Central Perk

marți, 12 august 2014

Damn Cool Pics

These People Will Only Make One Trip
Hilarious Babysitter Photoshops
The Cast Of Friends In The First And Last Episode
Zahia Dehar Wears The Tightest Dress

These People Will Only Make One Trip

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 05:48 PM PDT

There's no way these people are going to make more than one trip, it's just not going to happen.

Hilarious Babysitter Photoshops

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 05:39 PM PDT

When you're getting chased by a T-Rex while babysitting you really have to wonder if it's worth the money.

The Cast Of Friends In The First And Last Episode

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 03:59 PM PDT

A whole lot can change over the course of a few seasons.

Zahia Dehar Wears The Tightest Dress

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 03:55 PM PDT

The dress that Zahia Dehar might even be a little too tight, but we're not complaining.

The Latest Developments in Iraq

Featured

The Latest Developments in Iraq

Yesterday afternoon, President Obama gave an update about the situation in Iraq. He noted that U.S. forces have "successfully conducted targeted airstrikes to prevent terrorist forces from advancing on the city of Erbil, and to protect American civilians there." He also addressed our ongoing humanitarian efforts to help those who are stranded on Mount Sinjar, adding that we've deployed a USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team to help.

The President reiterated that "the only lasting solution is for Iraqis to come together and form an inclusive government," and highlighted important steps Iraq is taking in that effort.

Watch President Obama's full statement here:

Experiment: We Removed a Major Website from Google Search, for Science!

Posted: 11 Aug 2014 05:08 PM PDT

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

The folks at Groupon surprised us earlier this summer when they reported the results of an experiment that showed that up to 60% of direct traffic is organic.

In order to accomplish this, Groupon de-indexed their site, effectively removing themselves from Google search results. That's crazy talk!

Of course, we knew we had to try this ourselves.

We rolled up our sleeves and chose to de-index Followerwonk, both for its consistent Google traffic and its good analytics setup—that way we could properly measure everything. We were also confident we could quickly bring the site back into Google's results, which minimized the business risks.

(We discussed de-indexing our main site moz.com, but... no soup for you!)

We wanted to measure and test several things:

How quickly will Google remove a site from its index?
How much of our organic traffic is actually attributed as direct traffic?
How quickly can you bring a site back into search results using the URL removal tool?

Here's what happened.

How to completely remove a site from Google

The fastest, simplest, and most direct method to completely remove an entire site from Google search results is by using the URL removal tool.

CAUTION: Removing any URLs from a search index is potentially very dangerous, and should be taken very seriously. Do not try this at home; you will not pass go, and will not collect $200!

After submitting the request, Followerwonk URLs started disappearing from Google search results in 2-3 hours.

The information needs to propagate across different data centers across the globe, so the effect can be delayed in areas. In fact, for the entire duration of the test, organic Google traffic continued to trickle in and never dropped to zero.

The effect on direct vs. organic traffic

In the Groupon experiment, they found that when they lost organic traffic, they actually lost a bunch of direct traffic as well. The Groupon conclusion was that a large amount of their direct traffic was actually organic—up to 60% on "long URLs".

At first glance, the overall amount of direct traffic to Followerwonk didn't change significantly, even when organic traffic dropped.

In fact, we could find no discrepancy in direct traffic outside the expected range.

I ran this by our contacts at Groupon, who said this wasn't totally unexpected. You see, in their experiment they saw the biggest drop in direct traffic on long URLs, defined as a URL that is at least as long enough to be in a subfolder, like https://followerwonk.com/bio/?q=content+marketer.

For Followerwonk, the vast majority of traffic goes to the homepage and a handful of other URLs. This means we didn't have a statistically significant sample size of long URLs to judge the effect. For the long URLs we were able to measure, the results were nebulous.

Conclusion: While we can't confirm the Groupon results with our outcome, we can't discount them either.

It's quite likely that a portion of your organic traffic is attributed as direct. This is because of different browsers, operating systems and user privacy settings can potentially block referral information from reaching your website.

Bringing your site back from death

After waiting 2 hours, we deleted the request. Within a few hours all traffic returned to normal. Whew!

Does Google need to recrawl the pages?

If the time period is short enough, and you used the URL removal tool, apparently not.

In the case of Followerwonk, Google removed over 300,000 URLs from its search results, and made them all reappear in mere hours. This suggests that the domain wasn't completely removed from Google's index, but only "masked" from appearing for a short period of time.

What about longer periods of de-indexation?

In both the Groupon and Followerwonk experiments, the sites were only de-indexed for a short period of time, and bounced back quickly.

We wanted to find out what would happen if you de-indexed a site for a longer period, like two and a half days?

I couldn't convince the team to remove any of our sites from Google search results for a few days, so I choose a smaller personal site that I often subject to merciless SEO experiments.

In this case, I de-indexed the site and didn't remove the request until three days later. Even with this longer period, all URLs returned within just a few hours of cancelling the URL removal request.

In the chart below, we revoked the URL removal request on Friday the 25th. The next two days were Saturday and Sunday, both lower traffic days.

Test #2: De-index a personal site for 3 days

Likely, the URLs were still in Google's index, so we didn't have to wait for them to be recrawled.

Here's another shot of organic traffic before and after the second experiment.

For longer removal periods, a few weeks for example, I speculate Google might drop these semi-permanently from the index and re-inclusion would comprise a much longer time period.

What we learned

While a portion of your organic traffic may be attributed as direct (due to browsers, privacy settings, etc) in our case the effect on direct traffic was negligible.
If you accidentally de-index your site using Google Webmaster Tools, in most cases you can quickly bring it back to life by deleting the request.
Reinclusion happens quickly even after we removed a site for over 2 days. Longer than this, the result is unknown, and you could have problems getting all the pages of your site indexed again.

Business Influence In The Social Media Age

Posted: 12 Aug 2014 03:14 AM PDT

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to go to an afternoon course at Oxford Brookes University where Mark Shaefer, a globally recognised blogger, speaker and educator gave a talk about business influence in the social media age.

In this blog, I’ve summarised the key takeaways from the session.

#1 – Humans buy from humans

Before advertising and broadcasting, people expected a human experience, they wanted to know who they were buying from, and honesty and trust were the first considerations of the buying process.

As advertising was introduced, many businesses formed a routine of paying someone to do all the work and then waiting for the customers to come to them. They were being reactive instead of proactive.

In recent years, the amount of money being put into advertising and newspapers has drastically fallen and television is expected to follow a similar trend. Well, what about websites? In the last 2 years, a staggering 60% of websites, have experienced fewer unique visits. Why? It's gone back to needing that human interaction. People are going to other places, they are using social media for instant communication and to assess the trustworthiness of businesses.

Initially, many companies were hoping that the social media era would disappear. But it didn’t. Social media platforms are continuing to grow and somehow we are now in a social generation where cat selfies get more likes than the Pope! Why? It's not useful, it's not helpful, but in a way it's clever content.

Time is repeating itself – Our values have gone back to basic principles; your consumers want to know you.

#2 – Social Media Provides Interactions Leading to loyalty

How does social media fit into the mix?

Consumers have begun to endorse brands in extreme ways. People are getting tattoos of the Nike logo on their feet, women are painting coffee brands like Starbucks on their nails, but why and how has this come about? There must be a strong connection and engagement with businesses.

Social media allows business to target small drops of communication with consumers and over time this chain of engagement leads to loyalty.

We form relationships with brands just as we do with people. This is where social media fits into the mix. Using social media allows you to drip feed small pieces of communication to your audience over a period of time to the point where all the engagement leads into ultimate brand loyalty.

Over the last 2 years, the number of people following brands on the social web has doubled and the fascinating thing about this is that all of this effort is earned and not bought. Companies are starting to realise they need to create this content and these types of small provocations. It is earned media.

#3 – The information eco-system

What's the role of the website?

Websites used to simply be a destination, and people made little effort in assigning big budgets to make their website look good in order for customers to convert. But today, we need to populate the social web systemically in order to point consumers to the relevant place on our websites where they can instantly find what they are looking for.

Facebook search has tripled over the last 2 years, people needn't log out to search anymore, so companies need to systematically go where the customers are and populate the social web, meeting them at their point of need and then sending them back to their website, where information about products and services lies.

#4 – The social media mindset

Why are business stumbling with the social media minset? Because they are not making an adjustment culturally. Companies that are succeeding are moving from selling to helping customers. Having social media success is a combination of the following 3 things:

Meaningful content
Targeted connections
Authentic helpfulness

To have the opportunity for massive reach and authority, there needs to be something rich and deep that you are providing to your consumers, such as a video or a blog. Most companies are recognising the need for content but they are missing the fact that they need their content to move via targeted connections. Businesses need to find and build up their audience in order to make their content move and get it shared.

A word to the wise, people are tired of being sold to and bored of watching an array of adverts. They no longer want to find you, you now need to find them and begin the communication chain. Consumers want to to go and play farmville and candy crush, they want to see pictures of cats and funny videos – this is what they are finding interesting! People won't spend 3 seconds with an advertisement anymore but they will with content.

So, the main takeaway from this? To sell, you need to be helpful.

What does your business do on social media that works well? Have you moved away from traditional advertising? Or have you been to a recent master class and picked up some tips of your own?

As always, let me know in the comments or by tweeting me @Klbennett_

Image credit:

1)Andrew Kaczynski

2) Brad

The post Business Influence In The Social Media Age appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : What's it for?

What's it for?

and How will we know if it worked?

Answer these two questions first, please. If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing before you do it.

A hammer is for getting nails into wood, and it's pretty easy to tell if it does the job well. That's one reason why we have so many good hammers available to us--real clarity about what it's for, and whether it works or not.

Too often, we wait until we see what something does before we decide what we built it for.