Archive for December, 2009
Also bossnapped, defriended and redacted during 2009
By Lester Haines, The Register
A list of notable new additions to our beloved mother tongue reveals that the interwebs continued to enhance the lexicon during 2009, with hashtag, tweetup and the Slashdot effect featuring large on the manifest of neologisms.
Out in the real world, English enjoyed the particularly French pastime of “bossnapping” (preventing management from leaving company premises), “jeggings” (leggings made from material resembling denim) and the agreeably resurrected* “snollygoster” (a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politico). The linguistic newbies were selected by TV show Countdown’s dictionary botherer Susie Dent, who led a trawl of two billion words to compile the pick of the crop.
She said: “It has been another rich year. Last year, we found that ‘credit crunch’ was the most familiar new word, and the effect of the recession has stayed with us through 2009.”
Indeed, try the current “Great Recession” for size (cf “Great Depression”), which might force the cash-strapped to enjoy a “staycation” – a holiday in your own country or at home.
The wonderful world of entertainment is not well represented on the list, although “simples” stands proud. Dent explained: “It appeared on the ‘compare the meerkat’ TV adverts for insurance and quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone to mean something very easy to achieve. It really seems to have captured the public’s imagination in 2009.”
If your nerves can stand it, here are some more of 2009’s pick:
Epigenome – The pattern of chemical switches in human cell that indexes genetic information.
Freemium – Business model punting basic services for free in the hope that users will stump hard cash for additional bells and whistles.
Geoengineering/ecohacking – Major climate manipulation in an attempt to counter the effects of global warming.
Minute mentoring – “A system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating,” according to the Telegraph. Nasty.
Paywall – Disagreeable demand for money in return for access to website.
Phantonym – A word that looks like it means one thing but actually means something else (= phantom + antonym). Eg, “fulsome”, deployed by Obama in the sense of “full”, whereas it “is now chiefly used in reference to excessive flattery”.
Redact – Censor or obscure part of a text for legal, security or ▇▇▇ purposes.
Tag cloud – A visual depiction of user-generated tags, where the importance of a tag is denoted by font size or colour.
Unfriend/defriend – To remove someone from your friends list on a social networking site. “Unfriend” was voted the Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
Zombie bank – An effectively broke bank which is propped up by government money.
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Should I worry about my pages’ toolbar PageRank?
There are two kinds of Google PageRank – the actual PageRank that is a part of the ranking algorithm, and the toolbar PageRank that is updated from time to time and is aimed to provide webmasters with a general idea of the actual PageRank of the webpage.
The actual PageRank is one of 200+ factors that influence webpage’s ranking, it is constantly recalculated. Lately, its importance has decreased even more seriously. Susan Moskwa, a Google Employee has informed webmasters :
“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it [from Google Webmaster Tools] because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. “
Unique content, inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites, keyword-rich link text, and good neighborhood are the things that will influence your site rankings, and not the toolbar PageRank.
Should I use PageRank sculpting?
PageRank sculpting is a method of managing link juice flow by using a rel=”nofollow” link attribute and/or by organizing your non-priority pages for SERP’s in an external include file blocked with your robots.txt. All these are done to prevent your site link juice from being passed to untrustworthy sites that may create bad neighborhood or to secondary, unimportant internal pages.
“The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. – says Matt Cutts in his post about PageRank sculpting, – I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.” Things like intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs are easily and successfully managed by webmasters rather than manipulating crawl prioritization.
Will external linking reduce the Google PageRank of my pages?
One SEO myth says that outbound links without the rel=”nofollow” attribute decrease Google PageRank of the page. Like the majority of the myths, this is untrue.
Webpages’ PageRank is affected only by quantity and quality of inbound links, not the outbound links. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of the Google system encourage links to good sites. But you should remember that your page may be marked as spam and deindexed, if you place 1000 links on it or link to bad neighborhoods. But this has nothing to do with Google PageRank which will stay intact.
Another myth says that the more outbound links you mark with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, the more link juice will stay within your site and flow to other links, which is good if the links are internal. However, Google has changed the PR flow rules in the past year, and even though you may forbid a Googlebot to follow all the outbound links on your page, its PR will be divided among all the outbound and internal links and the link juice won’t stay.
So, if you are afraid of linking to an external site because your PageRank may decrease or your site may drop some link juice, forget this and go ahead and link to valuable relevant pages.
SEO Experiment – Is Page Rank Still A Ranking Factor?
Three years ago we tested if Google PageRank was correlating with the page’s position and pages with high Google PageRank were ranked higher on Google SERPs. The result was more than convincing: for any given keyword – be it popular or not – the average PageRank of the top 10 pages was always greater than the average PageRank of the next 11-20 pages, and so on. We didn’t find much exception from that rule. This time we’ve tried to remake the test and check if PageRank is an important ranking factor.
We assume that, in principle, the lower a page is in search results, the lower toolbar PageRank number it has – at least this rule remains as a general trend. So, we’ve requested results for some very popular and unpopular key phrases and checked the average PageRank of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th “10-position” results pages.
In detail: with the help of the Google Adwords Keyword tool, we have carefully selected 450 keywords (the 250 most competitive and the 200 least competitive) belonging to a few popular topics – real estate, vacation rentals, job search, and cooking recipes. We queried Google for these keywords and got 2250 webpages, retrieved PR for each webpage on the top five results pages, and then found an average PR for each of the five SERPs.
The results prove that the general trend remains only for large amounts of keywords, i.e. the PageRank simple average of 50-60 words gradually decreases from 1st to 2nd, from 2nd to 3rd and so on up to 5th page. However, on the single key phrase level, among all the keywords (popular and unpopular alike), only 22 key phrases out of 450 have an uninterrupted decreasing trend.
What does it mean? Google guys and girls were right, high PR is not all you need for your site’s success in terms of link popularity, and on-the-page factors now matter more than three years ago. PageRank is still a ranking factor, but its role is not as significant as many webmasters think. High PageRank is good proof that you have an established site, but is a doubtful traffic driver.
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Although many people shun email applications for webmail solutions, there are still some of us who prefer the configuration, security, and performance of a decent email client. Microsoft dominates the Windows world with Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail but, if you’re not keen on those products, Mozilla’s Thunderbird could be for you.
Work on Thunderbird started when the Mozilla Suite was abandoned in favor of Firefox. Although it has never achieved the popularity of their browser, Thunderbird is a great email application that deserves more attention.
Thunderbird 3.0 has finally been released. The client is available in 49 languages and offers new features such as:
- a simplified user interface
- tabbed email — yes, tabs have migrated from Firefox to Thunderbird
- easier account set-up
- a faster and better search tool
- message archiving
- smart folders that group inbox views
- IMAP folder synchronization, so you can access your messages when offline
Perhaps the most useful new feature is the attachment reminder. How many times have you sent or received an email which promised a file that was never attached? The Thunderbird reminder scans your email text for words such as “attached” then prompts you before the message is sent.
Thunderbird is free and available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Download it from getthunderbird.com.
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Know Your Future Browsers
One of the easiest ways to get the jump on your fellow developers is to keep a close eye on upcoming versions of your favorite browsers. Here are three important browsers to watch:
- In November we learned that the Internet Explorer team had started work on IE9, which is great news. In a blog post, the team revealed some sneak peeks at what’s inside the latest iteration of their browser: huge improvements in JavaScript performance, hardware acceleration for graphics (check out this nifty video from Channel 9), and some promising signs on the CSS3 support front. Chances are slim that IE9 will appear on desktops before 2011, but in the meantime, I’d hope that we can all look forward to plenty of updates from the IE team as they work on the latest version.
- Firefox 3.6 beta is available to test right now, and it’s full of lovely new bells and whistles. According to the release notes, we can expect to see some great new ways to deal with background images and gradients, support for HTML 5’s local file access API, and improvements for Firefox add-on developers. Firefox 3.6 was originally slated for a late 2009 release, but has yet to reach release candidate status — so keep a close eye out.
- Google Chrome Extensions are finally here. Will this help Chrome chip away at Firefox’s market share in 2010, especially among those of us who love our Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug? We put this to our Twitter friends and responses were mixed indeed: some people absolutely can’t wait, while other friends are fairly loyal to Firefox. One thing’s for sure — in 2010, as more extensions appear, there’ll be more incentive to try Chrome. (We reproduced selected tweets in last week’s Community Crier, if you want the full scoop.)
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Pay-Per-Click vs. Search Engine Optimization
At SES Chicago, there was an interesting session in which a group of search marketing profes+sionals debated the issue of which is better between PPC and SEO. Participants included Dave Naylor, Chirstine Churchill, Michael Gray, and Karen Weber, and Rand Fishkin.
Does PPC have more benefits than SEO?.
Churchill pointed to a study from Engine Ready on conversion rates by source of traffic (PPC vs organic). The study found:
- Average Order Value: Paid won
- Average time on site: Paid won
She gave the following as advantages of PPC:
- Have a new site? Have ads in an hour
- Start getting ROI sooner
- No ramp up time
- Great for seasonal items or time sensitive promotions
- Great for testing
- Easily test effectiveness of new marketing message or site design change
- Quickly gather feedback
- Regulate traffic volume
- Sales pipeline empty? Use PPC to push traffic
- Overloaded? Pause campaigns or cut back spend
- Have limited sales season? Saturate market while demand is high
“PPC is very agile. It’s also has targeting advantages,” said Churchill.
For targeting, she says PPC provides opportunity for high visibility in multiple channels (search engines, content sites, mobile phones), expands results beyond search results, and gives you control over placement on SERPs and better control over landing page/message.
It’s often easier to sell PPC to management because the concept is similar to traditional advertising, and provides for direct accountability. It’s easy to track measures of success. It’s an effective way to drive qualified traffic to your site, and it allows you to expand your opportunities.
Weber says the top five reasons why “PPC rules,” are: speed, flexibility, it’s unlimited, it’s goal-driven, and it’s controllable. You can quickly manipulate keywords to those that drive conversions, you can quickly change bid prices, and you can quickly get in and out of the market. You can turn your campaign on and off, and change ad copy, keywords, etc. You can target a much wider range of keywords, adhere to a budget, and have an immediate impact on sales.
Fishkin pointed out that PPC gets 10% of clicks, but 90% of spend. He said SEO is more challenging and less controllable, but the spend is there and the fact that people click organic results.
Gray said he believes that PPC could make SEO better, but Google is banning people now, so it makes things more challenging. Naylor said he believes SEO is more “open.” Weber and Fishkin both said they would outsource PPC over SEO.
Gray said it’s important to get in the top during the early part of the research phase, especially since Google is personalizing results for everyone now. Churchill noted that Google’s personalization is a better argument for PPC. Like iEntry CEO Rich Ord recently noted, the addition of personalized results could “make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords.”
Another point was brought up as we recently discussed – that the search engines are pushing organic listings down with mixed media (blended, universal) results.
Certainly there are many advantages to both PPC and SEO, and they can compliment one another. Actually, a recent study from a couple of NYU Stern professors found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked.
Posted in: Marketing Tags: pey per click, search engine optimisation | Comments Off
Those new to blogging or article writing have often been told to focus on one very niche topic. One narrow vertical. That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn’t your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services. But is keeping it narrow really the best way to go?
For some, it is. Another way to go would be to cover as much ground as you possibly can. Throw a wide net out there and see what you catch. Once you see what you’ve caught, maybe you can catch more in the same area. The thinking is that the more ground you cover, the more people you are potentially exposing your work to. It’s going horizontal, rather than vertical.
Mike McDonald of WebProNews had an interesting discussion about horizontal content sites with Lawrence Coburn, president of RateItAll. As its name suggests, RateItAll covers a variety of topics by offering reviews (along with some social elements) for each vertical. They cover a lot of ground: pets, movies, music, television, beauty, travel, gadgets, video games, sports, Internet, auto, politics, celebrities, books, companies, camera/video, fashion, food, drink, health, and baby.
Demand Media, as Coburn says, is kind of the poster-boy site for horizontal content. They have an algorithm that helps them determine the content to produce. It has now been revealed that AOL is going down a very similar path.
The more resources you have, the better off you will be, of course. That is why big companies with deep pockets find the horizontal content angle so attractive. They can afford to pay to have a lot of people create content. In paid search, they can afford to bid on keywords across the board.
But just because it’s easier for a big company to go horizontal, that doesn’t mean a small business or a blogger/writer can’t keep the same principle in mind. Small businesses can find success in e-commerce, despite the fact that Amazon and Walmart are only a click away. The same goes for horizontal content sites.
If you’re going to go the route of trying to cover as much ground a possible, it doesn’t mean that quality should be sacrificed. It’s not about quantity over quality. Search engines like quality, and more importantly, so do users (who also like to share quality content via social networks). Search engines like Google want to deliver the highest quality results possible to the user, and they’re getting better and better at doing this as time progresses.
You may not be an expert in everything. Who is? There are different ways to construct quality content in areas you are less familiar with. For one, obviously, you can get experts to write content for you in any given niche. You can also perform thorough research before tackling a specific topic. The more you learn along the way, the more knowledgeable you will be anyway, and what is an expert if not someone that has a thorough understanding of a subject?
If you can cover more ground, you can attract a wider audience, which means more traffic, which means more eyeballs, which means more advertising dollars. AOL knows this, and is planning on making it a very significant part of its business. But even if you don’t have the resources of a company like AOL, it is still a model that can potentially earn you a living.
Posted in: Marketing Tags: search engine marketing | Comments Off
Job centre overhaul outlined by British government
As the number of unemployed people in the UK is almost 2.5 million, the UK government has outlined plans to modernise job centres to help more people find work in the recession. The plans involve making better use of technology such as text messaging and the internet to communicate with job seekers.
The changes follow criticism that job centres have not responded well to the rising number of people who have lost their jobs during the downturn.
Broadband access
The proposals include helping people get online to perform most of their day-to-day job searching using their own personalised web page. The page would allow job seekers to find jobs specifically suited to them, and allow them to track benefit claims. The plans also outlined a “technologies budget” to help some people get connected to broadband at home. Job centre advisers will also be able to send out text messages about new jobs, and reminders about interviews and appointments.
Personalised service
The proposals also outline individual budgets that people can allocate towards various training and development options. “We’ve got a service that works pretty well for the people it was designed to help,” Employment Minister Jim Knight told the BBC. “But with almost a doubling in the number of people coming through the door, we’ve got a much bigger range of people coming in, with different sorts of skills.” Mr Knight said the service was getting more than half of people into work within three months, but that it needed to be “more personalised and more universal”.
The plans will be formally outlined in a government White Paper later this month.
Posted in: Technology 
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