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joi, 5 iulie 2012

Photo: Fireworks at the White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, July 5, 2012

Photo: Fireworks at the White House

Last night, President Obama welcomed more than 1,200 military service members and their families to the White House to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The event, organized by the USO, featured a performance by country music star Brad Paisley. As Paisley and his band finished their final song ("Welcome to the Future"), fireworks began over the National Mall.

Watch a video of the fireworks from the White House South Lawn

A crowd watches the end of Brad Paisley's performance on the South Lawn of the White House as fireworks erupt over the National Mall, July 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

How Twitter's Bad SEO Affects your Brand Reputation Management

Posted: 04 Jul 2012 05:08 PM PDT

Posted by zen2seo

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.

I'll start with a simple question: have you ever thought that linking to your Twitter profile can be very difficult? Probably your answer is "not really!", and in this case maybe you could find what I'm going to show you useful.

But let's start from the beginning...

A while ago I was re-reading a post by Kristi Hines on SEOgadget about using your Twitter profile for your link building: I had bookmarked it since it contained good and immediate tips to build links just having a Twitter Profile, but in all this months I had forgotten to put them into practice. However, working on it, I also thought that while building links to your website, with those resources you indirectly build links to your Twitter Profile, so you would aspect an important impact on your personal branding management too, particularly for you name/nickname SERP. Is it so? Yes, in most cases it is, but the are some problems. Twitter's bad search engine optimization, third-party links, and our own mistakes, in fact often make our link building less effective than it could be.

Let's search on Google [Kristi Hines], for example. Kristi is a very well know professional and there are a lot of reference for her name, however her Twitter profile ranks well and helps her personal branding:

I'm not as important as her, but if I search for my name on Google.it (I'm Italian) there's no trace of my Twitter profile (@zen2seo), even if it's linked in several articles and in my Google+ profile. It only appears in the fourth page of results.

I asked myself why, and found something interesting. Just look at the two screenshots and you can find one of the issues I was talking about: my URL contains the escaped fragment (#!), Kristi's doesn't. So, simply, Twitter is duplicating its pages, with a dilution of their strength, and Google is indexing different versions of the same content.

How many times? I've spotted a lot of variations and only a few certain conclusions. To better understand this confusing situation, let's check the most common causes of duplication of a website.

1) www vs. non-www

If you search for a www version of you profile, you won't find any results:

This is because www URLs are 301-redirected to the non-www ones:

So, our first conclusion, for now, is that you should link to the non-www version.

2) http vs. https

Using few advanced search operators, the first duplication I've found comes from http/https URLs versions.

As you can see, Google is indexing both http and https versions of the site. Which one would be better to link to? It's too early to answer to this question, but I'll try to give you some suggestions in this post.

3) The @ sign

Since we commonly refer to our Twitter Profile using the @ sign (es. @Zen2Seo), I wondered if I was able to find URLs containing it. I haven't found this duplication for me, but it exists in other cases.

4) Slash vs. non-slash

As for the previous case, I've found some duplicated URLs ending with the slash ("/")

5) Capital letters

My nickname is Zen2Seo, with a capital Z and S, but in the first screenshot you can see only lowercase letters. Does Twitter handle this difference properly? Not so much. A little deeper query shows you can have also capital letters indexed.

6) Third level subdomains

It's quite easy to notice that Twitter duplicates its pages (at least statuses) on several subdomains. I stopped checking after I found EN, IT, ES, DE, FR, and each of them is affected by the same problems we've already exposed.

7) IP Address

As you've seen there are several causes of duplication (and you can combine them too as you want), but moreover I've found Twitter is duplicating its content also via IP address:

What's your "canonical" Twitter Profile?

In this huge URL confusion, you should be a (good?) SEO to understand what is the right URL to link to. But the majority of the people that use Twitter are not aware of this kind of issues. And Twitter doesn't help them at all.

Remember Kristi's URL and mine: Twitter use AJAX and URLs with the escaped fragment, so the average webmaster has another choice (better, another combination parameter) and since the actual URL of the browser shows the /#!/ part, many people link to it.

In this case, things are far more complex than the previous situations. Vanessa Fox's interesting post about Twitter infrastructure issues shows how Twitter redirects the "normal" URL to the escaped one with a 302 redirect; here search engines crawl twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/YOURNICKNAME and receive a 301 redirect to http://twitter.com/YOURNICKNAME.

I bet this is confusing for some SEOs too, but - without investigating more - we can conclude that Twitter needs AJAX URLs but probably they want the HTML URL to be indexed, so we should link to it. This consideration becomes quite a certainty since they've recently announced they're getting rid of the hashbang (but just because they want to give users more speed not because of SEO issues...)

Another hint comes from Twitter trying to canonicalize URLs via canonical link tag

As you can see, they choose as canonical URL the one with:

https
non-www
no "at" sign (@)
minuscule letters
no slash at the end
no hashbang (/#!/)

The previous screenshots, however, demonstrate Twitter isn't succeeding with canonicalization, so if we link to a wrong profile URL we can aspect that link won't help us in our personal (or brand) reputation management.

Of course if you are as known as Rand Fishkin, you don't have to worry about your Twitter profile appearing in the SERPs for your name/brand. But if you aren't, something like this could pretty well be a problem:

So, how must we link? You could link to your canonical URL but at the moment, with Twitter unable to solve its duplications, maybe this is not a universal suggestion. I think it could make sense to choose looking at what Google prefers in its SERPs and it can be different from case to case.

So, check your ranking URL and link well!

Now, before you go, just a final note: if you've appreciated my SEOMoz post, feel free to follow my Twitter profile (zen2seo) or visit my SEO blog. Clearly, I expect a lot of new followers now than I'm linking to my "right" Twitter profile URL! ;)

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Will Publishing Reviews Destroy Your Brand?

Posted: 03 Jul 2012 05:38 AM PDT

Online reviews can be a divisive idea among marketers. Some welcome the user-generated keyword-rich content and increased transparency. Others argue that they have to be censored or you risk negative comments and even legal challenges.

So who’s right? This article takes a look at why you’d benefit from publishing reviews, what the risks are and how to mitigate them.

The rise and rise of UGC

UGC, or user-generated content is a fairly recent phenomenon of web marketing, and serves several of the major demands of SEO (at least in terms of how Google defines ‘optimised’ website content).

For a start, reviews are helpful to other visitors to your website – as long as they are honest. They offer an independent assessment of the quality of a product or service. No material written directly for marketing purposes can inspire that much trust.

Updating a page by posting a new review onto it shows Google (and other search engines) that the page and the website as a whole are still ‘alive’. Regularly updating a website is still one of the best ways to get it to the top of the search rankings.

On top of all of these things, like any text content added to your website, reviews contain plain, search-visible text; it may not be professionally keyworded or optimised, but it can still help you to rank higher for product names, and associated technical terms and phrases.

What are the risks?

One of the reasons why UGC is so popular is that it seems very low-risk – once you’ve added the capability to write reviews to your website, each user who posts their opinion is effectively providing you with search-visible content for free.

However, there are some downsides to consider – and these can be quite significant concerns. It can be especially risky for big brands that are in the public eye, or for firms that are subject to any special regulation or authorisation.

If you’re a law firm, financial adviser, or similar organisation, allowing UGC on to your site might be particularly risky – and you’ll often see even the discussion pages of such websites placed behind a gateway page warning that nothing published there should be taken as financial or legal advice.

For any website, though, you might want to take measures to ensure nobody can use your review section to trash-talk your suppliers, partners or competitors – you don’t want to find that a company suddenly refuses to supply you, or that a competitor has taken offence to a user comment and launched legal action against you.

Who’s responsible?

Liability in terms of UGC can be a complex topic and, if you’re not sure, it’s worth consulting a specialist solicitor who can advise you on any recent developments in what is clearly a fairly young area of the law.

Generally speaking, you should expect to bear at least some responsibility for any content that appears on your site – which is why pre-moderation of comments (whereby they must be approved before they appear at all) is a popular option, and typical of major brand websites.

However, if you moderate comments, it implies that you read them – which can actually increase your liability with respect to potentially libellous comments and reviews.

An entirely unmoderated approach may leave you with more plausible deniability when contentious reviews are posted, but it’s likely that you’ll want at least some control over what can and cannot be said on your site.

What are the options?

Putting aside the legal issues and focusing on the technical aspects of posting reviews, there are several steps you can take to exert some degree of control over what your users can say.

Limiting them to certain options – such as a five-star rating – is one straightforward way to allow feedback without the risks of posting free-text, unmoderated reviews. However, it also means you won’t benefit from the search-visible text that full reviews create.

As mentioned above, a pre-moderated approach gives you total control over your site, but needs constant attention to prevent a backlog of reviews from building up.

Take the option of moderating reviews after they are published, and again you need to be careful, as anything contentious requires prompt action to stop it from reaching a large audience.

Finally, you might want to set up alerts for when certain words are used in your reviews – from expletives, to competitors’ or suppliers’ names – so that you can moderate only the reviews you believe may be contentious.

The main thing to remember is that, whichever option you choose, allowing UGC on to your website introduces a certain lack of control, which you must find a way to compensate for – and that inevitably means there will be an administrative burden.

Reviews gone rogue

On top of everything we’ve already discussed, there’s one more concern associated with UGC – and that is the rogue reviewer, the renegade individual who decides to post an entirely satirical comment on one of your product pages.

You may have seen an example of this on Amazon, where everything from hair removal creams for men, to Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Men children’s books, have been targeted by satirical reviewers, and subsequently done the rounds on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Depending on the type of industry you operate in, you might actually welcome ‘going viral’ in this way – and certainly the reviews are not always offensive, but often simply take an unusual approach to reviewing an otherwise mundane product.

Indeed, many satirical reviews adopt an overwhelmingly positive stance on the product – originally for comedic effect, but often with an unintended positive impact on the reader’s perception of the item.

Alternatives to reviews

If you’re worried about welcoming people’s opinions of your products in a clearly critical way, there are some alternatives.

Rather than accepting reviews, you might want to add a more general ‘comments’ section, as you might find at the end of a blog post.

This still gives your customers somewhere to leave their feedback, but in more general terms – so you don’t face the unfortunate outcome of a product page dominated by a one-star customer rating.

Instead, a general comments section means those customers who have encountered a problem with the product can raise their concern, and you have a right to reply – as do any helpful visitors to your page who think they might be able to solve the problem themselves.

As a result, future visitors can see that aftercare is all part of your service, and that any previous customers’ problems have been effectively resolved, all of which can help to increase your chances of making a sale.

Entire websites and product support forums have been set up based on this principle of problem-and-solution posts between customers of varying levels of experience and aptitude, making it a significant area of UGC for the internet as a whole.

Take a look at your own site – the layout of each product page, or the availability of sections such as a discussion forum where reviews could be posted, and decide on the best way to invite UGC on to your pages, whether it is appropriate to do so, and how to mitigate the risks.

Remember, like any major change to your website, it can often be best to conduct a limited trial run, and then reassess your levels of success for the long term.

Seth's Blog : Entering sync markets

Entering sync markets

How does a painting end up selling for $5 million?

Why do some songs end up being listened to by legions of teenagers?

Which companies end up with investors swarming all over them, eager to put in cash?

Hint: in each case, it has little to do with the verifiable, rational analysis of the product. In some markets, things are popular merely because they are popular. John Legend's version of Compared to What is a pale imitation of the original, but don't tell the local teenager that. Jeff Koons is no longer a visionary, but he's a safe bet for gallery owners, investors and people looking for bragging rights...

Whining about what's good is a silly way to do business with people who seek to be in sync. What sync markets care about is, "who else is into this?" Markets like textbooks, surgical devices and nightclubs are all sync markets.

In every one of these markets are people who spot trends, who go first, who set the pace. This group (which doesn't have a defined membership... there's a lot of churn) cares a lot about being seen as right, about going first and being followed. The early trendsetters are not the mass market, but they are acutely aware of what the mass market is going to be willing to do next. (Sadly for marketers in search of a reliable shortcut, these trendsetters are often wrong. That doesn't mean that they don't matter).

Marketing to those that want to be in sync is a fundamentally different project than treating your audience as a horizontal mass of isolated people, all to be approached with the same story at the same time, all making independent decisions. The connections between people are always important, but in sync markets, they're the primary driver.