Central Perk

miercuri, 20 iulie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

How to Cool Down a Car Under Direct Sun with a Japanese Door Trick
Fascist Weddings In China
Funny Poses Above the Pool
Toothpicking Is New Planking
Funny Faces Of People Playing Video Games
Crazy Penalty Kick
US Military Tattoos

How to Cool Down a Car Under Direct Sun with a Japanese Door Trick

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 03:57 PM PDT

It's summer, and if you live anywhere the sun shines, science dictates that it gets stupid hot inside your car when it's closed up and baking in the sun. According to this Japanese video, rolling down one window and opening and closing the opposite door a handful of times will quickly and effectively cool down a hot car.

The video's only two and a half minutes, but unless you understand Japanese (or can read the Chinese subtitles), jump straight to the 1:52 mark to get the picture. Reddit user binarysolo offers this loose translation:

Roll down a window on a side of the car. Let's go with the driver's side window. Go to the opposite side door (in this case, passenger side) and open/close it ~5 times. Just do this normally.

Source: lifehacker

Fascist Weddings In China

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 03:33 PM PDT

Taking into account that for Chinese just-married couples it's almost a cult aim to take memorable wedding photos, maybe it is not that surprising to see such oddities of Asian creativity. If they were wearing a Japanese uniform of the WWII time, this would be much more brave.

Funny Poses Above the Pool

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:59 PM PDT

What is the best place for planking on a a hot summer day? Well, of course where the cold water is - The Pool! These are funny photos of people striking comedy mid-air poses before they crash into the pool.

Toothpicking Is New Planking

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 12:26 PM PDT

The phenomenon of planking involves the practice of imitating a wooden plank in various places, both public and private. This has lead to owling which encourages squatting on top of various objects whilst staring owl-like into the distance. The newest craze, spawn from its predecessors is toothpicking, which involves standing on your head. The most important aspect to remember is the more bizarre the place the better the planking, owling or toothpicking.

Funny Faces Of People Playing Video Games

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 12:18 PM PDT

When you're deeply immersed in a video game, the last thing on your mind is what your gameface might look like. But for photographer Phillip Toledano, capturing those funny faces is the best part. Back in 2002, he shot a smile-inducing portrait series of people playing video games. See some of them below:

Crazy Penalty Kick

Posted: 19 Jul 2011 09:15 PM PDT

Last Sunday, the UAE defeated Lebanon 6-2. Awana Diab scored a goal with a creative penalty kick that was struck with his heel:

Diab's setup seemed like any other for a penalty, but as he ran up to the ball, he stopped, turned around and backheeled the it toward the goal. Stunned by the audacity, madness and nerve it takes to try and score a penalty with your back to the goal, the keeper just stood and watched as the ball trickled into the net.

The UAE's coach immediately yanked Diab from the game, asserting that he had acted disrespectfully to the opposing team.

US Military Tattoos

Posted: 19 Jul 2011 06:56 PM PDT

According to studies and polls, armed forces tattoos are the greatest in the Navy, with the Army second, the Marines third, and then the Air Force. The style of tattoo designs seems to differ depending on the specific branch of armed forces.

Tattoos in the US armed forces have a long and colorful tradition. The millions of Americans who have served either as active service personnel or reservists means a countless number of inked war veterans. Many of them have gotten tattoos as a constant reminder that they once belonged to a particular unit or platoon, to acknowledge their loyalty not only to their unit but also to their country, to show feelings of camaraderie they felt, or even to mark the loss of someone close to them.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Why Counting Links Is Not So Easy

Posted: 19 Jul 2011 02:33 PM PDT

Posted by Receptional

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

By Olivia Isaacs and Dixon Jones.

Knowing what a link is… that’s SEO 101 right? Think again! It’s one of the most fundamental parts of SEO, but when we really asked ourselves the question, we found there were many different ways of counting links. We use both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO and decided to see if we can get a common census between the two tools. (Full disclosure: In case you didn’t know, one of the authors of this post is the Marketing director at Majestic.)

Firstly, let’s get all the confusion out the way about the different terms that are used to describe this one key word. "Backlinks", "inbound links" and "in-links" and "links" are different words but they have the same meaning. Namely, they are incoming links to a webpage or the entire website.

What Defines a Link?

Open Site Explorer tends to have used the word “links” – but this can be ambiguous as it might also apply to outbound links from a page. (It doesn’t, in OSE’s case, but user perception is reality.) By contrast, Majestic SEO tends to use the phrase "backlinks", but again the user might reasonably ask whether a backlink is still a backlink after it has been deleted (since Majestic keeps the row of data, but just flags it as a delete link) or if a link from within the site should be included (as Majestic drops these).

Both SEOmoz and Majestic SEO realize that terminology is important and both tools have agreed to work towards a common language moving forward where we can. Certainly – when you use both tools, you will invariably get different answers as to “how many links” there are to a site or page. There are loads of reasons – but even if there weren’t, getting a methodology just to count them is pretty hard. So let’s look at an example (bring on the infographic. Full size here)…

Problem 1: Handling the two (blue) links from Page A to Page B:

Have you ever seen a “Link count” between page A and Page B that is more than one? I haven’t. So how does one account for two links between page A and Page B with different anchor texts? They are obviously not the SAME link, but saying they are TWO links would be simply inviting trouble. Even the lowliest of hackers can create 1000 links on a free blog page all linking to a target page and call them 1000 different links in this case. We are pretty confident that Google only take the first link and anchor text into consideration at this time – if that’s any help to you.

Problem 2: Does an Internal link count as a link?

Look at Page A. It has three inbound links and three outbound links. So is that three links or six? OK – 80% of you will say “3” even though technically the 20% would be right. Let’s take it a step further… what if Page A links to itself? Oh GOD! Here I think we have a difference between OSE and Majestic.

Majestic currently drops any links from internal pages (sites within the same domain), so that last example would not apply… but it is not true to say internal link don’t have link value. It is just a lot of extra data that Majestic doesn’t store as there are tools available for free that let you analyse internal links. OSE, by contrast, did seem to be able to keep a track of internal links last time I checked.

Problem 3: 301 redirects

You will notice that there is a third way a user can get from Page A to Page B with one click – via a 301. So are there two links from Page A to Page B or three? If you say “three” then you are also saying by the same logic that there is a link from page I to page B, which passes through the same redirected 301 page. Now that’s a problem. Is there a link from the 301 page to Page B? Or do would you say that the 301 page should be transparent?

Well I can tell you that Majestic (and I believe also OSE) counts the link from the 301 page as one link. Both sites mark it as a redirect link, but neither one will add in the links from pages H and I in their link counts. Technically – Google does though! At least sometimes. That’s why so many people buy up expired domains and 301 redirect them to other pages. They have a chance of getting link juice as a result. In recent years we have seen a bit of a downgrade in the effectiveness of 301s –but they remain a vital part of the web infrastructure. OSE shows you that the link is a 301, which should give you a good clue. In MJSE the link is flagged as a redirect, but you would need to pick up your “clue” from their ACRank on that link and if you wanted to investigate further, you would need to actually analyse the url that returns a 301.

Problem 4: Other Redirects

If either OSE or MJSE were to try and “act like a search engine” in making your decision that 301s should be effectively invisible, the problems simply multiply. Spam links would appear to increase, for a start, but what do you do with 302 redirects? In theory, Google does NOT treat these as invisible – although some .NET sites use 302 redirects in their menu structures, so goodness knows how Google handles that bad piece of programming. What happens on a multiple redirect? A 301 onto a 302 onto a URL which 301s onto the landing page and – itself – has 100 inbound links? No – it all gets a headache – so a link from a 302 or metaredirect page simply HAS to be a single link, even if there are hundreds of links going into the redirection URL. So how do the different systems actually keep tally?

Majestic SEO says there are 4 links to page B. One from page A (oops) and one from each of the three orange redirect URLs.
A Search engine obeying the official line on handling redirects would probably count 5 – but they would be very different links. One from Page A, one from each of pages H and I, one from the MetaRedirect page and one from the 302 redirect page.

How many does Open Site Explorer count? I don’t want to speak for OSE but hopefully they will be able to say.

Note from SEOmoz - At this time, Open Site Explorer would count 2 links from the diagram above, one from Page A and one from the 301 redirect. Although you may see both H and I in an Open Site Explorer link report, redirects do not share or include their totals with the targets of the redirect. We continue to evolve our measurement and reporting as our knowledge search engines continues to expand.

In Summary

Counting backlinks is not a straightforward logic. Whatever logic you choose, Google sometimes counts 301s and sometimes doesn’t. It may be that Google takes the Juice but not the context of a redirect. So if you are building a technology like OSE or MJSE we need to either give you data OR give you opinions.

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Condensing & Repositioning SEO Copy with Jquery Sliders Graywolf's SEO Blog

Condensing & Repositioning SEO Copy with Jquery Sliders

Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:28 AM PDT

A note to eCommerce sites who put their “SEO copy” way down on the page where no human is ever going to see it: You’re not fooling anyone, least of all Google. We’ve all done it though, and that’s because there really was no other way. You don’t put ten paragraphs of content above your list of products on a category page. The last thing you want to do is push your money-makers below the fold so people have to scroll down to get to it. Sure, all that content may be good for SEO, but you can kiss your 5%-10% conversion rate goodbye.

Newegg Page Before Slider But what if I told you there was a way to get all of that useful, thick content up on top of the product lists without pushing products any further down the page than a pointless, short intro blurb – all while still being perfectly in-line with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?

The trick is to use Jquery sliders, but to do so you’re going to have to break up that content into bite-sized chunks. The good news is a lot of this type of content is already conducive to the format (e.g. “Five Things to Consider When Buying a Widget”). In this example, we’ll use content from Newegg’s LCD TV category page.

To your left is a screenshot of the page as it currently exists. Click to enlarge – or you can just visit the page yourself and scroll to the bottom.

Look familiar? You see a lot of this type of thing on eCommerce and affiliate websites. Sometimes the copy is terrible (like in the Newegg example) and sometimes it is really useful (like in this example). But even the useful stuff never gets seen because the site managers don’t want to push their products or affiliate links a mile down the page to make room for the beefy content. This is sad because A: you could use that content to educate and pre-sell the consumer, and B: it would be far better for SEO if the content appeared above the products, especially on affiliate sites.

Let’s take that huge chunk of content at the bottom and use Jquery to condense it all into a small slider that will fit on the top of the page. All of the content will still exist in the code as text, and will be completely spiderable if done correctly. I’m no designer, but I whipped up a slider real quick to use as an example…

Jquery Content Slider

Now let’s have a look at the Newegg page with all of the content moved to the top using this method…

This simple change could cut your category page-length in half, while putting the juiciest bits of content highest in the code without resorting to grayhat tactics like absolute positioning of divs. What’s more, it will force your copywriters to actually write something useful for the user instead of just garbage SEO filler.

This post was written by Everett Sizemore. Find more eCommerce SEO tips on his blog.

photo credit: Photospin

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Condensing & Repositioning SEO Copy with Jquery Sliders

How to Be Involved on Twitter in Less Than an Hour a Day

Posted: 19 Jul 2011 11:47 AM PDT

The following is part of a series on Hootsuite Social Media tool. In this post I’m going to show you how to set up a series of lists and custom tabs on Hootsuite to engage your followers and become part of you community–without needing to spend all day on Twitter.

This account was a local account. I was primarily following and looking to engage local followers in a particular city. I was also interested in people who travel to the destination on a regular basis. For more details, see How to Set Up A Local Twitter Account.

As I mentioned in that post, this industry was in the travel/hospitality area, so I was looking to interact with those accounts in addition to regular people. On any account that follows more than 300 people, the main stream becomes an unmanageable barrage of noise. The only way to make sense of it is to use lists. When you create lists, you can create two kinds of lists: public, which everyone can see or private, which only you can see. You need to decide what the purpose of the list is and whether it should be public or not.

I created four lists for hotels, restaurants, clubs, and hospitality. I created a list of hotels, restaurants, clubs, and travel related attractions or services in the area. I sent the list off to a subcontractor on oDesk and, 2 days and $25 later, I had a list of all their Twitter accounts. Not all of the businesses had Twitter accounts, though, in fact, I was kinda surprised that only 60% did–but it is what it is. Then I set about following those accounts and putting them on the proper lists. I made note of accounts that were following less than 400 people and had a positive following to follower ratio for future follower raid.

The next lists I created were for Klout followers. Now you can debate whether Klout is an effective measure of Twitter influence but, right now, it’s the best we have (see What Social Signal Might Google Use). Using the hootsuite filter, I put everyone I was following with a Klout score over 30 onto one list. One week later, I filtered the list again for people with a Klout score over 50. The logic is that, if you have a Klout score over 30, you are fairly active in social media; if you have one over 50, you probably have quite a bit of online influence.

The next list I created was for government or other municipality official accounts (things like the parks department). Then I created a list for news accounts and added local reporters, local news stations, or anyone who curated interesting-looking news tweets. The final list I created was for retweet watch. This was for any other active tweeters who didn’t appear on any other lists. Some people fell into the “overtweet” or “promotional” category and got filtered out over time.

Next, I created a tab specifically for that website and included the following streams:

Home
Hotels
Restaurants
Clubs
Hospitality
Klout-A
Klout-B
Official
News
Watch

You can have a maximum of 10 streams per tab on Hootsuite. Using Ziteapp and Google Alerts and a local Calendar of Events, I get an idea of what’s going on locally and, thanks to the weather bug app, I can access local weather and webcams fairly quickly. So, with my normal reading, I can schedule tweets for today or over the next few weeks, talk about local events, and even see the weather.

Using my tabs, I scan through the home feed looking for people talking about local stuff and have conversations with them. Using the restaurant, hotels and other tabs, I have more conversations, retweet and make friends, and even get invited to local events (which is the subject for another post). Basically, I’m able to schedule tweets, retweets, and conversational replys to make it look like I’m on Twitter all day with 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the afternoon. I have another tab set up for Q&A type stuff, which can take a variable amount of time depending on what’s going on.

Now, if you have an “event” or “campaign” online or offline, you’ll want to be on Twitter that day but, normally, 20-30 minutes spread around the day can give you an active and engaged Twitter profile. The best part is that you can migrate the tabs to an iPhone or iPad so you don’t even need to be sitting at your desk, you can be at the mall, poolside, or anywhere you are connected. There are a lot of social media clients, but I’ve found Hootsuite to be a powerful tool that helps me get things done.

To be clear Hootsuite is a paid tool with a monthly subscription. If you sign up through any of my links I earn a commission. However, I hope this and other tutorials show you how to use it effectively, productively, and profitably. It’s something I use everyvday and am comfortable recommending it to you. Feel free to sign up for a 30 day free trial and give it a try.

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