SEOish | Google Gadgets & SEO, SEOish discusses the wonderful world of Google gadgets, Open Social, and the shifting sands of SEO., seo, google
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I was going to do a post about some basic widget strategies. I asked Brent Csutoras if he wouldn’t mind me using his site, Weird Asia News, as an example for widgets. He said no prob, I have yet to write the post yet, but since I do have a widget made, might as well put it out there (this one is made from Sprout and will be part of a tutorial). The video is ridiculously funny. It is an actual Korean TV commercial.
I will be dong some basic widgets for a few sites as part of an upcoming series. Let me know if you are interested in getting your stuff widgetized.
note to Brent: before you do anything with this widget, email me. I want to use in a test I am doing starting Wednesday or so.
Jim Boykin and We Build Pages Says No to Paid Links
When I first came to We Build Pages, and even before I came, Jim and I spoke of the need to discontinue our paid link model. I am white hat and I am often referenced as the “Google Guideline Guy”. It seemed weird to many that I would even associate myself with a company known for obtaining “ninja” paid links. Little did people know that we have been revving up for a 180 degree turn.
We Build Pages no longer engages in paid links that violate the Google guidelines.
This change is not an easy one, but it is vital for our clients well being. We have guided our clients through thick and thin, through many updates and algorithm changes. We are convinced that paid links that are not machine readable will not only stop being effective, but will also bring real and significant risk.
To be more clear, we believe the age of penalties will soon be upon those engaging in paid links.
We also recommend to webmasters that they not risk themselves, or their ranking by accepting payments for links that are not machine readable. Back in August of 2007 Matt Cuttsdescribed in detail what paid links are considered in violation of Google policy.
Paid links must be machine readable, which means they must, in some way, be nofollowed or redirected. The common ways of achieving this are…
- redirect through url blocked by robots.txt
- redirect through url that does 302 Javascript
- rel=”nofollow” on individual links
- <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” /> on entire page
We Build Pages is still a link building company.
We will be offering many other services as well very soon, but our expertise was and is link building. Our link building services are the heart and soul of our business, and our link builders are the heart and soul of our office. We have dozens of talented and experienced link builders and they are hard at work even as I write this.
The change of policy of how we build links does not change the fact that we build links. Our link builders will be finding the right links for our clients that provide strength, not weakness. We provide free links or the right machine readable links for our clients content.
Speaking of content…
Our team of over 100 writers create content for clients that help our link builders do their jobs.
If you want to work with We Build Pages, the first step is an intensive and exhaustive report. Often these reports are around twenty pages long. They are created by Rhea Drysdale and are so intensive that you may very well feel violated by the time you are done with it. But there is a reason for this report. In order to survive and excel in Google requires real content that is link worthy. If you do not have linkable content then we will explain to you that you need to get some. We can create this for you, or you can create it for yourselves, but the bottom line is that without linkable and useful content, your rankings will not survive.
Paid links are over.
They are too risky for Jim or myself to recommend to anyone. If you are serious about your company you need to seriously consider stop using paid links that violate the Google guidelines and policies.
Tony has led the widget space for affiliate ad widgets and has come up with some unique and profitable revenue models for the widget world. Officially, his company is described as….
About mediaFORGE
Founded in 2005, mediaFORGE is socializing and monetizing branded, immersive, and portable widgets that leverage existing online advertising inventory. The company received a $1.5 million Series A in July 2006 led by Prospector Equity Capital and private equity firm Gazelle Investments. www.mediaforge.com
(Unofficially, I would describe Tony as someone it is wise to have a beer or two with while discussing widgets.)
MediaForge will now be teaming up with Linkshare as a widget provider. From their press release…
“mediaFORGE announced the integration of its socialized widget ad platform with LinkShare’s Flex Links and Targeted Merchandiser API. This powerful combination gives retailers in the LinkShare affiliate network the benefits of mediaFORGE’s visually rich and highly portable widget ads along with LinkShare’s contextual targeting at the product level – driving greater engagement rates and campaign success across affiliate sites.
mediaFORGE adds an entirely new social dimension to banner ads by incorporating extensible widgets that enable users to interact with content – whether it’s browsing exclusive deals, watching a promo video, taking advantage of personalized specials, viewing product details, or searching a retailer’s website – right from inside the ad. As a result, retailers can create meaningful brand interactions on a social network site, vertical site, or even a consumer’s desktop.
By integrating mediaFORGE widgets with LinkShare’s technology, affiliates can easily add rich, interactive content to their site, by simply copying and pasting a link. As a result, retailers can increase customer interaction and sales conversion across their network, as well as use mediaFORGE’s rich analytics to accurately track and measure the engagement of ad units on affiliate sites. LinkShare’s Targeted Merchandiser API automatically populates the widget ads with product offerings optimized for each site based on keywords and relevance.”
Google Gadget International Usage Numbers
The same Google gadget can be displayed in different languages depending on who is looking at it and what country thay are looking at it from.
Gadget usage is reported differently depending on where you are looking at it and what language is specified. You may have a million people using your widget in another language or country and you would not see that represented in the gadget usage numbers displayed by Google. Unless you look for it the right way.
This post will show you how to see how many people are using your gadget in different countries and languages.
How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other countries…
We will use my Panda Virtual Pet as an example. First go to your gadget description page on Google, here is a screenshot of the panda one in english…
The number of users displayed by Google is entirely dependent on where you are looking at the gadget from and what language you are using. The above screenshot is from USA with a default language of English.
Lets change the url we are looking at a little to see how many people are using this gadget in the United Kingdom…
The url can be changed in two ways to get more info about how many people are using our gadgets. The first way is to change the country. Let’s change the part of the url where it says “google.com” to read “google.co.uk” (United Kingdom)
Notice the change? Now Google is telling us that there are 5,572 users of this gadget. This means that in the UK among english speakers, there are 5,572 users of this gadget.
tip: If you have many gadgets, you can do this from your Google gadget author page and still see usage numbers.
Try other English speaking countries like google.ie (Ireland) or google.com.au (Australia) or google.co.nz (New Zealand) and watch the numbers change. This also works with any country so try some others too google.fr (France) google.it (Italy) etc.
tip: To see a full list of countries Google is being used in go to their language tools page and scroll down to the bottom where they have the flags and urls of each country.
What about language?…
How to look at your Google gadget usage numbers in other languages…
Okay, we just changed the country by changing the url, let’s change the language by examining the url again. Here is the original url of the panda virtual pet in the USA with a language of English…
By changing the countries and languages you can get a much better picture of who is using your gadget and where it is popular. Just remember that the country variable is king. In the above example the usage number only displays the amount of Italian language users within the USA. To see how many Italian language users there are in Italy, we would need to change the country url to “google.it”…
There are 8,783 Italian language users of this gadget in Italy, compared to the earlier number of 364 Italian language users of this gadget in the USA.
In the above examples you may have noticed that the title and descriptions of the Panda gadget changed when we changed the language. This is because I have used the Google gadgets and Internationalization spec called i18n. This is a great place to start learning about how Google uses countries and languages.
In a future post I will describe how to make your gadget appear in all the different languages that iGoogle offers. Until then, have fun seeing where your users are.
Neil Patel Wants to Fund Your Project
Neil Patel of ACS and QuickSprout wants to give you money.
There are few people in the SEO world that have been as respectful and helpful to me than Neil Patel. He is now part of a venture capital effort to provide up to 250,000 in exchange for equity in your projects or upcoming projects.
To learn more please visit his post where he explains more about his venture capital offer.
Lisa Barone Joins We Build Pages
Lisa Barone, blogger extraordinaire, is now working with us at We Build Pages. I begged and pleaded and offered chocolate cupcakes and now Yeah! she is with me, Jim, and Rhea at the most hopping search engine marketing company on any coast - We Build Pages!
The charity is the Ronald McDonald house and a donation of 50 dollars gets you you four hours of free booze and appetizers and the chance to be part of a party that raises the most money for charity (last one raised 40,000 dollars).
I was reading Janes blogpost over at SEOMOz about the advice given by Google on dynamic urls. There was some drama about this throughout the web as we all know. As I read Janes post I thought I could provide the explanation of why the advice given by Google could seem confusing.
My take on this issue is that Google is providing contradicting advice in their official documentation and that hopefully it can be clarified so that people who are trying to learn from and follow the advice given by Google can do so.
The Contradictions…
(I have put in bold the things that contradict each other.)
1) First contradiction
Official Google webmaster central blog….
“We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers.”
vs..
Official Google webmaster guidelines…
“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”
The above two items seem to disagree with each other.
2) Second contradiction
Official Google webmaster central blog…
“While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.”
vs…
Official Google webmaster guidelines…
“Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”
These two statements directly contradict each other. I am not saying this for drama, I am saying this because the advice given on the Google webmaster central post is stating clearly that one should ignore the value given to the user by static, trustable URLs. It is advising that “Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static” even though they have highlighted the value to users that static looking URLs provide.
This is the first time I have seen Google give such advice.
3) Third contradiction
Official Google webmaster central:
“Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.”
Official Google webmaster guidelines:
“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”
The above two statements seem to contradict each other.
These are the main contradictions I see. I believe they are valid and are worth consideration by the the Google teams involved.
Tony Zito of mediaFORGE is one smart fellow.
Official Google webmaster guidelines…