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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.

February 18, 2011

Google Updates Social Search Algorithm

Google announced February 17, 2011 on their blog that they were upgrading its social search algorithm to include posts from popular social networking sites of a user’s social network friends into its Internet search results.

The new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search is an effort by Google to help a searchers find more relevant public content from your social contacts and feeds. This is an ongoing effort by Google to improve the relevance of search results with Google’s personalized search features.

The idea is that if you do a local, personalized search for great restaurants, you should start seeing friends posts and tweets that are in your social circle. That is assuming of course they are posting somewhere that Google has access to. Google currently included content created by your friends on Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, Quora, Flickr, Google Reader and more.

The new social search feature is currently only available in English. Google will not be displaying any social search results from Facebook, who has previously declined to share information with Google.

Google began indexing links and social connections as part of their Google Labs program In October of 2009. Google then began making social search available in January 2010 to its users. They then added their social feed Buzz a few months afterwards.

Google product management director Mike Cassidy and product manager Matthew Kulick said in a recent blog post:

“Relevance is not just about pages; it is also about relationships”.

“Today we are moving a step forward; empowering you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they are publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website” they said.

Click here for more information about Google’s Social Search features

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 6:53 pm

Categories: Facebook,Google,social media,Twitter
Tags: blogger, flickr, Google Reader, quora, YouTube —

April 30, 2010

Beanstalk’s Blog Now In WordPress

Well alas, it had to be done. After years of touting the benefits of Blogger blogs and recommending client’s host their blogs there we’ve been forced to move by Google and their decision to discontinue support for FTP. While it’s a shame to have been pushed out of blogger. Of course I’m still working out a few of the kinks BUT all-in-all it went pretty smoothly.

For those facing the same dilema – here’s roughly what it took:

Install WordPress.
The easy way is to convert directly from your blogger account as Dusty illustrates on his blog at http://dustyreagan.com/convert-from-blogger-to-wordpress/ BUT I wasn’t able to go that route so I …
Export your Blog (if you can’t use the method in Step 2).
Using WordPress’ Import function (under Tools in the left nav) you’ll have to convert your exported data to a WordPress format (since you can’t use the Blogger import if you’ve gone past step 2. I was relieved to find an awesome tool at http://blogger2wordpress.appspot.com/ that worked wonderfully converting all the data exactly how it should.
So now you have your blog working. It’ll look different but all the information is there. I then had to go into the files and edit the theme to look like the Beanstalk blog is supposed to but if you don’t have your blog matching your site and you’re happy with one of the countless themes available for WordPress – you’re done. If not – you have to then manually convert your Blogger template to a WordPress template that requires a reasonable understanding of PHP. I say reasonable as I’m in no way a PHP developer and I was able to do it in about 30 o 40 minutes with the tweaks and the addition of a couple new features that WordPress had that weren’t available in Blogger.
Now all that’s left is to go through your backlinks and incoming traffic points and make sure to 301 all those link and entry points so you don’t lose link strength or annoy your visitors. And don’t forget to 301 your feeds.

And that’s all there is to it. The total process including figuring out how to do it took about 1.5 to 2 hours. I hope you have the same success or better.

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 5:54 pm

Categories: Misc
Tags: blogger, wordpress —

April 1, 2010

Proud Of Our Awards So We’re Blogging It … Oh The Irony

Today is April 1st. Apart from Google changing their name to Topeka and my kids running off with dreams of changing teacher’s pen colors – it’s a lot like most days before except that we get the honor of again making Top SEO’s list of the best firms in a variety of categories. This month we made the grade in the following categories:

SEO
Link Building
Content Creation
SEO Training
PPC Management

Of course we’ve very pleased to be including in this list and proud that our dedication to our clients and ethical SEO techniques is recognized. Thanks to Top SEO’s for once again including us.

Okay – that that was the good news of the day – now the bad news. Those who use Blogger’s FTP function (including your truly) have one month to find a new solution. Google will not be supporting FTP for Blogger after May 1st.

We’ve been looking into various solutions and will let you know when we lock down the one we’ll be implementing. And one last time – I’m not impressed Google. While only the minority of us use the FTP function I’ll bet that if we only count legitimate blogs (as opposed to splogs) that percentage is much higher. But alas – our hands are tied and our blog will be pulled out of Blogger – I just haven’t figured out where it’s going to go yet.

But did I mention that we won an award?
(wanted to end this post on a high note)

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 12:52 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: april fools day, blogger, google, topseos —

February 3, 2010

A Sad Day For Blogger Users But Good For Beanstalk

I love Google. Before I head into my latest rant I wanted to get that out of the way as this is two posts in a row that involve me complaining about something Google is doing. Perhaps the flaw is in the way I viewed Google – as more than just a marketing company. I suppose that this means I wasn’t really paying attention when the quarterly reports came out.

First, let’s setup the situation …

The year is 2004 and I’ve just registered the domain beanstalk-inc.com. I like sharing information and I like adding content to our site and so as soon as the site was fully operational and our core 100-or-so pages of content ere built I worked to get a blog started with the first post appearing on March 24 of 2005 (about the AskJeeves purchase). When I was choosing the blog system to use the choice was pretty obvious to me. The logic went something like,

I want Google to crawl my blog
Google owns Blogger
Google creates the Blogger code
Google will thus always be able to crawl Blogger blogs
I think I’ll go with Blogger

I wanted to content on our site so I chose Blogger and went with their FTP option. I chose Blogger because of the FTP option. I have setup clients in Blogger because it’s run by Google and has an FTP options. Google has just announced that they will be discontinuing their FTP option. Insert expletive here.

Now, I can see their reasoning. By their count, only 0.5% of the Blogger blogs are uploaded via FTP and are responsible for a disproportionate amount of support resources HOWEVER I would counter with two point.

About 75% of all the blogs are spam and I’d bet that the ones hosted on actual domains are more likely to be legit. I may be wrong but I’d bet not. But still – if we assume that we are still left with only 2% of legit Blogger sites being uploaded via FTP. So what does that mean in numbers? I don’t have access to the most current data but let’s say – thousand upon thousands of users will feel the inconvenience and now I have to go back and appolgoize for recommending to my clients that they use Blogger and further – find a solution.

Now – I do like their sub-domain solution (they’ll host blog.beanstalk-inc.com but let’s be honest – it’s still going to cost me to go this route via lost links to existing posts and the lost weight that seems to affect 301′d links (though I’m not sure why but it does appear to happen).

At any rate – that’s my rant and stay tuned, once I figure out what we’re going to do and test it – I’ll blog about the results so if you too are caught in this mess – hopefully we’ll be able to give you a solid solution.

And good luck.

And now on to the good news …

Beanstalk has once again made the grade to be included in TopSEO’s best of the best winning awards in the following areas:

Optimization
Content Creation
Link Building
Training
PPC Management

A big thanks for TopSEOs and to our clients.

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:09 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: blog, blogger, google —

December 3, 2007

SES Chicago, Blogger & Paid Links

Today’s post is a rushed hodge-podge of topics. A lot is going on and yet – time is short. I’m rushing through last-minute stuff to make sure I’m ready to head to Chicago tomorrow morning for SES. SES Chicago is already underway but I only get to be there for the two days I’m speaking. Fly in Tuesday, fly out after Jim and I host our radio show on Thursday afternoon (it’s going to be a great show so be sure to listen to WebmasterRadio.fm).

If you want to keep posted on my sessions, the session I attend, eta. you can do so on our website at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/ses/sesch07/.

Blogger has now stripped links from comments. It appears that Blogger-run blogs no longer accept you to post a link to your site as a comment. As a move to combat blog sp@m this is going to be highly effective. An incidental victim of the move are people who use blogs heavily and comment legitimately. They will lose some of their links and they likely deserve some of them however I’d say that those spanked with just cause will outweight the innocent bystanders.

And putting their money where their mouth is, Google has dropped paid listings for text link ads. My question to them would be however, why are you advertising them on my site?

If you look at the add that appears just today on our site:
Google advertising paid link brokers.
Now I’ll admit that I’m not particularly offended by displaying the ads. We don’t buy text links but I don’t have any special vendetta against people that do (Google seems to be taking care of that themselves) but if the folks at Google feel it is unethical to advertise paid links on their own site, why are they OK with pushing the ads onto mine?

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 7:04 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: blogger, google, paid links, ses ch 2007 —

SES Chicago, Blogger & Paid Links

If you want to keep posted on my sessions, the session I attend, eta. you can do so on our website at http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/ses/sesch07/.

And putting their money where their mouth is, Google has dropped paid listings for text link ads. My question to them would be however, why are you advertising them on my site?

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 7:04 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: blogger, google, paid links, ses ch 2007 —

February 20, 2007

Blogger And Google Indexing Problem

I love RSS and I love the Firefox Extension RSS Ticker. Firefox is an excellent browser and combined, these two make it easy to keep updated on the latest going-on effortlessly by scrolling my favorite RSS feeds across the bottom of my browser window. And that’s how I found this latest tid-bit of info on the Marketing Pilgrim blog.

For those who have blogs through Blogger (like this one) and who have converted to the new system recently, take a look at your code. It appears that there are some *minor* issues. Actually, just one but wow – is it a doozy.

Blogger blogs, by default, include the following generic code: <$BlogMetaData$>

Well this doesn’t look so bad. It tells Blogger to insert the meta data specified for the site through the Blogger control panel, how helpful. The control panel allows you to set your blog as listed or unlisted. If it’s listed then it will be crawlable, if it’s unlisted then it will not be. Unfortunately for some unfortunates who have recently switched, this tag is producing the following:

Hmmm, looks OK, looks OK, WAIT!!! Huston, we have a problem.

So, if you’ve recently converted to the new version of Blogger, be sure to check your code. You might find something a bit, well, let’s use the word “hindering” shall we?

As an additional note, and on an unrelated topic, please accept my apologies for the lack of posts of late. I’ve been busy ransacking and preparing to write about Google Personalization which involves tearing through 6 patents (now THAT’s fun reading) and then taking the time to understand what they actually mean. SiteProNews editor Jim Hedger and I will be publishing a white paper in the next couple weeks on the subject. I will be posting some patent info in the next couple days on this blog so keep watching.

And to be fair to the source of the Blogger info, here’s your link Andy.

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 2:36 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: blog, blogger, google, jim hedger, nofollow, noindex, personalization, white paper —