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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.

    November 6, 2012

    Dogpile on Apple Day!

    Dogpile on Apple

    Clearly someone neglected to remind me that November 6th is the international Dog Pile on Apple Day!?

    Lets take a look at a popular technology subreddit..

    Not r/applesucks, just r/technology:

    Those are just the current headlines!

    Last week we had a great story about internal politics in Apple, and the firing of Scott Forstall, a 15 year vet managing the Apps team.

    Some folks felt that the departure was due to a change of attitude at Apple, from Jobs to Cook, where people unwilling to apologize aren’t welcome.

    Others look at how Scott handled himself inside the company, acting out much like Jobs did, but without Jobs around he was making enemies instead of friends. Indeed Bob Mansfield cancelled retirement plans with Apple and agreed to 2 more years upon news of Scott’s firing.

    It can’t be all that bad really, since Apple sold over 3 million iPads last weekend alone?

    Plus, now that Apple lost the legal challenge over money owed to Motorola over patent licences it can just give up all intention of paying.

    In fact many observers agree it was Apple’s lack of interest in following the law that cost them the case.

    To paraphrase a really good reply to the decision:

    Why this was dismissed with prejudice:
    Apple wanted the judge to set license fees, but said that they would not agree to the ruling of the judge unless she set it at less than $1 per device.

    …

    The judge essentially said, fine, since Apple won’t adhere to legal judgements, Apple’s case is pointless.
    The last ditch attempt to say Apple might adhere to legal judgements hasn’t swayed me, I dismiss the case, and Apple can’t bring it to trial further.

    Why even bother with a trial when the plaintiff has made it clear they do not respect the law or the potential decision?

    If I knew this judge I’d be pleading her to let me take her out for a free meal as a thank you.

    So folks, if you see an Apple laying in the gutter, taking a power nap, just know that it’s hard being green.

    SEO news blog post by @ 12:07 pm

    Categories: copyright,Internet Law,IT Industry,Misc,Operating Systems,Technology
    Tags: , , , —

     

    September 27, 2012

    Google is 14 Years Old and Under Arrest

    Well I guess ’14′ is not a very important number, since Google’s own birthday doodle is an animated GIF:

    Google's 14th Birthday Doodle Gif
    Does that really say PooP?

     
    .. unless you count this ’14′ year old girl with ’14′ million views?

     
    That’s evil Google, even if you didn’t actually make that the top search result for ’14 years old’, it’s very evil. ;)

    Stop! Jail Time!

    Speaking of unintentional evils, Google’s chief executive in Brazil, Fabio Jose Silva Coelho, was arrested and then released after a Brazilian court found him guilty of violating South American pre-vote election laws.

    Fabio’s crime? He denied a request to have politically sensitive videos removed from YouTube.

    The same judge also ordered a .5 million dollar per day ‘penalty’ for Google to pay if it continues to host the videos!

    Since the videos are not in English and most of the news sources are English, finding these ‘horrible’ videos isn’t very easy.

    Here’s one explaining a connection between the candidate for Mayor, Alcides Bernal, and a money laundry scheme with a co-operative taxi service.

     
    My Portuguese is pretty non-existent, but even without Google TranslateOpen in a New Tab, it’s pretty clear that the candidate for Mayor isn’t being promoted favorably in this video.

    Google is facing similar political pressures over the recent anti-Muslim videos, including fines, however they are all currently being left online by YouTube/Google as it’s very clear that no rules of the service have been violated and removing the videos would merely make people want to share them even more.

    Bearded Sikh Woman Teaches Reddit A Lesson

    In fact these political types could learn a great lesson from a young Sikh woman who recently was ridiculed for not tending to her facial hair/beard over on Reddit’s r/funny boards.


    Ugly remarks like: “Transgender Sikh Dwarf” didn’t phase Balpreet!

     
    Rather than get upset, Balpreet Kaur, took the attention as an opportunity to register with Reddit as a new user and explain herself in a calm respectful manner.
     
    This resulted in a huge cultural awareness among the thread readers, and she is currently being hailed as an outstanding example of how to handle criticism.

    Here’s the full storyOpen in a New Tab (with twitter reactions) over on CBC News.

    You go girl! :)

    SEO news blog post by @ 12:36 pm

    Categories: Google,Internet Law,Misc,Net Neutrality,Privacy,Search Engine News,Twitter,YouTube
    Tags: , , —

     

    May 8, 2012

    First Self Driving Car is Licensed

    It’s official, if you see a car drive by with nobody inside, the license plate has a red infinity logo, and you’re in Vegas, that really happened, you’re not just in bat country.

    011011110110111001100101

     
    Google can now legally send it’s self driving cars out solo, with nobody inside.

    I had to say that to myself to fully appreciate how impressive this moment is in history.

    Sure this puts a twist on Driving Miss Daisy 2 – Drive Harder, but overall I’m very excited about the countless ways this will improve our lives, save gasoline, time, money, and most of all, lives.

    Driving Miss Daisy 2
    Hopefully Mr.Freeman won’t mind?

     

    Why Buy Facebook Stock?

    Lets say you had money that isn’t already invested in proven winners like Google, HTC, Intel, etc.., and you wanted to invest in something a bit different, and for some reason wanted to gamble on something as fickle as social media (remember MySpace?).

    Personally, even with that list of caveats, I wouldn’t be looking at buying FB stocks, and Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, agrees.

    In an interview that is circulating the web like mad, Mr.Ohanian explains why he wouldn’t invest anything in Facebook, citing their support of CISPA as a primary reason. While I agree that the CISPA support is horrible, my list of concerns is a bit longer.

    For my needs I’d want to pick a business with a clear path forward, not one with heavy investments from Microsoft, yet promote’s the competition’s browser :

    Use Chrome on FB
    This is taken from the Power Editor tool in FB

     
    I also wouldn’t invest in a company that’s decided it’s crucial to place privacy so far behind promotion.

    These ‘login to view this story’ roadblocks are a bane of FB and recent studies back up my own findings: people will not login to FB to read something. It’s much easier to highlight the title and right-click it for a Google search and that’s what users are doing.

    When you stop listening to your users, and usher them to the competition, you really can’t be shocked when people don’t struggle to get their wallets out for a chance to buy some stock.

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:59 am

    Categories: Browsers,Facebook,Google Chrome,Privacy,seo articles,Technology
    Tags: , , , —

     

    April 12, 2012

    Another Pleasant Google Plus Refresh

    Much like keyword rankings on Google, it’s not a matter if things will update, it’s more a matter of when, how much, and if it’s going to make your life better.

    Sounds relatively subjective? Well that’s because while the folks at Google are definitely trying to make a ‘please everyone’ interface for all products, and Google Plus is the latest to get some love, nobody is perfect and everyone is different.

    The following video is a bit heavy on the ‘promotion’ and a tad light on the ‘features’ so if you are details oriented you can skip it:

    Obvious Changes:

    Better use of wide screen format:

    • The left side bar has been iconized with short text labels below the icons.
    • Not only are the icons very easy to see, but they are very easy to arrange/remove.
    • Full drag and drop support for icons makes touch operations much easier.
      ie: You can finger drag someone to a circle without needing a right-click.
    • Having your chat contacts on the right makes good use of wider screens.
    • Larger photo thumbnails are a nice improvement and more modern.

    Sharing option is very obvious now:

    • The improved share input area is really easy to understand.
    • Minimalists can still use the old pop-out Share menu linked to your profile image.

    Focus on Chat

    • Because your contacts are visible on the left chat is icon-less
    • Removing the icon has removed the useless indent in the chat window:
      New Google Plus chat UI
    • If you liked staring at your profile image you can always switch back to GMail and chat there.

    On the BAD side of things:

    I was shocked at what you can’t drag to the side bar. If I want to play a single game, I’d rather have it than the ‘Games’ link?

    Lonely neck-beards all over Reddit have been mocking the extra space on their wide screens with 16:9 ratios.

    Thing is that the chat windows fill that space if you have 2 or more people you chat with constantly, and most people do. Sadly the meme is so popular that #usesforwhitespace is actually a trending topic and leaves me doing my best impression of Jean Luc.

    Does this do anything for the folks who see G+ as the arch-nemesis of FB? Heck no!

    In fact there’s a fresh batch of very pointless debates raging about how ‘G+ is unwilling to post user statistics because it’s an embarrassment.‘ which is another face-palm because they publish that info all the time (currently @ 170 million active Google+ accounts, 90 million accounts were created in the last 2 months alone) but unlike FB it’s not a bragging point since Google is clearly not interested in user counts.

    If Google+ cared about user statistics they wouldn’t care if the accounts were active or not when publishing their stats, and they wouldn’t have worked so hard to allow people to use the system without making accounts (unlike Facebook/Twitter).

    To quote John Lydgate:

    “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

    The whole self mockery reminds me of this awkward/embarrassing clip demonstrating the temple of promotion that is ‘Hawaii Five-O’ attempting to establish a new ‘slang phrase’for Microsoft while showing off a Windows 7 phone :

    Amazingly bad..

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:57 am

    Categories: Bing,Google,Google+,Technology,web design
    Tags: , , , —

     

    January 17, 2012

    Surviving the SOPA Blackout

    Tomorrow, January 18th, is SOPA blackout day, and lots of very popular sites are committing to participate in the blackout.
    SOPA Blackout cartoon
    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?

    Pastamania!
    Chia Bart number 5
    To all my little Bartmaniacs, drink your water, get lots of sunlight, and you will never go wrong!

    SEO news blog post by @ 11:28 am

    Categories: Bing,Google,Internet Law,Rankings,Search Engine News,seo articles,SEO Tips,SEO Tools,Technology,web design,Yahoo!
    Tags: , , , , , , , , —

     

    January 5, 2012

    Spain-full SOPA Politics

    The Jan 2nd news that Spain has full implemented it’s anti-piracy ‘Sinde Law’ was a blow to the Anti-SOPA community. It was even more painful to learn today that there’s deep allegations of US involvement and threats geared towards passing the law.

    Spainfull

    If you’ve been on Reddit, or Torrentfreak, you’ve probably seen the following allegations:

    In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.

    United States government interference in Spain’s intellectual property laws had long been suspected, but it was revelations from Wikileaks that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement.

    More than 100 leaked cables showed that the US had helped draft new Spanish copyright legislation and had heavily influenced the decisions of both the government and opposition.

    Okay, so then if we hop over to WikiLeaks (the same uber-political anti-American site that’s been caught multiple times sharing carefully doctored misinformation) this should be all over the front page right? Nope. Nothing posted to WikiLeaks since December 16th 2011. Apparently the only thing the Wikileaks folks are excited about is getting more donations to ‘fight the evil US’. :roll:

    So if we look around we should be able to find the leaked cables right? Nope. (Please correct me here if I’m wrong.)

    What’s more there’s conjecture that the ‘supposed’ US involvement was a ploy to put the blame for the bill on the US when the Spanish government had long term goals to put the bill into effect. Apparently the furore over further meddling by the US in Spanish politics might distract the majority of the voting public and save the current political parties from losing support over pushing through the bill?

    Talk about confusing! I have a headache just thinking about all these people standing in a loose circle pointing at each other saying ‘blame them!’.

    It will be interesting to see how this news unfolds and if the US administration will dispute the claims or just lump it since the Spanish anti-piracy bill clearly falls in-line with current direction of the US policy makers?

    On a slightly different topic of heads, Chia Bart has sprouted:

    Chai Bart week one
    Sorta gross isn’t it?

    It was a moisture issue, I had to put a bag over his head for the whole night to get the sprouting to happen. Now it should just need some light and regular water top-ups to get the green to start showing.

    SEO news blog post by @ 12:00 pm

    Categories: Internet Law,internet security,Technology
    Tags: , , , , , , —

     

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