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I was tempted to title this blog post ‘Why it’s cheaper to just block France‘ but that implied a lot and wasn’t as much fun as ‘Google’s Map Scam’ (translation).
Ever since the days of Google suggest, there has been some serious merde tossed at Google by French businesses and organizations. I think we all remember the famous French victories search?
Well apparently that algorithm has caused quite a stir for the French as they actually sued Google to get them to remove ‘Arnaque’ from showing in a suggest result for ‘cnfdi’ because it looked bad! Seriously, the French are complaining that the suggest results are too ‘honest’ and they took legal action to have Google give a fake result for that suggest query:
Then again in late 2011 Google lost a French court case over a suggest result that added the French version of ‘crook/swindler’ to the end of a search string for a French insurance company. The sum of that settlement was almost $65,000 and again, the problem is that Google isn’t censoring it’s information enough.
If that wasn’t bad enough, this week a French mapping company that offers similar services to Google Maps has won a settlement of over $660,000 against Google for providing it’s mapping services for free. Yep, once again, Google’s too honest/generous and France wants justice!
From my personal perspective, if I was Google, I’d just give France the same treatment as China, setup some massive IP block restrictions, and then go get some freedom fries with my spare time and money.
This is the last in our series of "Which Social Sites Do I Use?" In Part 3, we discussed how to link your social sites together to maximize their effectiveness. In this last installment we will cover some commonly used terminology to help get started in the world of social media.
Twitter Tweets/RT & Mentions:
A tweet is simply a message posted on Twitter. While all agree on usage of tweet as a noun, people disagree on whether you "tweet" or "twitter" as a verb.
RT stands for retweet: Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting something from another person’s tweet.
A mention is any Twitter update that contains @username anywhere in the body of the Tweet; this means that replies are also considered mentions.
Google +1 Button, Circles & Sparks:
The +1 Button: Each time you click +1, you’re adding to the batch of sites that you are attaching to your online profile. You’ll find your full list of +1′s in a special tab on your public Google profile. You can show your +1′s tab to the world or choose to hide it.
Circles: You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles make it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.
Hangouts: Bumping into friends while you’re out is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, spontaneity hits the web. Whether you’re home in your pajamas or hitting the streets with your mobile phone, video hangouts let you bring up to 9 people into your world. It’s the next best thing to everyone being there.
Sparks: Google Spark would start on a single idea. Then, this idea would grow from collaborators’ comments, likes, and other ideas branching from this "spark". There would be connections, more connections and collaborating, and soon, a whole tree of ideas and support. A web of ideas revolving around a single motion, a single vision, linked by tags, keywords, and web links.
Facebook Likes & Recommends:
The Like Button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website. People are more accustomed and more familiar with this term. It is considered a more subtle action, and some people might feel less hesitant about liking something (rather than recommending it).
Recommend Button is a considered a stronger action than a "Like" and usually works well for negative (but interesting) content such as news stories. Followers may be more compelled to click a recommended link in their feed though some people may feel less compelled to make such strong action as a "recommendation" There is a perception that you would only recommend something that you firmly agree with or feel confident about recommending. Recommend also places a larger snippet in the Facebook news feed.
Take-Aways:
Don’t rely only on Social Networking. Use it in conjunction with a well developed, multi-tiered approach with might include traditional advertising.
Be willing to commit a significant amount of time, stay engaged and offer quality content.
Social media is about building up relationships online and instilling trust in your brand.
Engage with a deep understanding of your long-term business goals and mission statement and integrate them as part of an overall marketing strategy.
Put Social Buttons only to the most important networks on your site. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many.
Social media and networking is responsible for the biggest revolution in marketing and is undoubtedly responsible for the changing face of modern business networking. Staying engaged with your followers through social media allows businesses to stay closely connected with contacts, followers and customers in ways that traditional advertising and marketing could not.
Any business that is not fully engaged in social media is missing out on a increased customer base, increased sales and the potential for unparalleled growth.
We keep optimizing our meta tags, keywords, link structure, content densities, markup, etc.. etc.. But how does Google optimize itself for us? If this is any sort of ‘relationship’ what’s Google been doing for us lately?
Anti-Spam DMARC Efforts
One of the big problems with promoting on-line is the folks who don’t care about courtesy or the rules and they just spam everyone/anyone. The best way to cope with this is to never buy products we have seen ‘spammed’; Yet this has been a nerd mantra for so long, and clearly the consumers never got the message because spammers still get paid.
Because of all the abuse, legit advertisers have a bad reputation even before they get started. This is why we have captchas, whitelists, RBLs, and many many other annoying services that some people actually pay to use.
Major email providers like Google and Microsoft (including Yahoo!/Hotmail), are working to ally with major online sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, and more to work on the DMARC system to cope with not only spam, but phishing, fraud, password scams, ID theft, etc..
In a nutshell DMARC is:
..a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.
Essentially it’s going to make ‘authenticated’ mail much more commonplace in hopes of raising the global bar on email authentication to help eliminate the spam problem. Still too long winded with the explanation?
Here’s an illustration of DMARC:
New Privacy Policy
I’ve witnessed a lot of complaining about this move, and yet I haven’t seen one logical complaint I could ally myself with. Personally, I’m a GMail user who has already invested the deepest amount of privacy I can into Google just by using GMail. Each time Google releases a new product, if I use the same Google account as I do with other Google services, I ‘expect‘ it to be smart and use what Google knows about me to the fullest.
If I wanted a privacy division between Google Maps and GMail, I’d make a separate account and use multiple logins so that if I am hunting for the closest guitar shop I won’t have to deal with Guitar adverts getting special preference when I am logged into GMail. In fact, if I was looking for a gift for someone and I really loved the focus Google has on ‘me’, I might just use a fresh browser instance to keep Google from getting confused.
Fresh browser instance?! I know, that’s jargon and we promised to explain ourselves, so a quick demo of this is to load Chrome (sorry Moz lovers) and then right click on a normal link. In the right click menu you should see this:
This will open a Chrome Incognito window :
Sites in this tab will not see browser history!
Try visiting your popular sites to test!
If all goes well, as long as you use the incognito window, you will be able to use Google services, and others, without them easily tying the info to a particular account.
Keep in mind that the alternative to a unified privacy policy is a system where the users have to read each privacy policy for every Google service to make sure they understand each service. Then, if you wanted your data to be shared between services you’d have to not only go and manually ‘share’ the information, but you’d also better be praying or something to find a way to motivate Google spend the time to enable the link between services because as we know already, Google doesn’t waste much resources on things that aren’t going to be popular. When you make something like this automatic it changes the entire functionality of that idea and what would otherwise be a ‘wasted effort’ suddenly becomes a ‘big win’.
Kicking Keister in Kenya
If you haven’t read about the Mocality debacle, you really aren’t missing that much, it’s more of a ‘How the heck?’ than anything.
In a nutshell:
There was a Google contractor in Kenya using Google IPs and identifying themselves as a Google entity that had been ‘scraping’ the sign ups from Mocality and stealing them away with lies.
When Google first heard of the situation there was a “No freaking way, let us investigate and get back to you.” response from the powers within Google looking into the issue. As things unfolded it became clear that Mocality was indeed providing honest information and that something very bad was happening over in Kenya under Google’s name. Google’s own team leads were ‘mortified’ over the details of how the situation unfolded.
At this point the head of the Kenyan offices for Google, Ms. Olga Arara-Kimani, has resigned stating she felt personally that ‘the buck‘ stopped with her and she wanted to take full responsibility.
While no official statement has come from Google there are signs that the investigation is over and that Google is already implementing measures to prevent something like this from happening again. I expect we’ll hear a few more details as things unfold.
How’s Chia Bart? Well he’s in limbo, and I haven’t started the re-plant. Time for a vacation I think?
Ever try to catch something slimy only to have it slip away from your best attempts to grasp it? That’s how the intellectual world feels towards SOPA and the various laws that follow in it’s slimy footsteps.
Public protests erupt as Poland signs ACTA
Yesterday Poland went ahead and signed onto the ACTA agreement joining the nations already signed on and enraging it’s public in the process. The internet is cheering on activists who took to the street in mass protests of the signing.
“Over 9000 protesters meet in the streets of Kraków to have their voices heard!”
Hopefully this strong public reaction will be a very clear message to other political powers debating on how bad the public backlash will be over signing such ‘internet endangering’ agreements.
Is it the sort of addendum that doesn’t merit input from the public?
Well Irish legal expert Tim McIntyre had the following comment on the new regulations:
“At a minimum this will probably allow courts to require ISPs to block access to alleged infringing sites (such as the Pirate Bay). Over and above that it becomes impossible to say — the language is so vague it might, for example, allow a court to require an ISP to introduce a three strikes system or to block certain ports. However, once copyright plaintiffs get hold of this power you can expect it to be pushed to its absolute limit.”
There’s still time!?
While the USA, Canada, and Mexico are already signed onto ACTA, there’s no reason why the public can’t organize an opposition to the decision and work to either get the agreement amended or have support withdrawn one country at a time. The only roadblock is getting folks to agree on a meaningful reaction that everyone can rally behind. So far the most centralized effort I’ve come across is the SOPA subreddit which has plenty of discussions on ACTA and PIPA as well.
Google announced Tuesday that it will be combining more than 70 current privacy policies to make a blanket privacy canon that will allow Google to access and use a user’s information over any of the company’s platforms such as Gmail, Google+ and YouTube. Google users will not have the option of opting out of this new privacy policy.
Google’s director of privacy, product, and engineering, Alma Whitten blogged to clarify the changes that will become effective March 1:
What does this mean in practice? The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.
This is also part of an ongoing struggle between various search engines and social media sites that are directly competing with Google to collect user data. This information is like gold for advertising companies that target advertisements based upon consumer internet habits, trends and searches. Free speech advocates and analysts see this as a step towards users losing their anonymity.
In the first minute of the offical ‘hard hitting’ video called ‘Focus on the user’ they stab at the heart of the Google+ social search issue:
They do a search for ‘cooking‘
Then they click on the ‘most relevant cooking result within Google+‘
Afterwards they compare that with a search for ‘Jamie Oliver‘ and complain:
‘cooking‘ isn’t very relevant to the latest info from ‘Jamie Oliver‘
Don’t believe me that they did this? Go watch it again, they actually want us to feel outrage that ‘cooking’ doesn’t link us to the most relevant info for ‘Jamie Oliver’.
The authors of the plugin fully admit that they are getting the results info from Google itself, and just don’t want to say the words “Google is simple showcasing it’s services” instead they want to make it out to be a matter of ‘evil’ and ‘holding back’. If they didn’t at multiple times in the video slip up and show how you can still get the top results without using their plugin I’d say they had a case.
As much as there is to roll my eyes at, from an SEO standpoint, everything about focusontehuser.org is brilliant. The back-links must be pouring in, and I saw a very clever ‘click here to get your results to show’ link in the video that could be a real profit mill for them (their marklet’s broken right now or I’d investigate).
Don’t get me wrong, I know this scripting project was backed by Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace (it’s still going), so it already had some deep pockets, but in my opinion, it looks like the devs had some deeper ‘evil’ ideas?
While we are still on the ‘Google+ Social is Evil’ topic, the changes to support nicknames, pseudonyms, and maiden names is apparently done and now you can socialize however you wish on Google+. A more ‘evil’ company would have stuck to the original, and far more profitable design which requires valid names and serious privacy commitment.
I know this is the part where I slap up a picture of Chia Bart’s amazing growth and progress.. but someone decided to help him out and drain his water tray so he’s really wilted right now and I’m trying to get some life back into him. Perhaps I’ll do an update after lunch if he perks up?
Bart sprang back a fair bit, had to zoom to see the wilt!
Now that you know how to setup your social accounts and who the main social players are, it is time to tie all of your accounts together.
TwitterFeed
TwitterFeed is a program that allows you to syndicate several RSS or Atom feeds and sends them directly to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook (and a few others) This allows you to produce a steady stream of content to your social sites that will help to increase your level of activity. You will also want to check each social platform you use to see if you can like other social sites you are using.
Use only high PageRank news feeds from reputable sites. Ensure that the feeds are not coming from your competition as they will invariably contain promotions which may lure your readers away. Stay focused on relevant news topics to keep your readers engaged.
Include your company’s blog feed into TwitterFeed. This is the best way to not only keep your followers tuned in to current news about your industry, but enables you to send out specific, content designed to convert your followers into customers.
Most social platforms allow you to spread your updates across other networks which can lead to syndication loops. An example would be syndicate your TwitterFeeds to Facebook and Twitter and then inadvertently telling Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) to send status updates into Twitter.
Because the RSS feed comes into Facebook as a status update, you get the same RSS going to back to Twitter. This can have the unwanted effect of you being penalized for distributing duplicate content which can severally affect your site’s search engine rankings.
The real secret to success with social media is to stay actively engaged with your audience on a consistent basis. The more you participate, the greater the reward will be. You should consider spending at least a few days per week engaging, responding and generally participating in all of the networks you are connected with. The real "trick" to social media is to be consistently involved with your community by sharing content, Tweeting (and retweeting), commenting on other posts and producing high quality, relevant content for your followers to share.
Klout.com
It is one thing to stay actively engaged across your social networks, but how do you measure success? Indicators for measuring your success may include the number of contacts and followers you have, the increase in conversions, or the number of likes or retweets your posts are getting.
If you are wondering about your progress once you step in to the social world, you can use a web utility like Klout.com to follow your progress. The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from a variety of social networks in order to measure:
True Reach: How many people you influence.
Amplification: How much you influence them.
Network Impact: The influence of your network.
TIPS
It is important to keep your public and private networks separate and distinct. Do not use your personal Facebook page to promote your business. Create a separate, personal space where you can chat with grandma and put up those pictures from your "crazy weekend."
Choose a marketing representative or individual from your company that does not mind having a public profile linked to your business account and that you feel will portray your company in the best light.
Build up your marketing representative’s online persona by following only legitimate, valuable businesses and people. It is of vital importance to aim for quality or quantity.
Avoid promotional networks on Twitter such as #TeamFollowBack and similar groups that attempt to lure you in to following them in return for gaining followers from them. These may have a short time gain, but if you cannot vouch for the validity of each and every member of this network you may find yourself associated with those that do not share your ethics or personal values. It is also an attempt to game the system which will inevitably lead to several penalties.
Once you have a solid, well-developed persona, complete social profiles and have gained a some followers, you can create a business page on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php ) and Google+ (http://www.google.com/+/business/ ) and consider getting involved in a few secondary social networks.
Ensure that your website keeps your viewers socially engaged with social media button that readily allow them to share, like and otherwise spread your content.
Congrats to everyone that participated in the SOPA/PIPA Jan 18th blackout, even if all you did was sit on Twitter and complain(some strong language was used), you did something to bring the topic into the foreground.
Yesterday’s on-line unity was a clear message to the political parties backing these bills. Last I checked the opposition to PIPA was only 6 senators away from the required 41 “no” votes needed to keep PIPA stuck in the Senate for good. While I haven’t seen a public list of senator opposition to SOPA, it too needs 41 “no” votes to end the future of the bill.
While this sounds great, it really just means that the entertainment industry, and fans of public censorship, now have to try even harder to keep their efforts out of the public eye. Make no mistake, there are people, wealthy and misguided, that will keep trying to find a way to sneak this sort of law through. Don’t think that’s a fair/optimistic assessment of the situation, well here’s the flip side (Very strong language/opinion warning) from Mr.Maddox.
Just last night I was trying to get some programming done while watching a bunch of movies I’ve been backlogged on. One of the movies in the stack was ‘Kick-Ass‘ and I won’t spoil a decent film for you with too much info, but there’s a scene where they are streaming a web broadcast live on the news. As the live stream becomes ‘too violent’ for television the audience quickly switches to the web to watch the rest of the live stream on-line.
While most folks watching the film were probably totally distracted by the context of the scene, I was immediately thinking about all the conservative types watching this unfold and thinking to themselves:
‘This should never be possible, we should have the ability to censor a live stream that is so disturbing! If it can’t be shown on TV it shouldn’t be viewable on the Internet! Just think of all the things the internet could broadcast un-censored! We need something like this SOPA/PIPA thing we can abuse!’
I’m not sure if the big players in Hollywood actually intended that sort of reaction to the scene, I’m not saying the film is a brain-wash attempt by the industry, but the thought did cross my very ‘open’ mind, so it stands to reason I wouldn’t be the only one.
In fact if you haven’t looked at ACTA, you might want to check it out. This is a more international version of PIPA/SOPA with the same issues surrounding loose definitions and loopholes that could be exploited while doing little to actually stop piracy. ACTA has been bouncing around since 2006 with a bunch of countries already signed on to the current version.
The closure date for signing onto ACTA isn’t until 2013 but it looks like there may be some difficulties getting all signing countries to agree on a final version (yay for diversity!). A notably large issue of ACTA, especially in the eyes of the EFF, is that it has been drafted in secret, hidden from public eyes by participating governments around the world. So if you haven’t poked your nose into it, you really should.
Speaking of closure, I think Chia Bart’s pretty much grown all that he will and I’m cheating now to try and get the top of his head to sprout.
Are you having problems getting to some of your favorite sites today? This may be a sign of things to come if the unpopular SOPA legislation comes into effect. Today is the WWW Protest SOPA Day. Most of us are aware of the SOPA/PROTECT IP fight that has been raging for some time. However many people are still very confused about the protests against the potential new legislation and whether or not they should be part of it.
I came across a video that explains the whole issue very succinctly and may help you to determine which side of the bill you are on.
More than 7000 sites have blocked access to their web content in protest.
Sites like sopastrike.com are urging people to protest and sign an online petition:
January 18th, 2012 is the largest online protest in history, to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA. Join in by blacking out your site and urging everyone you can reach to (http://sopastrike.com/strike/)contact Congress now.
Tomorrow, January 18th, is SOPA blackout day, and lots of very popular sites are committing to participate in the blackout.
How can web companies, such as SEOs, and supporters (like us) maintain workflow in the midst of a major blackout?
We’ve got some tips!
I need to find things mid-blackout!
While some sites will be partially blacked out, a lot of the larger sites will be completely offline in terms of content for maximum effect.
This means that during the blackout folks will have to turn to caches to find information on the blacked out sites.
If Google and the Internet Archives both stay on-line during the blackout you can use them to get cached copies of most sites.
If you’re not sure how you’d still find the information on Google, here’s a short video created by our CEO Dave Davies to help you along.
I want to participate without killing my SEO campaign!
If all your back-links suddenly don’t work, or they all 301 to the same page for a day, how will that effect your rankings?
Major sites get crawls constantly, even 30 mins of downtime could get noticed by crawlers on major sites.
A smaller site that gets crawled once a week would have a very low risk doing a blackout for the daytime hours of the 18th.
Further to that you could also look at user agent detection and sort out people from crawlers, only blacking out the human traffic.
If that seems rather complex there’s two automated solutions already offered:
sopablackout.org is offering a JS you can include that will blackout visitors to the site and then let them click anywhere to continue.
Simple putting this code in a main include (like a header or banner) will do the trick: <script type="text/javascript" src="//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js"></script>
Get a SOPA plugin for your WordPress and participate without shutting down your site. It simply invokes the above Javascript on the 18th automagically so that visitors get the message and then they can continue on to the blog.
I’d be a rotten SEO if I suggested you install an external Javascript without also clearly telling folks to REMOVE these when you are done. It might be a bit paranoid, but I live by the better safe than sorry rule. Plus just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to track your visitors.
How’s Chia Bart doing? .. Well I think he’s having a mid-life crisis right now because he looks more like the Hulkster than Bart?
To all my little Bartmaniacs, drink your water, get lots of sunlight, and you will never go wrong!
This is the last in our series of "Which Social Sites Do I Use?" In Part 3, we discussed 
Bart sprang back a fair bit, had to zoom to see the wilt!
Leaf me alone! The kid is not my sun!
