Google Plus – run circles not rings around your friends
September 1, 2011
With Google Plus run circles not rings around your friends
When it comes to innovative computer technology, Apple is the acknowledged leader in this field, when it come to innovating on the Internet, Google is the master, well, in most stuff especially search related. When it comes to social media, Facebook is way ahead so it is quite unusual for Google to find itself playing catch up in social media.
When the social media penny finally dropped for Google, the come up with an answer, Google Plus ! . It is mile and mile behind Facebook in terms of membership but then again, Google Plus is not actually launched yet, you cannot even use it unless you are invited but even when its completed and open to the public, it is highly unlikely that it will attract the level of usage Facebook already has. Knowing how powerful Google can be when it come to technology and innovation, they are certainly going to give pricing as many social networking addict from Facebook as possible.
Google are already succeeding in winning converts to Google Plus, it just by the fact that you can separate people you are connected with info what they actually mean to you for example you can create a circle for your friends, a circle for your family etc etc as oppose to Facebook’s definition of anyone and every one you want to network with or who wants to network with you as friends.
If you have not yet been invited to test drive Google Plus, you may want to do so, its quite and interesting new social media platform. Its has a lot of downside which hopefully Google will sort out before it rolled out. Some of the things I find annoying includes its unfriendly url and not so intuitive user interface but over all, its worth giving a go. You will find a link to where you can get invites for Google plus in the paragraph below.
More Google Plus Resources:
Temi’s Google Plus page
Free Google Plus Invites
UK Google Plus Forums
Google’s Discussion Forum
Google rolled out a new algorithm change based on negative reviews
December 2, 2010
It all started with a NYTimes story related to how a business prospered from bad reviews. It seems the business owner was treating his customers bad for getting negative reviews and online buzz about his business. According to him, the buzz created not only ranked his business upper in the search engines but also brought a lot of new orders/clients. Negative reviews translates into backlinks that can definitely skyrocket a website in search engines.
Guys at Google, after reading about this experience gathered a team to take care of this. If first they « took care » only about the company we talked above, they saw that that company was not the only one taking advantage of negative reviews thus this being a widespread problem. And this is how an algorithmic solution was born, algo change that will mean lots of changes in SERPS. Translated, this means that negative reviews will become a minus factor for search engine rankings.
According to Google, Decor My Eyes (the business that created the buzz) received lots of links from authority news website thus the jump in rankings and the orders’ numbers increase. Another « to come » change comes right from Google’s Amit Singhal and it is related to expose user reviews (negative or positive) alongside the results for various service/product providers. Exact words were « though still on the table », meaning something new is cooking related to ratings and search engine results.
The new algorithm was already incorporated in the search rankings but this comes with a new question : if negative reviews will impact search engine rankings, wouldn’t be easier for the competition to hire a few guys that all day long post negative reviews on different websites, thus leading to massive drops in the results ? It is a question that will definitely find an answer in time, however this could just be a wrong move from Google made in its algorithm.
Social Networks Eclipse Search Engines in Popularity
August 7, 2010
Social Networks Eclipse Search in Popularity
For many years, search engines has been the most popular websites online. Most Internet users start their online journey with a search engine thereby making search the most popular Internet destination, until the middle of 2010 that is. For the first time, Internet traffic to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter exceeded traffic to search engines.
Earlier this week, Twitter mark the occasion of its users sending the 20 billionth tweet. The much talked about 20 billionth tweet was characteristic of what some of the critics of social networking site called pointless gibberish. Gibberish or 20th billionth tweet if you prefer to see that way which was sent at 1544 GMT last Saturday by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a Tokyo graphic designer for an advertising agency. GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world.
While twitter is the rising start of social networking, Facebook is the indisputable king at the moment, it attracts 55% of the social networking traffic in UK, making it three times the size of its nearest social networking rival; YouTube. Twitter is the 3rd most popular social networking force in UK. Given how fast Twitter is rising, it will not be a big surprise if it catches up with or even exceeded YouTube in the not too distant future. It took Twitter four years to reach 10 billion tweets, but five months after that, the number of tweet sent increase by 100%.
The combination of popularity of and phenomenal growth in in social networking has seen traffic to social networking site exceed search engine in May 2010 according to Experian Hitwise. A list of top 10 most popular websites in UK according to Alexa can be found below.
Top 10 UK Sites
- Google UK
- Google Dot Com
- YouTube
- Yahoo
- BBC Online
- Windows Live
- eBay UK
- Wikipedia
Google PageRank update 02/04/2010
April 3, 2010
Google PageRank update 02/04/2010
Webmasters (some webmasters I should say) are usually obsessed with Google PageRank update, the hardcore obsessed one not only keep a chart of the previous updates and the expected date of the next but they discuss it at lent at UK webmaster forum and other forums. As early as the middle of March speculation about the next PR update started, well, its here now. The update started rolling out from various Google data centre from the 2nd of April and it is still on going as this blog is posted.
The last Google PageRank update was on the 2nd of January, making it exactly three months between updates. You can continue discussion about Google PR update at UK webmaster forum or you can comment on this blog page.
Promoting Ecommerce Sites with Google Merchant Centre formerly Google Base
March 1, 2010
Google Merchant Center is a place where vendors can submit products, sell them through this service and promote their goods by search indexing.
Formerly known as Google Base, Merchant Center is better optimised for items listings and products managing. If you are a Google Base user, all your feeds, items and settings have been already relocated into Merchant Center database.
Uploading your products to Merchant Center doesn’t mean targeting a higher position in Google search but being listed when somebody uses the “shopping” link from the Google’s top page, so it’s a targeted action for people searching to buy different stuff using this shopping place. However, depending on their relevancy, uploaded products can also appear in a regular Google search, though this is not a rule.
Items are uploaded into Merchant Center through data feeds so this tutorial will be for submitting products through this method. Its has an extraordinary potential for sales boost so using this service might be a good trick for marketing and selling your items.
Creating a feed translates into compiling your products inventory into a single file that will be added by Google in its products’ searching engine. This is a free service, however, starting to upload your feeds requires setting up a free Google account. So here are the steps for uploading data feeds to Google Merchant Center:
1. Create a Google account
2. Enable Google Merchant Center
Go to Google Merchant Center and fill the required information.
3. Create Data Feed
Accepted data feeds are only in text or XML formats. The easiest way to create a text feed is by working in Microsoft Excel and converting the feed into .txt.
a) On the first line include any relevant information that best describe your items. This header might look like this:
In the rows below, enter information for each product displayed into separate rows:
When you finished your spreadsheet save as .txt and submit it.
b) For uploading items using XML, only RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0 versions are supported. Creating and editing these feeds can be done using any text editor, like Notepad for example.
Creating a single item in RSS 2.0 would look like this :
4. Register a data feed
For registering a feed, click on Data Feeds link followed by Register New Data Feed. Here is what you will need to fill in:
Target Country – select the country where you want your items to be displayed in search results
Data feed type – select googlebase
Data feed file name – enter the exactly name of created file and use an extension supported ( text versions with .txt and Atom or RSS with .xml )
Hit Save button. Now data feed is ready to being submitted into Google Merchant Center.
5. Submit Data Feed
There are 3 possibilities for submitting data feeds:
a) Uploading through Google Merchant Center Data Feeds page for files with maximum 20MB size
b) FTP for more than 20MB file size ( a FTP account is required for larger file size )
c) Automatic scheduled upload for a maximum 15MB size
Google recommends uploading via Data Feeds page while the FTP method is prone to encounter different errors. Here are the final steps for uploading a feed to Google Merchant Center:
- sign in and go to Data Feeds link
- locate the feed through the registered ones and click upload file from Uploads column
- click Browse
- select the feed and click Open, verify the name that appears near the Browse button to match with filename
- click Upload and process this file
Once the file have been uploaded a success notification will appear on your screen. It may take 24 hours for a feed to be uploaded, so don’t panic if hours go by and still no updated account.
