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Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

January 21, 2013

FaceBook Social Graph Search

It has been over ten years since people began making the choice to share their lives online, and users buying into social search will be the next step according to Facebook. Facebook has announced the release of their new search tool, called Graph Search; a reference to the network of friends its users have created.

This new search function encourages users to divulge more personal information in order to provide better advertising results.
Google began introducing semantic over the last few years, and there have been numerous attempts from other (Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Hunch) to utilize social search; but nothing at the order of magnitude at which Facebook operates.

This new search function is being regarded by many as a test for the users of the social networking site which could have repercussions for the Internet at large due to the scale at which Facebook operates. The test will show whether users are willing to allow and contribute to more sharing of their personal lives and whether or not social search is the future of online interaction.

If successful, Facebook is confident that it’s over one billion users (1.01 billion as of September 2012) will be willing to share more information from the movies they watch, the places they visit or the food they eat.

Facebook’s algorithms will filter search results for each individual and ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. Initially, the new tool will mine users photos, check-ins and likes, but will later search through a users complete profile, status updates, and posts.

Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week "People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook," Mr. Stocky said. "It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that."

As anticipated Facebook users have mixed feelings regarding the new search tool. Independent studies suggest that social media users are actually becoming more resistant about revealing more about themselves online. This reluctance may stem from increased media attention given to online privacy and protection, and scattered reports of employers and educators using the medium to investigate Facebook profiles.

In a survey of 500 students aged 21 and 22, Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University stated: "These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more."

Another study from the Pew Internet Center indicated that social users (especially those on Facebook) were aggressively pruning their profiles by removing friends, comments and tagged photos.

It may be that Facebook is taking a huge gamble with their launch into social search. With many users (including myself) trying to close down the doors of Facebook instead of opening them up, Facebook may not be paying enough attention to the fact that many users are facing a social-saturation-tipping point, or "social media burnout" en masse and may they have missed the mark on this latest endeavor.

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 12:53 pm

Categories: Facebook
Tags: graph search, mark zuckerberg, privacy, semantec search, social media burnout, social search —

January 17, 2013

Facebook Social Search: Grasping for that Third Pillar?

On January 15th 2013, Facebook planted it’s so called “third pillar” of it’s social network empire, “social search”.

If Facebook *is* all about social media, and they already had a search function, how is this a big change?

Stack of coins with a magnifying glass on the pennies.

Okay, well that *is* some small change..

From what I can tell of the new search feature, it’s an exclusive index of Facebook, powered by Bing. So you get better/different results from the previous search options because it’s been handled by Microsoft’s search methodology.

So, you may be wondering, “Why isn’t Bing offering an improved ‘Social Search’ now that they have access to all this Facebook data?”, and you will be amused to note that today Bing indeed announced an improved ‘Social Search’ to users of their services.

In fact, Bing’s social search results are appended to the Facebook search results, and all clicks stay inside Facebook.

Still, what’s really ‘new’ about this search behavior?

Allegedly if I tack on action words to a search like, “visited by friends” or “popular with friends”, it’s supposed to marry the search results with social data from my friends list.

I gave that a whirl, trying to find various searches that would result in ‘approvals’ or ‘likes’ from my friends and I got very poor results.

Could it be that my tech savvy friends have dialed in their Facebook privacy settings to the point where Bing’s assistance is negligible? Possibly. And I wouldn’t blame them for it.

Then I tried some of the same searches in Google, without engaging any ‘social’ tags or features, and viola, I can see restaurants, pubs, and even retail stores that people in my circles have rated. I also know now to never have lunch with Dave, since he loves all the types of restaurants I try to avoid.

Plus, thanks to Google’s purchase of Zagat, I have a fallback option for accurate/honest feedback if my friends aren’t reviewing restaurants or pubs that I want to try out or are simply closer to my location.

While I’m not seeing a real improvement, FB is seeing a nice reversal of their stock prices, which were on a steady downfall last year, as we mentioned in our May 22nd, 2012, blog post: FB stock drops as SpaceX soars to success!

How long this will bolster their faltering stock value?

Will ‘Social Search’ mature into a feature that entices disinterested users to revisit Facebook?

Clearly that’s anyone’s guess, but at least they are trying to keep the ship afloat, and search traffic could help bolster ad revenue, as it did for Google.

Time will tell.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:56 am

Categories: Bing,Facebook,Google,IPO,Privacy,Search Engine News,seo articles,social media,Technology
Tags: social search, stock prices, third pillar, ZAGAT —

December 20, 2012

Video Ads Planned for FB Timelines

Co-Workers and clients ask me why I stopped using MSN Messenger, like it’s a surprise to them that I don’t willingly sign into an application that spends most of it’s time trying to download videos/advertisements to distract me?

To me the more advertisements I see on a service the more I see that service as coming to an end, with one final attempt to monetize the fleeting popularity of the service at it’s peak of it’s traffic volume.

So clearly then Facebook is signalling that now is the time to monetize and cash out, with executives promising video advertisement opportunities in 2013.

To quote the original article on AdAge:

“By April at the latest, it(FB) will offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds on both the desktop version of Facebook as well as on Facebook apps on mobile phones and tablets.”

There’s also some advanced speculation that the goal will be to keep the video adverts capped at 15 seconds, which would help minimize the amount of data transfer that is wasted on content you never wanted to see in the first place.

Additionally, if advertisers have to compete in 15 seconds or less, this could produce ‘light’ video spots that are then re-used on other sites around the web, hopefully just replacing existing clips that are 30 seconds.

To the advertisers out there (some of which are our clients) this means that if you were in the planning/edit stages of a video promotion for your site, and social media was one of your target audiences, then you would do well to plan on a 15 second version of your clip in advance.

Speaking of Video Advertising

What would happen if YouTube paid a handful of the most popular YouTube video creators together to make a ‘popular mashup’?

I think this is what would happen (this is NOT the cheap re-mix you may be expecting):

Felicia Day and Minecraft? It’s almost like I helped make this.

Nice work YouTube! Clearly, at 28million (and counting) hits since it was released on Monday, people can’t get too much of a good thing, which is shocking considering how overplayed some of those videos are, especially the Gangnam Style remixes.

The end of the clip has some references to the video sources, some of which were fresh links for this old dog.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:28 pm

Categories: Facebook,Misc,seo articles,social media
Tags: rewind 2012, traffic monetization, Video advertising, YouTube —

December 19, 2012

Instagram: “All Your Photos Are Belong to Us!”

There was a huge online outcry from users when Instagram introduced a new privacy policy and Terms of Service that will take effect on January 16, 2013. Concerns were raised over changes that would allow for Instagram to sell users photos to advertisers without notice or compensation.

Instagram’s 100 million users use the popular app to take stylized picture of everything from food they enjoy to pets or any other aspect of their daily lives to share online. When the news of the proposed changes hit Twitter, the story and accompanied anger towards them went viral.

This change comes just four months after the social media giant Facebook purchased Instagram for one billion dollars. The new policy states: "A business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness and photos."

Later that same day, Instagram issued a blog post stating:

"Advertising is one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not the only one. Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram."

"Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."

Now that Instagram is owned by Facebook, it may be a similar scenario to how updates to Facebook have typically played out. Facebook has a tendency to roll out mass changes with the anticipation of user backlash; only to retract part of their updates. It’s a case of moving 10 steps forward and taking 1 back, ultimately the changes still get adopted.

The simple truth is that whenever you are online, whenever you use an App, it is very likely that your information is being used by the site or is being sold as data to interested third parties. The best way to maintain some semblance of privacy is to not go online at all – which wherein lies the irony.

It is almost impossible for most of us not to be connected to the internet at some point every day; be it through a PC, a Smart Phone or tablet. When we go online our user data is collected, stored and researched by a multitude of companies for a variety of purposes; some benign, some nefarious.

We are only now becoming aware that we are no longer just consumers; we are in fact walking product endorsements and advertisements for big business. What happens in the next few years will determine our new role in the emerging global marketplace. Do we want to protect our privacy, or do we want ads that are geared towards our relevant interests?

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 11:28 am

Categories: Facebook,Privacy
Tags: facebook, Instagram —

November 5, 2012

October 1, 2012

Dying Online, Facebook and the Digital Afterlife

From time immemorial, countless people have looked at the stars and contemplated their existence and life’s greatest questions; What happens to us after we die? What will our legacy be? What will become of my Facebook account?

In an ever increasing digital world, this is a question that has been posed more than a few times between around the water cooler here at Beanstalk. With an ever increasing amount of users employing cloud based digital assets, and engaging in social media, many people are concerned not only for the protection of these valuable assets and intellectual property, but in preserving memories for friends and family for posterity.

A paper published law professor Jason Mazzone from the University of Illinois calls for federal government to interevene and to regulate what happens to digital accounts after an account holder’s demise.

Along with an ever increasing amount of people, Mazzone argues that social platforms and other online services have policies that do not adequately protect an individual’s intellectual property or privacy after their death.

"Virtually no law regulates what happens to a person’s online existence after his or her death," he said. "This is true even though individuals have privacy and copyright interests in materials they post to social networking sites."

In an absence of any legal regulations, social sites are unlikely to adopt any policies of their own accord that will do little to protect a users account or intellectual property. Presently there are very few regulations in place, and most sites are left developing policies on-the-fl, with little regard for the user’s data.

"It’s becoming increasingly common for people to have digital assets, and some of them do actually have value," he said. "Not only are such sites repositories of intellectual property, they also are important to family members and friends. Historians of the future will likely depend upon digital archives to reconstruct the past, which creates a real problem, particularly in an age when we don’t leave diaries, and, increasingly, people don’t write books."

Facebook’s policy is to "memorialize" the deceased’s account. All content that has been uploaded (status updates, photos & videos) are removed. The user’s wall remains intact so that individuals can express their condolences to the departed. However, the user data is not deleted by Facebook. Currently, the data is archived with the speculation that it will be held for posterity by Facebook until a such time where it can be re-purposed for historical records.

There is no system in place to state your wishes for your account after your demise (similar to a living will) and no regulations in place to appoint an executor of your estate. As the population of Facebook users begin to age, Mazzone is at the forefront of a growing movement to instill federally mandated regulations to protect the billions of Facebook and social networking users worldwide.

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 12:43 pm

Categories: copyright,Facebook,Google+,Internet Law,LinkedIn,Privacy,social media,Twitter,YouTube
Tags: digital assets, intellectual property —

September 18, 2012

Google-a-gram? Insta-oogle? Google-Shop?

Do you like pictures? Pretty pictures?

Google just purchased an online graphics startup called ‘Snapseed‘, adding the outstanding features of it’s tools to Google’s already growing list of image editing options.

While we like to get people’s attention, this news does not require Snapseed to suddenly be elevated to the status of ‘Instagram rival‘ just for the sake of writing an article.

In fact Snapseed was popular with photographers, not just ‘people taking pictures of their cats’; Something which already declassifies it from comparison to Instagram; Above and beyond the fact that photographers actually paid for Snapseed’s services.

In fact I don’t even need to pretend that:

‘Google and Facebook Inc are locked in a battle for social network followers‘

..to bolster this article either, but thanks for your attempt at ‘journalism’ Reuters.

The truth is that G+ isn’t for the MySpace holdouts, nor has it been designed to force people off of FB.

Heck I’m sure there’s users of both systems who will never make the switch and I’m just as sure that the developers working on G+ are fine with that.

You heard it here folks:

Google+ is not Facebook.
Does Facebook allow me to video chat with my GMail contacts?
Can anyone guarantee efforts on Facebook will always be favored by Google?
Do FB business pages give me the same professional exposure that a company page on G+ would provide?
Would it be worth it to setup rel=author links for employees FB profiles when G+ is far more business worthy?
Etc.. etc..

People keep saying things like, “Google is playing catch up in social…“, which is true if you completely ignore the innovations and ways that they are leading social tech.

Google already has some great graphics options like SketchUp:

.. and SVG Edit which is great for HTML5 authoring:

(This is a 3kb SVG script)

.. and Picasa for photos:

(Which in version 3.9 has a lot of image filters already!)

Heck, speaking of Picasa and Google+, with Picasa installed locally I can organize/edit photos on my desktop and have that organization flow seamlessly to email contacts/friends/public.

With multiple PCs at my disposal, having my efforts tied to a single online sharing point is ‘huge’ to say the least.

In fact, some tools, like SVG Edit, are directly available online, making it a very accessible tool for quick web design work on-the-fly.

If Nik Software’s Snapseed adds even more options to the process then I’m super happy to be a G+ user.

Thanks for all the free love Google!

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:43 pm

Categories: Facebook,Google,Google+,html 5,Misc,seo articles,social media,Technology,web design
Tags: Instagram, Nik software, Picasa, Sketch Up, SnapSeed, SVG Edit —

August 16, 2012

You don’t want the next Penguin update…

Is Matt Cutts just goofing around or is he really trying to scare us?

The statement in the title of this article, from Matt Cutts, has the SEO world looking for further information as to just how bad the next Penguin update will be.

During the SES in San Francisco this week Matt Cutts got a chance to speak about updates and how they will effect SEOs. One of the things he was quoted as saying really caught my eye:

You don’t want the next Penguin update, the engineers have been working hard…

Mr.Cutts has recently eaten some words, retracting his statement that “too much SEO is a bad thing“, and explaining that good SEO is still good.

Even with attendees saying that he spoke the words with no signs of ominous intent, how do you expect the SEO world to take follow up statements like:

The updates are going the be jarring and julting for a while.

That’s just not positive sounding at all and it almost has the tone of admission that the next updates are perhaps going to be ‘too much’ even in Matt’s opinion, and he’s one of Google’s top engineers!

My take is that if you are doing anything even slightly shady, you’re about to see some massive ranking spanking.

Reciprocal links, excessive directories, participating in back-link cliques/neighborhoods, pointless press releases, redundant article syndication, duplicate content without authorship markup, poorly configured CMS parameters, etc.. These are all likely to be things, in my opinion, that will burn overly SEO’d sites in the next update.

The discussion also made it’s way to the issues with Twitter data feeds. Essentially since Google and Twitter no longer have an agreement, Google is effectively ‘blocked’ from crawling Twitter.

On the topic of Twitter crawling Matt Cutts was quoted as saying:

..we can do it relatively well, but if we could crawl Twitter in the full way we can, their infastructure[sic] wouldn’t be able to handle it

Which to me seems odd, since I don’t see any other sites complaining about how much load Google is placing on their infrastructure?

Clearly the issue is still political/strategic and neither side is looking to point fingers.

With Twitter’s social media relevance diminished you’d think +1′s would be a focus point but Matt Cutts also commented on the situation stating that we shouldn’t place much value on +1 stats for now.

A final point was made about Knowledge Graph, the new information panel that’s appearing on certain search terms.

Since the Google Search Quality team is now the Google Knowledge Graph team Matt Cutts had some great answers on the topic of Knowledge Graph, including the data sources and harm to Wikipedia.

There had been a lot of cursing about Google simply abusing Wikipedia’s bandwidth/resources but it was made clear during the session that Wikipedia is not traffic dependent because they don’t use ads for revenue.

Essentially, if Wikipedia’s data is getting better utilized, and they haven’t had to do anything to make it happen, they are happy.

If you wanted to get more details there’s lots of #SESSF hashed posts on Twitter and plenty of articles coming from the attendees.

I’m personally going to go start working on a moat for this Penguin problem..

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 11:56 am

August 15, 2012

August 1, 2012

Red-Handed Face-Palm

Facebook is making headlines again, but not the kind that Mark Zuckerberg would like.

Earlier this week ‘Limited Run’, an e-commerce developer that used Facebook as part of it’s start-up media campaign, posted a report on their findings of click-through data from their Facebook ads.

The data that Limited Run shared was a bit startling. In their own words:
Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site.

Since data is all about who’s looking at it or how someone looks at it, the folks at Limited Run signed into a ‘handful’ of other tracking services and found the exact same thing.

At this point you have a web developer who is very curious about something going on with their web traffic, so naturally they built an analytics system for their own site:
Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on … in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook.

Limited Run is a start-up company, and the publicity from being the first to catch Facebook with it’s hand in the proverbial cookie jar of advertising money would certainly help ensure the company’s run isn’t so limited.

Even still Limited Run was VERY careful to point out that there is little to no way of proving that Facebook is behind the bot -> ad traffic.

They are however dropping Facebook’s advertising and their company page on FB because of a claim that FB was unwilling to assist them with a name change, “because they weren’t actively paying for $2k or more in campaigns”.

Plus if 80% of the traffic from an advertising source is fake, and you have to pay for 100% of it, there’s better ways to promote your company.

So as this was a smaller advertiser, not someone spending millions of ad revenue on Facebook, we took it as a one-off issue, until this morning when Forbes posted a link to an article on Macleans.ca about “blank” image advertising tests on Facebook.

The gist of the piece is that a blank image test actually netted double the clicks of a static banner style image (think a logo or some non-promotion/non-offer) and only one click in ten thousand less than the average banner ad.

Web Trends even jumped in to do some testing on the clicks to see if there was some sort of curious appeal to clicking on a blank image and by using heat maps and quizzes they confirmed that the traffic is not human.

Facebook makes %85 of it’s ~$2.2 billion revenue from advertising traffic, and 14%-19% of FB revenue is from Zynga, a company that is suddenly involved in a stock crash scandal.

If you hadn’t heard, just prior to some ugly profit reports for the company, the company Founder Mark Pincus, and key members of company, cashed out over $516 million in shares!

Zynga share prices are currently at $2.83 each, way down from the $10 initial share price, and miles away from the $14.69 peak price of the company’s stock.

It would appear for now that both companies have some explaining to do, and some problems to solve. For the users/subscribers this should be a wake up call on where you are spending your time and your advertising budgets.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 10:28 am

Categories: Analytics,Coding,Facebook,ppc,social media
Tags: bots, Limited Run, Zynga —

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