'Net Features : google

7 Ways to Build Authority on Google+

Allison Howen — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

As the looming Penguin update (version 2.0) hovers overhead, search professionals are left wondering how the unknown changes to Google’s search algorithm will impact their company’s digital visibility.

While Google always holds its cards close to its virtual chest when it comes to its search algorithm, Matt Cutts (who is in charge of Google’s webspam team) has announced in a recently released video that the company is looking to give special ranking boosts to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space. Although Cutts doesn’t define how authority will be determined, one could speculate that the company’s social network, Google+, could be an influencer.

This scenario wouldn’t be surprising at all, especially because Google has been incorporating its social network into a variety of its products, including its search engine, for a while now. So in the case that Google+ does indeed become a factor in determining authority, one question remains – How can a brand build authority on Google+?

1. Grow Your Circles

A brand with 20 followers on Google+ doesn’t come off as very authoritative in its niche. That said, building a fan base on this social network can be challenging, especially for companies whose fan base spends the bulk of its time on other social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. However, there are ways that brands can increase their popularity on Google+.

Start by growing the people within your circles, which is a tactic that is frequently used on Twitter. By doing this, your brand’s name and Google+ profile is being put in front of new people, which influences them to return the favor. And the more people a brand adds to its circles, the more likely it is to receive higher follow back numbers (keep in mind that not everyone will follow you back). While you can add anyone to your circles, this strategy is most effective when targeting relevant people. To do this, brands should search for influencers within their industry, as well as for contacts that they already have on other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even email lists.

Furthermore, if you already have an active audience on a social network like Facebook or Twitter, make sure to promote your Google+ profile with your audience on these platforms. You can even tease exclusive Google+ content in order to persuade your audience members to make a profile and follow your brand on Google+.

2. Post Fabulous Content

Content is, and will always be, king. In fact, nothing says that you are an authority on a topic more than content that receives high engagement metrics, like shares, comments and +1’s. And regardless of your follower numbers, the only way to obtain high engagement rates is with content that captures attention and makes audiences feel like they need to share the information with their circles. There is absolutely no way around it – in order to receive high engagement numbers, brands must create and post content that resonates with their audience, is relevant and is in high-demand.

3. Leverage Communities and Hangouts

To be an authority within your niche, your presence on Google+ most go beyond posting regular status updates. Luckily, Google’s social network offers a variety of avenues for brands to foster relationships with their audience, including Google+ Communities and Hangouts.

Communities, for instance, allow users to create social groups based on specific topics or interests. And when a brand fosters an active community, it not only helps them build better relationships with their audience and acquire more brand advocates, but also helps them obtain more interactions and therefore gain authority within their niche. In addition, brands can use Google Hangouts as another unique way to build relationships and increase engagement rates, which, ultimately, helps a brand gain authority.

4. Interact with Your Audience

We have already established that shares, comments and +1’s help a brand gain authority, so what better way to encourage this type of behavior than by interacting with your own audience? Just as adding people to your circles can influence them to return the favor, so can interacting with people. That said, you shouldn’t just start interacting with everybody and every status update. Rather, choose your interactions wisely so that you do not come off as unprofessional (and un-authoritative). For example, if someone comments on one of your posts, consider responding back. This will help build brand loyalty by showing the audience member that you pay attention and care about what they say – making them more likely to interact with your brand in the future. Likewise, if someone posts interesting content that is relevant to your industry, an action as simple as a +1 or share could influence them to return the favor in the not-too-distant future.

5. Network with Other Brands

Take your interaction strategy up a notch by networking with other brands and industry professionals. While the aforementioned audience interaction tips can be applied here as well, you can also partner with other brands and professionals to share contributed (guest) content with your audience. By doing this, your business is not only providing its readers with relevant content from respected industry professionals, but it also helps to increase your business’s visibility. This is because the contributor is likely to share the content with their network as well, which puts your brand in front of a whole new audience and gives you the opportunity to increase your followers and engagement rates.

6. Use the Google+ Page Badge

Just as you display social sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter on your site, it is also important to feature the Google +1 button. This button encourages site visitors to publicly recommend your content and share it with their Google+ circles. And the more +1’s you obtain, the more authority you gain, as it shows Google that you are a trusted source of information.

7. Take Advantage of Authorship

If your brand is publishing content, make sure to link that content to the authors' Google+ profiles with Authorship. This not only gives recognition to your hard-working employees, but it also shows Google that there is an identity connected with the content, which gives the content and your brand, better credibility.

Could Google+ Play a Role in the Upcoming Penguin Update?

Michael Garrity — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:05:00 GMT

On Friday morning, Matt Cutts, the person in charge of Google’s webspam team, announced via Twitter that the search engine would be rolling out the next generation, version 2.0, of its Penguin update (originally released in April of last year).

This update will likely have considerable ramifications on the way that Google sorts and ranks pages on its search engine results pages (SERPs), as these types of overhauls entail altering the search algorithm, as opposed to just an index refresh.

Penguin 2.0

The first Penguin update focused on black hat SEO and links/link quality, as part of the company’s apparent desire to keep "spammy" sites stuffed with low-quality links from reaching the upper echelons of the SERPs (or even the first couple of pages, for that matter). It’s been tweaked a few times since then, with the first refresh (Penguin 1.1, if you will) simply cleaning up and implementing the algorithm update in the way it indexes pages, and the second refresh adding the Disavow Links Tool, which puts the onus of identifying and removing bad links on the webmasters.

But this new update promises to be much more significant and should resonate more with all websites and webmasters. In a video released yesterday (see the bottom of this post), Cutts said that the upcoming Penguin update, which is expected in “a few weeks,” will likely go deeper and have more of an impact than Penguin 1.0, but didn’t really elaborate beyond that. He also explains that Google is looking to give special ranking "boosts" to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space, meaning it will return those sites above loess authoritiative sites in related queries. He doesn't define how they will determine that authority, however.

Naturally, this has led many Web pros to wonder just what this new update will entail, and how it may affect their own performance in the SERPs. For now, all we can do is speculate.

What about Google+?

One likely scenario involves Google’s silently growing social network, Google+, which passed Twitter in Dec. 2012 to become the second largest online social network in terms of active monthly users (according to a Global Web Index study). Whereas Google started out by aggressively (over) marketing G+ when it first went live, the company has slowly backed off in favor of quietly integrating the social network with its myriad other products.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising, then, to see Google trying to incorporate G+ more intricately into its search engine, as well. And since the original Penguin was largely about links and link quality, one might expect Penguin 2.0 to put a special emphasis on links appearing on the social network. That is, content that gets linked to on or from Google+ will be weighted more heavily, or at least with more credibility, than if it were just a link on a random website or blog.

In other words, Google could end up viewing links that also appear somewhere on Google+ as being of a generally higher quality than others, so it may end up giving them a boost in the SERPs. And if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google Search also paid attention to the activity around links on Google+ (e.g. shares, +1s, etc.) in order to better determine just how “quality” they may actually be.

Should this end up being the case, it would mean that brands and content publishers, especially, will want to become more active on Google+, sharing links on the social network in order to give them more authority or credibility in the SERPs, especially if they expect these links to appear on other websites or blogs.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and Google is being, and will continue to be, quiet on the subject until the release of the new update, as it always is. I’m just saying, it would be an interesting way for the company to quietly nudge people toward using Google+ more often, although the downside would be the creation of an increasingly insular, exclusive “Google Universe” that may alienate Web professionals and users even more than it already has.

Google Kills Instant Previews & Related Search Filter

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:21:00 GMT

Google seems to be in the midst of a spring cleaning frenzy - at least on its search results page. The search engine has recently dropped support for both Instant Previews (which launched back in November 2010) and the "related searches" filter.

The Instant Previews feature showed users what sites appearing in the index actually looked like and would even highlight sections of the page related to the users query.

The reason for removing the features? Both the related search option and the instant previews feature, according to Google, received low usage which is leading many to speculate that a new round of functionality is coming to the search results pages.

Check out some previous coverage of Google's Instant Previews features below:
- Instant Previews Now on Google Ads
- The Good and Bad of Google Instant Previews
- Google's Design Guidance for Instant Previwes

Social Annotations Now in Google Enhanced Campaigns

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:35:00 GMT

Google released enhanced campaigns back in February 2013 - ad campaigns which use context such as location, time of day, and device - and over 1.5 million campaigns have already officially been upgraded.

Two new features have made their way into the advertising ecosystem which should make the Google Adwords offering even more irresistible to Internet marketers.

Adwords advertisers running enhanced campaigns can now include social annotations. If you have a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in a enhanced campaign search ad, you could start seeing the social annotations immediately. Companies including Red Bull are already using the feature as part of their digital strategy (see below).

Google didn't stop at adding some social elements into the advertising mix. Advertisers can now reach app users with their ads based on context (location, time of day, device). Couple that with being able to adjust bids based on demographics, interests and topics and you have a powerful mechanism to reach the right people at the right time with the right ad.

Recent Articles on Google at Website Magazine:

- Google Affiliate Network Retires
- Google Rolls Out Real-Time Widgets in Analytics
- Facebook Dominates Social Login Scene
- Google to Start Sharing Space
- Spam Web Hosting and Google Rankings

Sample Social Annoations from a Google Enhanced Campaign run by Red Bull:

Google Rolls out Real-Time Widgets in Analytics Dashboard

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:50:00 GMT

Google announced it has expanded the functionality of its Dashboards feature and is now providing access to four new real-time widgets in Google Analytics.

GA users can select from one of four widgets – a counter, a timeline, a geomap and a table.

The counter widget enables users to show specific metrics (like active visitors), group the visitors by dimension, and set a filter (a feature available to all the widgets).

The timeline widget is a little different in that users can select to track a specific metric but then must choose a time period (30 minutes or the last 60 seconds).

The geomap real-time widget is where it gets really interesting. Users select the metric, and then choose whether to show the data on the country or the city level – they can also select a specific region.

The real-time table widget is also interesting in that after selecting the metric to track, the user can add multiple dimensions to display.

Google to Start Sharing Space?

Michael Garrity — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:17:00 GMT

In an effort to make Google more transparent when presenting specialized, or “vertical,” search results, at least in Europe.

The European Commission is about to rule on a two-year-long investigation into the search giant’s practices, and they’re expected to make Google change the way it presents results to improve visibility for other specialized search engines. In other words, Google has to start sharing space with its competitors.

Primarily, the EC is concerned about specific, specialized search results like maps, weather and finance, as it suspects Google of giving results from its own services and widgets priority over its competitors. It is expected that the ruling will force the company to present “clearer alternatives” and label its own services more clearly, so that users know what they’re looking at.

During this time, the EC had been investigating Google to see if it had been linking differently to its own vertical services and giving them preferential treatment. There was also some concern that the company was copying content, like reviews, from alternative services and putting it in its own results.

Google is expected to turn in its final concession offer this week to try to hold off formal charges and a substantial fine.

Facebook Dominates the Social Login Scene

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:50:00 GMT

Social login is one of those technologies or tactics that have been a truly meaningful development for Internet businesses.

By enabling users to log in to adigital property with the credentials they use from popular services such as Google or Facebook, (or LinkedIn, Twitter or Yahoo) it is possible to remove - or at least reduce - a rather significant barrier to the conversion process - getting users to turn over at least some of their personal information. For this reason, it's important to stay on top of any data available about usage patterns.

Janrain, a provider of social login features, has released information for the first quarter of 2013 and the results are quite interesting. The data shows that Facebook currently leads as the most popular identify provider for social login. Facebook did lose some ground to Google for the second straight quarter though. Facebook however has remained the most popular choice for nine (yes, nine) consecutive quarters which is impressive by any measure. If Facebook usage is falling as many suspect though, there could just be an end to the social network's rein.

Janrain goes into detail about the login trends for specific industries - from music and entertainment to consumer brands and retail sites.

New Google Places for Business Dashboard

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 02:00:00 GMT

Last week, Google revealed a new look, feel and (most importantly) functionality for its Google Places for Business dashboard.

The changes will roll out over the next few weeks, but let’s take a closer look to see what all the buzz is about.

What’s most interesting about the updated platform is that it features far better integration with Google products. For example, local business owners can now take advantage of social features like sharing photos, video or posts from within the dashboard. Those businesses using Adwords Express and Google Offers can manage their ads and promotions from within the dashboard as well. Plus, users can even check results and make edits directly from the dashboard.

Google noted that it may continue to moderate changes to ensure the “highest quality local experience,” but most edits made through the interface will now appear on Google Maps and within Google’s suite of other services within 48 hours.

Real-time Events Now in Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:45:00 GMT

Google's real-time reports are one of the far more engaging reporting features for digital marketers as they can provide immediate insights into the performance of campaigns. But now the Google Analytics feature iss even better thanks to greater support for Events.

Say for example that you want to track specific interactions on a page (or website) such as a link click and do so independently of pagevies. Google Analytics newly enhanced real-time reports not only shows the top events as they occur but provides the ability to filter on particular event categories (from link clicks to downloads). The depth of these intelligence reports could prove quite useful to both marketers and website managers. For example, say some news event occurs and there is an increase in a pageviews for an article/post that was previously written. In this scenario, the website manager might want to highlight the content in some manner on the homepage and the marketer may want to redistribute it through social media channels. As Google suggested, having access to this level of data is akin to being about to pour fuel on the social media fire.

Google introduced three other features worthy of note, including reports to understand whether real-time traffic is from desktops, tablets or mobile, create shortcuts to favorite real-time segments, and the ability to compare real-time filtered data again overall real-time data.

Below is a screenshot of the Realtime Events Report in Google Analytics

Webmaster Tools New Site Verification Mods

Administrator — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:15:00 GMT

Google has made some changes and modifications to its Webmaster Tools verification system related to management of website verifications.

Webmasters can now see who the verified users on their sites are and now the verification method they used to achieve that status. That's useful information to know when you're managing sites within Webmaster Tools that were once under the control of another individual or agency.

Google is also now requiring that that the verification method be removed from a site before unverifying an owner within Webmaster Tools. If the verification (for example a meta tag or an HTML file) then there will be an error message shown. It's easy enough really to remove meta tags and HTML files that were once used for site verification, but this change likely the result of the delay in updating DNS records (a common problem).

Finally, Google also modified the CNAME verification string, making it shorter in order to support more DNS providers. Google's long CNAME was causing some problems for some users who were not able to use the verification method because some DNS systems limit the number of characters than can be used in DNS records.

5 Tips for Optimizing Product Listing Ads

Michael Garrity — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:15:00 GMT

Since Google introduced Product Listing Ads (PLAs) as part of its Google Shopping initiative last year, Internet advertisers and online merchants have been working hard to find the best possible ways to optimize the performance of their PLAs.

These product-specific and information-rich advertisements are displayed when consumers conduct product-related searches and are visible in a sponsored section on the SERPs. So far, they can increase click-through rates by as much as 73 percent, conversion rates by 35 percent and provide a 46 percent higher return on ad spend for merchants.

However, in order to get numbers like those (or even better), it’s important to clean up your product feeds (where Google pulls the information for each individual product from) and carefully set up your PLA campaigns.

Here are five things you can do to improve the overall performance of your Google PLAs:

Title Specs

What’s in a name? Well, for busy consumers, it can be a lot, especially because titles will indicate the queries that you’re likely to show up for. That’s why you should be thoughtful when giving your products a title in your product feed. For starters, be sure that it is no longer than 70 characters; otherwise, Google will truncate parts of the title. In addition, be sure to put the most important (read: significant for keyword-based searches) information at the front of the title, since Google will only show the first couple of words in the SERPs.

Information and Descriptions

While both product titles and descriptions should include essential keywords for the searches that you want those specific products to appear on, they shouldn’t be overstuffed with keywords. In other words, ensure that they include necessary information while also being readable and interesting for consumers. Also, don't worry where you place your keywords in the descriptions, since they don’t actually show up in the PLAs; they’re really there so that Google can more easily separate similar products.

Price Products Accurately

Google will almost certainly penalize any PLAs that inaccurately list the price of the product in question. Keep in mind that if you have package pricing, you will have to include the lowest possible price that someone can add items into their cart for. For instance, if customers must buy a minimum of 20 products for $2 each, the price should be listed as $40, not $2.

Ad Groups

One way to gain greater control over the bidding, offer copy and targeting of each product is to create a separate ad group for each product category. When you do this, you can either use the product categories Google uses for Google Shopping, or customize your own parameters to categorize groups of products in the most relevant way possible. In addition, you should be careful when putting bids on a catch-all ad group, as Google will serve the PLA from the ad group with the highest bid, ignoring all of the others. That being said, you can also optimize your best-selling ad group and make it more visible by giving them higher bids.

Testing Ad Groups

When you set up your ad groups, you should create custom targets that will focus on the first targeting option and your individual product IDs. This allows you to see what queries each of your products are showing up for and provide more visibility into which of your products are converting well. The reports you glean from this testing will show you which of your feed’s copy listings are most effective, and which products you can increase your bids on due to their higher conversion rates. You should also monitor the average position for you groups that usually perform well, and if you see that your average position changes when you haven’t done anything, it’s probably because other merchants (e.g. your competitors) are increasing their bids; you’ll need to do the same in order to stay competitive.

Google Universal Analytics – What to Know

Administrator — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:10:00 GMT

Google has officially released its Universal Analytics offering to the digital masses. While unlikely that there will be a virtual stampede to use the enhanced platform (at least right away), doing so could certainly position your enterprise for success in the future. The reason? You’ll know more (way more) about your users and the performance of your digital properties than with the classic version.

Launched in beta back in October 2012, Google’s Universal Analytics release enables firms to import their own datasets into its analytics system in order to understand how customers interact with a business across many devices (including mobile, tablets and PC’s) – and touch points (search, advertising, etc.). Why is this important? More control over the type and depth of information collected leads to more refined (and better) analysis. Ultimately that provides a more complete vision of the marketing funnel.

Universal Analytics exposes configuration options in the administration panel that were accessible previously only to developers through an API. Now, pretty much any user can customize and control reporting of traffic from organic search sources, have better handling of session and campaign timeouts, exclude referrals and search terms as needed, and even implement a broad range of custom dimensions and metrics (the new tracking code also works on subdomains).

Essentially, the Universal Analytics platform introduces a new set of features that change the way data is collected and ultimately organized. In addition to a name change for the actual tracking snippet – from ga.js to analytics.js – Google also reduced the number of cookies (from four to one) and extended the life of the tracking cookie to two years.

The offering has apparently been well received by some big brands. PriceGrabber VP of Marketing Rojeh Ananesian (in a video in Google’s official post – included below) discussed how using Universal Analytics help server users better by providing them with “more relevant content and shopping results.”

The Latest Google Drive API is All About Collaboration

Michael Garrity — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, Google launched its Google Drive Realtime API to allow developers to utilize Google Drive’s real-time collaboration features in their own applications.

According to Google, this API is meant to offer collaborative versions of popular data objects, like maps, strings, lists and JSON values, as well as automatically synchronizing and storing any modifications to these objects. Developers can even add their own custom objects and references.

Plus, since the API will track the presence of collaborators, the developers can alert users when other people join and leave, as well as when they make changes to a document.

As with Drive, the Realtime API will enact any local changes that take place when a user is in the developer’s application, and these will be immediately reflected in the local document via the use of operational transformation. In other words, local apps will continue to be responsive, even if they’re running on high-latency networks.

In addition, Google has opened up the Drive Realtime API Playground, so that developers can go in and test out their applications. To use the Drive Realtime API and gain access to the Playground, users must first sign up for the original Google Drive API.

Google Search Updates Coming Soon

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:04:00 GMT

The SEO industry has been on virtual pins and needles since last week, in frightful anticipation of a significant round of search algorithm updates.

At SMX West, Cutts indicated that the Penguin algorithm update would be significant and likely focus on 1) penalizing link networks, and 2) go after "low-quality" merchants.

Those likely in digital harm's greatest way are those that continue to use link networks. If the recent penalty of SAPE links - a provider of a popular paid links platform for advertisers/merchants and publishers- is any indication, the update could be as epic as last year's initial April Penguin release and subsequent updates in May and October. Google has been on the offensive of late in this regard, penalizing a UK newspaper for selling links.

Cutts also indicated that sometime in 2013, Google would be focusing on the presence of low-quality merchants, and what (if anything) can be done about it. Part of this may be related to the penalty of Interflora in late February, but many others have suggested that Google is pushing merchants towards use of its Product Listing Ads by way of reducing their natural/organic search position.

The Web Pro's Guide to Authorship Markup

Michael Garrity — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:55:00 GMT

Web professionals immediately embraced Google authorship markup, despite kind of being a tricky way to convince people to join Google+, when it was unveiled in 2011.

In case you’re still (somehow) unfamiliar with authorship markup, just know that it is a Google-specific microdata set that utilizes the rel=author tag to enhance tagged Web pages when they appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). To the casual user, these markups can be identified by the little author portraits that appear next to certain Web pages on Google Search and link to the author’s Google+ page. You can learn more about how to implement a rel=author tag in “The Difference Between rel=author & rel=publisher.”

It makes sense that Internet professionals would want to take advantage of these tags as much as possible, because markup doesn’t really require any additional work once it’s been implemented, but it can provide an incredible boost when it comes to driving search traffic.