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marți, 24 aprilie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Unique Sketched Tattoos by Peter Aurisch
18 Year Old Has Britian's Most Beautiful Face
The Case for Beer [Infographic]
Fearless Cat Shows Bear Who's Boss
The Kitten Covers

Unique Sketched Tattoos by Peter Aurisch

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 03:15 PM PDT

Peter Aurisch is a tattooer with a very interesting style, he is based in Berlin, Germany. His tattoo designs have a distinctly designer look to them; so incredibly different than the standard ink on the street. His work melds both modern and reinterpreted classic themes, often combining intricate line drawing with carefully chosen overlapping layers of bold color.

Via: inkbutter

18 Year Old Has Britian's Most Beautiful Face

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:15 PM PDT

Florence Colgate has been dubbed "Britain's Most Beautiful Face," and there's science backing the claim up.

The winner of a Britain-wide beauty contest sponsored by Lorraine Cosmetics, Colgate has mathematically perfect looks, according to statistics reported by the Daily Mail. Not only is the 18-year-old's visage perfectly symmetrical, but she has the "optimum ratio" between her mouth, eyes, chin, and forehead.

The Case for Beer [Infographic]

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:08 PM PDT

Beer and wine both can be wholesome elements of a healthy lifestyle, but they can become decidedly unwholesome if drinking becomes excessive. Excessive drinking is not only detrimental to your health, it's expensive, and can easily become a drain on your finances if you're not careful. However, when enjoyed responsibly and in moderation, some studies are beginning to show that beer can be as heart healthy as wine, and bears some other potential health benefits as well.

Read on to discover the case for responsible beer drinking, as well as some helpful tips on food pairing and optimal serving temperatures. In my opinion, if you slow down and enjoy it fully, at the right temperature and with some nicely complimentary food, you'll be far less likely to enjoy it in excess, and far more likely then to reap the positive benefits of beer. Of course, you should always consult your doctor about what is most beneficial for your own health. Enjoy, I hope you find it informative.

Click image to see a larger version.

Source: FrugalDad.com

Fearless Cat Shows Bear Who's Boss

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 09:21 PM PDT

A group of bears looking for their next meal stumble upon a delicious cat. Funny enough, the cat defends itself and the bear gets scared and runs away.

The Kitten Covers

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 02:47 PM PDT

The Kitten Covers are re-imagined legendary album covers from "from a world dominated by kittens" made by Aym Visuals. Do you have a favorite? Let us know in the comments!

"We Must Tell Our Children"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, April 24, 2012

"We Must Tell Our Children"

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about honoring the pledge of "never again" by making sure we are doing everything we can to prevent and end atrocities and save lives.

After being introduced by Professor Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, the President spoke of the importance of telling our children -- and all future generations -- about the Holocaust:

We must tell our children. But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, "never again" is a challenge to us all -- to pause and to look within.

President Barack Obama tours the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with Sara Bloomfield, museum director, and Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor, April 23, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Real Impact of the Google SmartPhone Crawler (Part 1): Situation Overview

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 02:25 PM PDT

Posted by Suzzicks

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.

Not everyone realizes it, but Google has been serving different search results to mobile phones than desktop computers for a long time. Beyond that, they serve different results based solely on the handset you are using to search. The differences are often subtle, or focused on the order of Universal Results that are included in the mobile result-set, but Google is algorithmically trying to prioritize content that will work well on the phone that submitted the query, and give less priority to content that might not work on the phone. If you want to compare for yourself, MobileMoxie has a mobile search simulator tool that allows you see the results of one search query across three different phones at a time (cool!)

Now Google has launched a new smartphone crawler, and this will likely push the differences between desktop search and mobile search more into the mind of the average SEO. (Think: “Does Google consider this a smartphone or a feature phone or something else? I don’t know!”)

So let’s see if we can demystify the impact of this new smartphone crawler using some data. This is the beginning of a three-part blog post series, all focused on the new Google smartphone bot. This first post will focus on how it works and what sites will be effected. The next post will focus on how you can optimize your mobile content for the new smartphone bot best by creating effective mobile redirects. The final post will discuss common mis-indexing problems that mobile websites have and review how to protect your mobile content from search engine indexing problems.

Mongoose Metrics published a study that broke down how the top sites in the US are handling their mobile traffic. They divided the QuantCast Top Million sites (most US traffic’ d sites) into 3 categories based on how they were publishing mobile pages: Server-side redirection, JavaScript redirection and what they call ‘cloaking’ or selective serving of HTML assets. The study went deeper, and looked at results for iPhone, Android and RIM requests, but we can just look at the summary for all smartphones, which show the following stats:

For SEO, these results are each unique and relevant; here is why:

Server-Side Redirection

This is a mobile site-architecture strategy that uses two (or more) urls; one for the desktop or primary content, and one for the mobile content; designations can be added for tablets, WAP and other devices as well. The mobile content can be on a mobile subdomain, a mobile subdirectory or a totally different domain, and those decisions can all impact the content’s ability to rank. The mobile urls can be static and optimized urls or they can be temporary dynamic urls, which are usually stuffed with the exact paramaters of the mobile page request.

Until Google’s new smartphone crawler, this mobile SEO strategy relied on the rankings of the desktop pages which automatically redirect to mobile content when requested by a mobile phone OR building independent SEO value for the mobile pages so that they would rank on their own merit. This strategy sometimes also includes joining the mobile pages with their desktop counterparts by using the canonical tag to help share SEO value. What is most relevant for SEO is that that both versions of the page are left crawlable by search engines. This might be important if you target lots of WAP phone searches, which are still sometimes using a separate ‘mobile-only’ Google index and are not affected by the new smartphone crawler. This could also be important if there is a future algorithm shift that puts a stronger emphasis on mobile file size (which could still happen because it is so important for a good mobile user experience).

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULTS FOR SERVER-SIDE REDIRECTION: 52.52% of the QuantCast Top Million Websites in the US may see an immediate user experience benefit from the new smartphone crawler. Once these sites have been crawled by the new smartphone crawler, they will be serving mobile content to mobile users from search results automatically, without their server having to process each of the redirect requests.

JavaScript Redirection

This mobile site-architecture strategy also involves a primary and a mobile url for each page and an on-page JavaScript redirect is included from the desktop page to its mobile counterpart. The strategy actually relies on the FAILURE of the search engines to crawl and execute JavaScript in order to work properly. Frequently this strategy relies 100% on the desktop page to rank well in smartphone search results, and the mobile pages are blocked from search engine indexing in the robots.txt file, to prevent the risk of duplication or confusion in the index. In some cases, this JavaScript is detecting specific phones, and redirecting to landing pages that are just built for those specific phones, which can get very involved, but is great for user experience. Unless the new smartphone crawler begins to execute JavaScript redirects (unlikely), sites that rely on this method will not benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler.

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULTS FOR JAVASCRIPT REDIRECTION: 2.15% of the top million websites are not going to benefit at all from the new smartphone crawler, but may have already had good results in mobile search rankings without indexing mobile-specific pages.

Cloaking or Dynamic Serving

This mobile site architecture strategy relies exclusively on one url that can display a page with different characteristics, depending on the device that requests the page. What content is served is determined by the server and something that is usually described as a ‘mobilization engine’ or a ‘transcoder.’ These are essentially databases of rules and content at various sizes or stages of degradation that can be sent, depending on the capabilities of the phone requesting the page. With this system, a desktop computer will get the full version of the site, but a mobile phone might be served a similar HTML skin, with smaller components switched in, to replace place of the larger elements that are served to the desktop computer, all on the same url.

A similar but less sophisticated version of this type of mobile publishing can be accomplished using mobile-specific style sheets and media queries to re-render or re-organize the content on the page based on the screen size of the device that it is requesting it (Responsive Design). This strategy uses only one url which might be appealing if you are trying to keep things simple for maintenance or SEO reasons. In both cases, bots will be served content based on the device or browser that they are emulating, so the smartphone crawler would likely (hopefully!) be served a smartphone-friendly version of the page unless the JavaScript is purposely made un-crawlable.

SUMMARY:

RESEARCH RESULT FOR DYNAMIC SERVING/CLOAKING: 45.33% of the QuantCast Top Million websites might be at a disadvantage in terms of bandwidth, user-experience and load-time. All of the dynamic processing is still required by their server to render the page each time there is a mobile page request. They will not likely benefit from Google’s new smartphone crawler, and might now be at a disadvantage, (in terms of the load time of the dynamically generated pages) where they probably had a slight advantage previously.

Mobile SEO is an ever-changing field. The search engines don’t all agree, and still don’t seem 100% sure how to best rank and evaluate mobile search results. Your best option is always to know how things work, keep a close eye on how your sites are ranking and do your own mobile testing wherever you can. Until the smartphone crawler many people were unaware that mobile search results were treated differently from phone to phone. Now you know that testing on your own phone might not be enough; you may have to address the new Google smartphone crawler with some well-planned mobile strategy. Hopefully you can use this analysis to help determine how your site will manage with mobile serving, and still please the new smartphone crawler.

Stay tuned for the next post in this three-post series about the new Google smartphone crawler. It will cover how you can optimize your mobile content for the new smartphone bot best by creating effective mobile redirects, then the final post in the series will review common mis-indexing problems on mobile and discuss how to update your mobile server settings to prevent search engine indexing problems.

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Glenn Jones on Microformats and SEO – BrightonSEO

Posted: 23 Apr 2012 05:53 AM PDT

Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.

Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.

There are three different ways to markup structured data.

Microformats
Microdata
RDFa

Microformats let you markup data with pre-existing attributes. Both Microdata and RDFa are more flexible, as they let you use prebuilt schemas or create your own

Which should you use? Glenn uses microformats most of the time as they're simpler, but they only cover some things. Microdata can be used to describe more unusual objects.

Glenn talked through how to mark-up a Yorkshire pudding recipe using microformats:

You can have a property inside another, such as yield inside the summary.
You can have marked up data within paragraphs of freeform text.
Some properties have parent-child structure. For example, 'ingredient' has the child properties 'amount' and 'name'.
Properties can take data that aren't text, eg has to be an image
Some data are more complex. For example there are many ways to write same date, so you have to use a specific data structure that says what the text means, eg title=”2011-10-27″ when text says '27 Oct 2011'.

Google's Webmaster area has a rich snippet page that tells you how they want you to mark up data, and what's most likely to be pulled into the search results. Not all data are pulled into the SERPs at the moment, but as more may be used in the future it makes sense to mark up as much as possible.

Best thing to do to help is to use Google's rich snippets testing tool – this gives an example of how how it looks your page could look in the SERPs and shows the data it's parsed.

There are compound microformats (microformats with microformats nested inside them). For instance hRecipe can hold an aggregated review and author.

To mark up an author, link all recipes (or articles) to a profile page using rel=author, then link form the profile page to a Google profile with rel=me. See the Google Webmaster Tools help page on authorship.

Does this affect SEO? Google are not telling us – Glenn suspects it does affect ranking but doesn't know.

How does it affect CTR? Paul Bruemmer saw a 30% uplift for rich snippets, while Richard Baxter only saw a 5% uplift. You have to test it yourself: there isn't one figure for everyone.

Audience Question: there's spam going on with microformats, how do you avoid it?

Glenn says it does happen: people will game any technique that affects search listings. It will be the usual cat-and-mouse game between Google and spammers. Microformats are about adding extra semantic data to website, improving way machines can parse information: quality content will win out in the end.

Pierre Far from Google said that if someone's rich snippet spam really affects the SERPs, Google will take their rich snippets out. There's a form to report rich snippet spam. Don't abuse it.

Audience Question: Unlike other attributes, rel=author is tied into Google+, so does it belong to google? Will it be able to tie into other social profile sites to be used by Bing and others?

Glenn hopes Google will become more open, as people are interested in connecting up social media identities.