share posts and links completely relevant to the audience who is following them. Search Engine Land has already started to experiment with this.

Unobtrusive Requests

One thing that drives me crazy about Facebook is I get a lot of friend requests. At one point I had 50 friend requests sitting in my inbox because I had no clue who they were and haven’t necessarily met them in person. Facebook, to me, is more personal. So the nice thing about Google + is that people can put you in their circles, but you aren’t necessarily forced to reciprocate that. It’s a very unobtrusive act and truly fosters the “personal” environment that Google introduces here. You can throw people in a circle for your own benefit. And if you want to, you can check out the incoming posts of users who have put you in their circle. Nothing is forced through your feed. Yet.

I’m keeping my eye on Google +. I was pleasantly surprised at the release of this and I can’t wait to see what other tricks they have up their sleeve. Or what things they can add on to make us mad.

– — – — – — – –

If you’re interested in keeping up with us or have questions about the social media space, follow BlueGlass on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.  If you’re interested in just knowing more about US,  follow our BlueGlass Tumblr.

They’re doing it wrong.

I’m pretty sure by now you all know about my obsession/fascination with Facebook and Open Graph, and I’ve been diligently working to understand and utilize these attributes. We’re at a point in internet marketing where you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not at least THINKING about taking the steps to understand and implement this.

As a Facebook user, you’re probably wondering how exactly the information from an external site gets pulled into Facebook; often automatically adding itself to your movie, music or book ‘Likes’. How does this happen? What web is this weaving?

This is going to be part 1 in a small series outlining why you need to go a step further than just implementing the ‘Like’ button on your site. In this post, we’ll talk about a basic overview and in the next post I’ll talk about some best practices with Open Graph. Using Open Graph attributes lets you fully control how your information is being displayed in the Facebook news feed and your user’s social graph.

Many brands don’t realize you can do this and struggle with having in-congruent images or site level (and not post level) descriptions getting pulled in when users share a link. Og: attributes (open graph attributes) can be viewed somewhat like meta data. You have a multitude of tags you can use and each acts like an identifier to be crawled by Facebook.

In the example I’ll show today, I’ll go over some basics such as:

• A quick visual representation of Open Graph and how it ties us together socially
  .
• Basic Open Graph tags and how to customize so the appropriate images, links and descriptions gets pulled into the news feed
  .
• How to scrape and force Facebook to update any changes you make to your Open Graph, along with check for errors or missing tags
  .
• Bing Social + social trust. Also, the added benefit of Bing Social – showing how a trusted review can be displayed from your social graph to help a decision.

The Visual of Invisible Open Graph Connections

What you’ll see is that Open Graph data is actually pretty intricate in how it’s shared, and how we’re connected. This is just at a basic level.

Here’s a diagram I put together… please hold your giggles back. I never claimed to be an artist.

The black arrows are showing the path of your “Like” and the red sharpie lines are showing the connections that Open Graph is encouraging; ultimately ending up with a review that gets pulled into Bing Social. We’ll talk about this in a bit.

You’ll see that there are little red squares in the profile boxes and also the newsfeed. This is where your descriptions, images and URLs will ultimately show that you tag in.

As mentioned previously, there’s tons of tags that you can utilize but for the sake of keeping this simple I’ve dumbed it down to demonstrate how these tags can be visually useful. You’ll see two above, and we’ll also talk about og:url [a canonical URL] briefly.

Scraping the Surface of Tags

Let’s use a vacation rental for an example. Let’s say that I stayed at Arbors by the Sea in an awesome little cottage called “Iris” (which I did).

I stayed there and wanted to share with my friends on Facebook. I go to the ABTS website and hit ‘Like’ on the individual cottage that I stayed at. You’ll note that there are multiple “Like” buttons on this page. Most users are under the impression that all ‘Like’ buttons operate at a “one page” level and not necessarily on an “individual level”.

I ran into a problem with one of the sites I first tried to implement OG with, because on the homepage, with each individual post snippet, I had a ‘Like’ button. I didn’t realize I had to treat each separately and as a result, every ‘Like’ on the homepage (even on a post snippet) would simply show up as the main URL, and not the post; however, on the post level, it worked fine.

Treat each of these boxes like different objects on the site- they’re separated by div tags and each one is acting individually.

From here, I decided to ‘Like’ the Iris one. From this, it’s pulled into my profile and my newsfeed.

To better help demonstrate what these tags do, you’ll notice that there’s also an og:type attribute. To scratch the surface of this quickly, let’s look at how it applies to the external site and Facebook. On IMDB, I liked the movie Tron. These ‘Likes’ can technically be pulled into Facebook when tagged appropriately.

This had the og:type attribute of  ‘movie’:

<meta property=”og:type” content=”movie”/>

Which ultimately made a phantom connection to pull Tron into my Facebook information as an actual movie I like.

How Do Tags Affect What’s Displayed in Facebook?

The og:description, og:title, og:url and og:image are all GUIDING what is going to show up when a user ‘Likes’ something on your site. If you don’t tell Facebook what to pull, it’s going to pull some irrelevant photo from your site as well as the easiest information for the description that it can find.

If you’re like is at a post/page level, it might even pull the site URL in as opposed to the post/page URL. If this wasn’t set up properly, it would show up as:

“Selena Narayanasamy likes a link- <appropriate title> linking to —> http://www.arborsbythesea.com”

instead of 

“Selena Narayansamy likes a link- <appropriate title> linking to —> http://www.arborsbythesea.com/iris/”

You can achieve the Title “Iris” (which is linked to the /iris page) by using the og:title attribute. You’ll also note that the grey under the title “Iris” pulls the actual domain in, and not the page.  That’s fine.

Example:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://whateveryouwant.com/img/logo.png”/>

<meta property=”og:title” content=”anchor text/title of links”/>

<meta property=”og:url” content=”http://whateveryouwant.com/subpage”/>

<meta property:og:description” content=”The description here is what gets pulled into your newsfeed. You better make it AWESOME.” />

SO now, another person in my social graph also ‘Likes’ this link, and even goes so far as to put up a review of his stay in the Iris cottage on TripAdvisor. This review will get pulled into his Facebook newsfeed and profile, and will also ultimately get indexed into Bing Social as well.

Checking & Updating Open Graph Attributes

Facebook has a nice tool called the Facebook URL Linter and what this does is force Facebook to scrape and crawl your changes to guarantee that they’re being rolled out. If we enter the above website in there, we’ll be able to see that the attributes that are being scraped are indeed being displayed. This is all publicly available information.

Wrapping up: Social Trust

We spoke earlier about a review going up in TripAdvisor and it being pulled into Facebook. If there was a mutual friend of ours who saw that we both ‘Liked’ this vacation rental, it’s extremely likely that they’ll go and look up information about it to see some reviews. In Bing Social below, you’ll see that when you search up ‘arbors by the sea iris’, not only is there a “like” on the first URL, but it also shows that this person ‘Liked’ and shared their TripAdvisor review.

This encourages social trust and eases the weight that decisions put on us. We are more likely to trust a review from a friend, than a random review or even what the search engine is recommending without that social aspect.

I hope this taught you a little something, and got you really amped up about the ability to adjust your images, links and descriptions within Facebook.

Have you come across any sites that are Open Graph enabled that aren’t huge brands (yet)? What are some that have done it right?

– — – — – — – — –

If you’re interested in keeping up with us or have questions about the social media space, follow BlueGlass on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.  If you’re interested in just knowing more about US, follow our BlueGlass Tumblr.

Search rankings are based on a combination of signals from various locations. Successful link building means incorporating multiple efforts into the plan. There was a time when buying paid footer links, only using exact match anchors and spamming commenting on a few blogs would get you pretty decent results. Today, you would not want to do any of these things. Instead, modern link building requires less exact match anchor text, strategic social traffic/signals and fewer links overall.  Here is a look at one well thought out linking plan which entails fewer links….

Less exact match:

• Exact match anchors have been over used and abused for some time now.
  .
• Penalties, as opposed to rewards, are being reaped for too many exact match links.
  .
• Don’t be afraid to vary your anchor text. Incorporating branded terms is important.

An example of modifying anchor text:

Let’s pretend I own Joannasbakery.com. I want to rank for red velvet cupcakes. Instead of focusing on red velvet cupcakes, I would want to vary the anchors and methods for reaching my goals. Using methods like blogger outreach and viral marketing are going to be very important. Get people in the blogging communities to love your product and they will comment and share and provide positive feedback. In order for your content and product to be appreciated, it must be of valuable quality. I can’t stress that enough.

So I would shoot for a link graph that would look something like this:

• 20 % to internal page -> red velvet cupcakes
  
• 20 % to internal page -> red velvet cupcake
• 20 % to internal page -> cupcakes Red velvet
• 20 % to internal page -> Joanna’s velvet cupcakes
• 10 % to the homepage -> Joannasbakery.com
• 10% would be random

Importance of social traffic:

Viral promotions to high end content is key to obtaining quality linking these days. Having a strong presence on social communities is still a very important factor. Social news aggregators are becoming very strict as time passes and are allowing people to submit less and less spam-like content.  Don’t just submit anything, it has to be content that will be interesting & relevant to the community.

This is another indicator that Google is varying its methods for determining rankings. Social sites realize the penalties of poorly written content and are making adjustments to remain valuable. Niche forums also hold great significance. Links must be placed in forums that are relevant to the site you want to obtain back links and traffic for. These efforts are time consuming but they can have tremendous results.

More focus on quality over quantity:

• Google’s algorithms place more impact on ONE really high quality link opposed to hundreds of randomly placed links.
  .
• Links that are not strategically placed appear to be forced. It is very unnatural looking.
  .
• These outdated linking tactics hurt your rankings. In fact, many of these types of links will likely get removed from Google’s index over time.

Are your current link building methods bringing you more pain than joy?  Let us know in the comments or by contacting us here.

For the most part, traditional rankings or Google SERPS are still the base core of the Google Results, but on a local level, Google Places results AND the web results from local businesses have made their way into Universal SERPS, and in some instances, knocking a “core” #2 or #3 well below the fold into a #7 or #10 level.

I’ve previously written about Google Places issues, false positives and the incorporation of User Generated Content into Google Places results via Google Hotpot, but this time, I’ve found some very interesting examples of businesses that are being highlighted in Google Places that have no permanent location nor do they actually have a location. It seems that after doing some targeted searches for several local terms, that Google Places is considering vending machines as local locations.

Now whether the Google Places results for vending machines mirrors the modern choices and the transition of established brick & mortars into outdooor businesses. I mean, haven’t lunch trucks been ALL OVER Food Network lately? Let’s take a look

Redbox

Redbox is a chain of video rental vending machines that along with OnDemand and NetFlix, drove the traditional video store model to extinction. When searching Google, Redbox places appear for their brand name and for “video stores”, but without permanent real estate or on-location employees.

Zooming into one of the location results, we see that the Redbox is located at 13151 Race Track Road, Tampa, FL, the address of a 7 Eleven.

What’s interesting is that although these are vending machines, they are ranking for terms like “video stores” and “video rentals”.

Citibank ATM’s

Taking a page out of the Redbox book, Citibank has altered its business model to be much more of a kiosk model in many areas in the US, and consolidating branches into versatile ATM stations which are convenient and carry the trusted name of Citibank. I had originally ran into this issue years ago when searching for a Citibank in my area for an International deposit. I was new to town, and after finding Citibank locations listed in Google, I ended up driving to a 7 Eleven.

This still holds true today, in fact, a search for Citibank in my area leads me to a familiar address : 13151 Race Track Road, Tampa, FL!

Google must be sending this 7 Eleven A LOT of business!

Coinstar

I was thinking of other vending machines (no, a search for Coke or Pepsi did not result in Google Places listings) so started brainstorming around other semi-businesses in the form of machines that lease spaces outside or inside of other stores. Here’s a Coinstar that’s located in a grocery store :

Other Kiosks & Machines?

Does this mean that vending machine based companies are taking advantage of Google Places? Of course not.

In fact, these are all thriving businesses that people are more than likely searching for or engaging with using Google. And given the direction of the video rental business (that is, actually renting DVD’s in person vs. downloading movies on iTunes, Netflix or your cable company) to Redbox and other vending machines vs. traditional stores, it makes sense for businesses to look into optimizing for local search and getting these Places pages authorized even if they are not permanent locations.

Kiosks, booths and other seasonal pop-ups [Christmas tree or decorations stores that pop-up in November] are all good examples – especially if Google can serve seasonal results based on trending.

I would also suggest :

• Setting up a Foursquare, Google Latitude or Facebook Places account for physical checkins & specials (this is great social proof that a location actually exists)
  .
• Setting up a Yelp profile and other local profiles such as Citysearch and other local directory listings. These also serve as proof that your location exists and are aggregated by Google Places.

Stumbling across some of these results, especially the Redbox ones, which are dominating keyterms in Places and not just branded searches, really got me thinking … what other opportunities are there?

When I search for “photo printing” the results are all traditional B2B printing and copying centers, but not the Kodak or Fuji kiosks that are available in CVS or Walgreens that regular people use to print their photos daily. Do these photo kiosks deserve Places?

Can you find other examples of vending machines or kiosks being indexed and served in Google Places? What about locations that deserve to be listed but are not?  If so, please share them in the comments below.

————————-

Follow us on Twitter here for more Internet marketing goodness.

Granted the mainstream media picking up on a search update, and its tie to one of the first major tech IPOs in recent history are all the right ingredients for major commotion. However, the good SEO will stay calm, sit back, and collect data. The seasoned SEO knows how these things play out, a major change followed by adjustment, then the need to tweak a marketing plan.

But what are the tweaks?

Let’s looks at what information we have to date.

Google gave us our biggest clue, and Barry covered it over at SearchEngineRoundtable.com :

Hi All,

I wanted to update this thread with some additional guidance for those who have sites that may be affected by this update.

Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content thatâs copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.

We’ve been reading this thread within the Googleplex and appreciate both the concrete feedback as well as the more general suggestions. This is an algorithmic change and it doesn’t have any manual exceptions applied to it, but this feedback will be useful as we work on future iterations of the algorithm.

Wysz

So how does a search company and a bunch of engineers define something as subjective as “quality writing.”

Vanessa Fox wrote over at SearchEngineLand.com :

This algorithm specifically targets sites (not necessarily content farms) that are low quality in a number of ways, such as:

• Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
• Poorly written content
• Content copied from other sites
• Content that’s not useful

Low quality content on part of the site can impact the rankings of the entire site ….

…. A key phase is “information that [is] just not useful”.  It’s not enough that content is unique and verbose. Another key is that even high quality pages can lose rankings if poor quality pages tarnish the overall site.

It is pretty simple to figure out how they can algorithmically target “shallow content” and “content copied from other sites.” Content such as this is likely what led to the major drop in traffic of Mahalo.com and similar websites.

However, how are they gauging the “usefulness” of content beyond these points. Much of it likely has to do with the upstream, downstream, and onsite quality metrics they collect via toolbars and other Google products. Interaction with content is going to be a major signal for the big G.

What else?

Twitter of course.

Real time social data and links are going to give significant relevancy signals to content and sites as a whole. Google is paying for that data, and they will use it.

So what should a webmaster due to ride the Panda?

1) Find content on your site that may fall into the easily assessed areas of “shallow” and “copied.” There may be legitimate reasons for these such as the fact that portions of your site use directory style listings. You have to make a decision on these. Are they critical for your search traffic and monetization. No? Cut them out of your crawl. Are they significant for your visitor? If the answer is no here think about redirection and cleaning up the usability of your website. Quality over quantity is now the path in terms of content.

2) Create a style guide for your site to guide content creation in the future to assure its quality. We do this as one of the first steps at CopyPress.com , and our customers receive intriguing content the consumers interact with. High quality content is still a winner.

3) Build a strategy to get your content out in front of people, and allow for interaction. Social buttons, commenting, reviews, the ability to add more information to a directory page, all of this can help in terms of signals of quality. You may also want to look at how to turn your news section into a highly competitive news portal and optimize it for Google News inclusion. For queries where shallow content may be the standard, i.e. ecommerce , look to differentiate your content from others through fresh product descriptions. Most ecommerce sites utilize manufacturer descriptions aka “copied” content.

4) With an estimated 12% of queries effected by the Panda update, you can bet some portion of your link profile saw changes. Between this and the massive noise surrounding high publicity link penalties recently, it is a good time to look at your linkbuilding strategy. Natural is what is always going to work best. Stick to linkbuilding that Google recommends, and find a linkbuilding company that does the same. Guest blogging, blogger outreach, content relationships, and linkbait creation and syndication are all great strategies and obviously tactics that will prevail through this update.

In the end you will need to collect data and make smart decisions through this change. Reacting in an overly aggressive manner to this change in search may have permanent consequences.

In the interview where those statements were made, Mayer emphasized the importance of social to Google, stating  :

“We ultimately know we need to get social right. If you think about the Web, there are four key platforms: search, video, mobile, and social. Google has done really well in three of those four — and we haven’t gotten social right yet.”

“We do need the context of who your friends are and who you know,” states Mayer, pointing to one of the flaws that led to Buzz’s downfall.

Buzz made it too simple to be found by a variety of contacts who were far from being friends, and gave no incentive to track down or create actual connections; deprived of a profile and lacking in creative extras, Buzz served as a watered-down knockoff of Twitter. Luckily for Google, there’s a new service that will change Google’s social presence.

How Hotpot Will Change Social and More

That product is Google Hotpot, the evolution of Google Places that adds a number of key social features. This product seemed at first glance to be little more than a revamped interface for location ratings, but those paying attention — especially to the updates in the last two months — have seen a strong social trend.

In January alone, the following key features were added:

• A “friends” feature. Added January 6th, this obvious social move will allow Google to see how users connect, who they want to associate with, and more.
• The addition of a “highlight” on Google Maps for locations rated highly by Hotpot friends. (Added January 11th.)
• A stream of recent ratings from Hotpot friends. (Added January 19th.)
• The addition of profile pictures to your Hotpot profile. (Added January 26th.)

This certainly isn’t to say that “Hotpot is a social network.” Rather, it’s a local service with key social elements that will lay the groundwork for all other social features Google creates. Additionally, Hotpot’s very nature makes it Google’s strongest platform for connecting users and local business owners — and, more importantly, create advertising revenue with local, brick-and-mortar businesses.

Google’s Hotpot Push

Don’t think that Hotpot’s important? Well, even if it winds up fading like other Google experiments, it’s clear that the service is one that Google cares deeply about. More than any other product since Gmail — and perhaps exceeding even that — Google has given Hotpot a publicity push.

Since the launch of Hotpot back in November, Google has pushed the service on a variety of platforms, including one that Google rarely touches: the real world. Google took to the streets of Portland, Oregon, for one of the more impressive offline marketing efforts from any recent company. Beyond running a competition with tens of thousands of dollars in prizes, Google also gave away t-shirts to the entire audience of a Trail Blazers game, gave away free coffee and merchandise at Voodoo Coffee, provided business owners with care packages that included the coolest stickers ever, and more. Google isn’t restricted to just Portland, either. A San Francisco event was also held, and more are anticipated.

Google has also spread across the world, into the search engines, and onto the mobile platform. It began with Google Maps for Mobile, whose December 22nd update added, with ninja-like stealth, a Hotpot widget for all Android users; this pairs beautifully with the Latitude updates that make Google’s location app far more competitive with industry leader 4Square and Facebook Places, and puts the Latitude/Hotpot pair in a strong local search position. Then Google spread to a global scale, localizing to 38 different languages at the beginning of February. Most importantly, however, was the integration of Hotpot with Google’s most important property: their search engine results page.

Where Google’s Social and Local Will Go from Here

While representatives like Mayer may be honest, that doesn’t mean Google is transparent with its upcoming actions. I’ve found over the past few years of monitoring Google, that the company would rather sit back and learn from the challenges their competition faces than jump into a competitive market headfirst.

1. Take GMail for example. Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and other services had been around forever before Google figured out how to deconstruct the moneitized webmail service, add competitive advantages in mail search and mail storage, then launched GMail to change the market entirely. And GMail was the conduit into Apps, Docs and even GTalk.
2. Yahoo Local was ahead of the local game for a very long time, then Yelp … and although Google tried entering local as an aggregate of brick & mortar data, this never really gave them the competitive advantage. By integrating Google Places & Hotpot into Droid, GPS, location targeted information display and other new technologies, Google is not only getting the jump on Yahoo Local and eventually Yelp  … but also setting the stage to take on Facebook Places & Foursquare as well.
3. Google & Groupon?  … read on

Google’s attempt to purchase the daily deal company Groupon, despite the six billion dollar price tag, shows the company’s commitment to this line of thinking.

There’s little confirmed on whether Google will be buying another group or continuing building out the leaked Google Offers from scratch, but we do know that Google has started making phone calls to sell local business owners special “coupon advertisements” which display on Google Maps, Hotpot, and more. Further, “click-to-call” and other locally-oriented features from Adwords are improving success in this crucial division of advertising.

Groupon is being hit not only by Living Social right now, but in almost every direction and vertical offerings are popping up all over the web.

Thinking beyond the local, there’s no doubt that Google will be trying to breach into the social scene once again. While the upcoming social network has many rumored names, including GoogleMe and Google+1, the existence of the project is certain. All we don’t know is the release date — but stay tuned to Google I/O for a potential announcement of a 2011 release.

Google’s next social attempt will have a strong advantage thanks to Hotpot. With connections to local advertising, the primary ad source seeing success in networks like Facebook will already be “hooked in.” Additionally, those using Hotpot will already have an established profile and group of friends, making the transition to the social side of Google both painless and instantaneous.

Have you tried the Google Hotpot experience? How do you think it will compete with Foursquare, Groupon or Yelp? Please share your thoughts in the comments below and be sure to check out our Facebook Page.

The reason why I love the search engine so much is its flexibility. The range of opportunities I have with the tool is enormous. Many people don’t even have the slightest idea of how many options they have besides typing a word and hitting “search”.

This post is an attempt to show how really flexible and creative you can be with Google. It is an attempt to inspire.

In this post we will try to research our potential Twitter following (and probably competitors) by searching for Twitter users.

Note: before we actually start searching, here are some great ideas for you to learn what else you can get from Google search results besides just clicking through them:

1. Take a look at this (rather old but still valid) post of mine on exporting Google results to Excel (and the comments to it): this way you can open results in a more organized, ready-for-analysis way.
2. Take a look at this post on analyzing Google results, especially the word cloud tool.

Throughout the post we are going to use SITE:twitter.com search command to restrict results to Twitter domain. Also, you may want to set Google to show at least 50 (better 100) results per page (You will need to disable Instant search for that).

1. First Things First: Just Search for Your Keyword

The best way to start is to just run straightforward search [SITE:twitter.com keyword] in Google and see what happens.

What most likely is going to happen is that Google will return Twitter users and Twitter lists that have your keyword in the title tag and / or URL – this is just how Google works most of the time. These will probably be bloggers and official Twitter accounts and lists that promote their profiles and are very much focused on the topic of your interest:

There is likely to be more Twitter lists in search results (depending on your keyword, of course), which is surely useful but not really the purpose of this post. So what we are going to do is to apply some filtering.

2. Show Google What You Need: Apply Filters or Force the Exact Match

So if we need only Twitter users returned in search results, we need to filter some URLs out. It would be possible if we had “list” word somewhere in the Twitter list URL showing it’s not a user. However with Twitter it is impossible – the URLs of Twitter lists are all different: they consist of /%username%/%twitter-list-name% parts which are both variables.

Therefore we need another way to drop the lists of the search results. If we look closely at search results, we’ll see that all Twitter users have “(%Username%) on Twitter” part it the title as opposed to Twitter lists:

So we can use this part to exclude Twitter lists from the search results. For that we will need three operators:

• intitle: to indicate where the part should be located;
• “” (quotation marks) to indicate the exact match;
• + to force the part in the results:

Nice! Your results are pretty much ready for Excel export and/or analysis!

Now let’s try something trickier:

3. Go more in-depth: Search within people’s bios

The above search did return many results, but the important limitation of them is that, like I said, Google will give top rankings to those using our keyword in the page title and URLs (which is good in most cases and does reflect the topic of most web pages) but will cause us to miss a great deal of highly relevant results: users who mention the word in the bio (without including it in their full names or usernames).

If we want to focus the search on those Twitter users, we need to include the word “bio” in our search.

Note: If you opted in “New Twitter”, you may have noticed that the word “bio” has been removed from users’ profiles. This could result in our experiment failure because Google won’t know it’s a bio unless there’s the exact word on the page. But the good thing is that unregistered users as well as Google still see “old” profiles with the word “bio” on them – which we can make sure of by taking a look at Google Cache of any Twitter profile:

So while we don’t (yet) have the tools to use Google to restrict results to a particular part of the page, we can use the word “bio” to show which part of Twitter profiles we need to focus on.

New search operators we will use:

• - to exclude results with our keyword in the title (we’ve seen enough of them in the previous step) combined with intitle: to show where we don’t want our keyword to appear;
• * to let Google replace it with one or more random words (people might use in their bios):

We can export these results as well and merge the list with the one we built above.

Now, from the above screenshot, let’s make sure we understand why we need each part of the search query:

• site:twitter.com restricts search results to Twitter domain;
• “bio * diabetes” indicates that we really want the word diabetes to appear somewhere near the word bio. We need * (wildcard) there to make sure that isn’t the exact match – without the wildcard Google will only find users whose bios start with the word diabetes.

Note: To control the proximity you may also want to play with AROUND() operator which I haven’t found terribly useful – which also makes me wonder if it actually works at all.

• -intitle:diabetes excludes all pages with diabetes in profile page title (which means it drops all the Twitter users who have the word mentioned in their “full names” or “user names”)
• +“on twitter” forces Google to only search profiles (dropping all lists out).

Looks good? I hope this post has demonstrated how flexible and incredibly smart Google search is when you use it to its full potential! Please share your favorite search operators and tips!

If you want search and social media tutorials delivered to you regularly,  like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter!

What are “Clustered” Google Search Results?

Or, in other words, why are some results get clustered?

If one domain gets two pages ranked in top 10 results, Google would unite those two listing in the “clustered” one.

According to Google:

Indented results

When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it. If we find more than two results from the same site, the remaining results can be accessed by clicking the More results from link.

Obviously, indented results are usually given for long-tail, less competitive search terms.

Clustered (or indented) listings have been around for ages. They have been changed slightly several times:

• For branded search results indented listings were substituted with “stacked” domains (where many pages from the same domain are returned without any clustering);
• Forums got multiple “mini”-indented results for multiple related threads;
• Google experimented with multiple indented results for the same domain.

Note: I usually don’t recommend trying to “force” an intended result for your own domain because promoting two pages from your domain for one key term may result in triggering duplicate content filter. The best intended result is the one that comes naturally. But if you have a page ranked in top five for some search term and another page ranked within 11-20 range, you have a good chance.

Is there a Way to “Uncluster” Those Results?

“Unclustering” those results can discover some highly important opportunities for you:

• How easy it would be for you to push your competitor down;
• How easy it would be for you to get higher.

To learn the real position of the indented result, take advantage of &num=1 Google search URL parameter: it forces Google to display one result per page and thus puts the indented listing at it actual spot. The great example of this tip in action is this thread:

I’ve been #3 and #4 for my favorite keyword for a long time, while another site has been #1 and #2 for as long as I can remember. In unclustered results, I’m #2 and #5 while he’s *1 and *3. These unclustered ranks show that I’m fairly close to getting the #1 spot (I wouldn’t be close if he had both *1 and *2).

Let’s exercise.

Taking the example in the very first screenshot, we see the first listing from the cluster on page 1 (obviously):

While the second indented result comes only on page 8 (which means it is fairly easy to push it down!):

This means that our initial screenshot should actually look like this:

Is there a Tool for That?

Not exactly a tool but a very handy way to speed up the process. This browser bookmarklet (courtesy of Squarefree) will add &num=1 to any Google string once you click it:

num=1

(Just drag it to your browser bookmarks toolbar).

The bookmarklet is compatible with FireFox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.

For more useful SEO content, tips and inspiration, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!