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If you are like me, you have all your major working materials stored online: I organize useful links with Google bookmarks and Delicious, store email and IM conversation with Gmail, have most of my important (collaboration) docs at Google Docs, have multiple resource collections on WordPress and Blogger, etc. Backing up this massive amount if highly important information is actually a smart idea because the services are not owned by me, hosted by God knows who and thus having a local copy and updating it regularly would be wise. Backupify is a nice (free until January 31) web-based tool that allows to download content from a number of popular online services including: Gmail Twitter Google Docs Flickr Facebook Basecamp WordPress Delicious Photobucket Blogger FriendFeed Here’s how it works: after signing up you will be offered the list of social media sites “to manage”: Here are a few examples : Allow the tool to access your Twitter account by Twitter auth; Login to Delicious using your login information; Connect to Flickr account by Flickr auth; Connect to Photobucket account by Photobucket auth, etc When you are done adding your social media accounts, set up the back-up frequency (daily or weekly) and delivery options: Email me every time a backup is performed Email me a once daily digest of all backup activity Email me a once weekly digest of all backup activity Do not notify me via email of any backups You can also access the archives of your backups at Backupify from any computer. The only possible excuse for not trying the tool out is the privacy concerns, here’s an extract from the service privacy policy (remember: your privacy is up to you): What information is collected about me? We only collect data you provide us at sign-up. We do not ask for any other personal information. We do not collect data without your knowledge. How do you use collected information? We don’t use it at all. The only thing we collect and monitor is general patterns of storage and service usage so that we can make sure our architecture is optimized for speed and scalability. What security measures do you use to protect my privacy? Any information we have about you is stored with strong encryption. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Back up Your Social Media
Tags:
archives,
flickr,
knowledge,
personal,
search-engine,
social,
tool,
twitter
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We discovered in 2009 that AdWords inaccurately attributes the geolocation of your AdWords visitors. I previously wrote a blog post about AdWords geotargeting’s inadequacies in Feb 2009 (” “> Hey AdWords, Do You Offer GeoTARGETING, Or Just GeoSUGGESTION? “). Though my desired fix (allow experts to turn off query parsing even even if defaults “on” for noobs) was echoed by many users, nothing has changed. After almost a year, Google can’t even tell me they intend to schedule an improvement in this area. AdWords users need to understand why they’re getting inaccurate geolocation information and make sure they adjust their advertising efforts accordingly, and be sure NOT to segment their ads in accordance with inaccurate info. A Second Major Problem Due to Query Parsing? I believe all of these problems relate to query parsing, which overrules the geotargeting you set in AdWords. “It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature” – by Mauralyn , Flickr Creative Commons Our AdWords rep called query parsing a feature. I said, “that’s like telling someone who wants a manual transmission that their automatic transmission is a feature.” Regardless, all we ask is that experts be able to turn it off. But the inaccurate attribution I cover below makes it a bit more complicated. This means that query parsing is somehow trumping IP-based geolocation in both reporting and ad serving. AdWords Geographic Report Disagrees with Both Omniture GeoSegmentation and Google Analytics [The experiments here are from one of my expert PPC/SEO/Social Media apprentices, Josh Williams , also of Fuel Interactive and WhatOurBossSaid .] Josh ran a test to see how AdWords’ geo targeting correlates with actual traffic from the targeted areas. He created a campaign targeted only to South Carolina, put an Omniture campaign parameter in the destination url, and ran it for a week. We compared the AdWords geographic report with Omniture’s GeoSegmentation report. AdWords said all but 5 impressions (and zero clicks) came from South Carolina (thus 100% of clicks were from South Carolina according to Google). That would be nice, since that’s what we asked for. However, Omniture SiteCatalyst said that the visitors actually came from 38 U.S. states, and only 12.2% of clicks came from South Carolina: The majority of visitors came from North Carolina, which as previously mentioned, fits with what we know about Myrtle Beach tourists from many other data sources. However, we didn’t ask Google to serve ads in NC, and Google says they didn’t. AdWords reports that what we asked for was achieved, even though it was not. In some circles, we would call that lying. But let’s not call an automated report a liar. Let’s give Google the benefit of the doubt and call it a technical error that they need to fix. (I would not be so cagily accusatory if I had not been through the unsatsifying AdWords customer service run-around on this issue for a year. I doubt my blog posts are more effective than running up and poking Goliath. This kind of neglect will lead Google to inherit the ire Microsoft has achieved- an ire they have expressed a desire to avoid. Neglect and/or stockholder interests could incentivize AdWords reps to be more PR diplomats than the customer champions we need.) If you don’t have Omniture, you can get the same confirmation from Google Analytics. We checked both to make sure our conclusions were correct. Our AdWords rep said this: “AdWords reports on IP addresses the same way Omniture is, so it shouldn’t show up differently in the geographic report. For example, that person from Colorado searching on the keyword with a location specific term, if he sees the ad and clicks on it, it should register as a click from Colorado in AdWords and not as a click from a South Carolina IP address.” But clearly the results show that’s not what’s happening. Omniture and GA agree with one another, and both disagree with the AdWords Geographic report. More Impossible Results Reported in AdWords Web Interface In a similar experiment, Josh created a series of 9 campaigns, each geotargeted to one state, and all using only the same two keywords: exact matches [myrtle beach hotel] and [myrtle beach hotels]. He ran these from Oct 5, 2009 to Nov 2, 2009. And when he didn’t see response, he attempted to get more impressions by raising bids and budgets. The results were striking: According to AdWords, more than 99% of the impressions came to the South Carolina campaign. Highly Unlikely, as we know from other data, and contradicted in the other study by Omniture and GA. Implications: Can You Trust Geo Data In AdWords? So why would you ever run a Geographic report in AdWords? I suggest you don’t, unless your business is not locally oriented and your brand names have no city names in them.What’s more, it means you can’t trust the impressions, clicks, and other data you see in the AdWords web interface if your campaigns are geotargeted. TAKEAWAY: Make sure you’re using another analytics package- use Google Analytics and link your AdWords account to it. Rely on that for your geographic data. GOOGLE: Fix the error, please. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Local PPC: Google AdWords GeoAttribution Is
Tags:
flickr,
local search,
north,
search engine marketing,
Social Media,
south,
south-carolina,
tools
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Many people will tell you that using external (free) image hosting to host your website images is the same as using free hosting overall: unsafe, unreliable and generally unadvisable…. Well, this is not exactly like that. So before we go any further, let’s discuss the pros and cons. Why using a free external image hosting service might be a good idea? (1) It’s a good way to save on hosting and bandwidth (especially if you publish multiple images regularly); (2) It can be one of steps to take to speed up your site. Of course, there are some cons: (1) Less control over your images (the service can decide to cancel your account, delete your images, etc); (2) Less reliable: the service may once just close down, etc. Am I using them? – Yes, for those sites where there are many images. Note: Of course, I do optimize the image size before publishing it, but if I have multiple images per page, the page load time will still leave much to be desired (even with a fairly good hosting package) – unlike when those images are hosted on Flickr for example: the page loads pretty fast even with like 50 images on it. Main (Most Reliable) Image Hosting Services:
Tags:
build-the-image,
flickr,
image,
image-hosting,
image-sharing,
images,
personal,
photobucket,
save-on-hosting,
search-engine,
seo,
short-example,
tools
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Have you ever heard about microformats? If you still need someone to clearly explain what it is about, check out Joe Hall ’s post on development trends that will impact SEO . Microformats look for a new way to format markup languages. Essentially, they offer a new standard for identifying important information. There’s one really nice FireFox addon that uses Microformats to analyze the page content: “ Operator ” is an extension for Firefox that adds the ability to interact with semantic data on web pages, including microformats, RDFa and eRDF. It can turn really useful for spotting the essential microformats used on the page. Once you install it, you’ll be able to see the toolbar that can be toggled using View > Toolbars > Operator Toolbar . (Useful tip: To make the tool hassle-free, find the checkbox in Options that causes the toolbar to auto-hide when there is no data on the page). The toolbar breaks data found on a page into the following sections: Contacts; Events; Locations; Tagspaces; Bookmarks; Resources. Here are a few examples of what each section stands for: 1. Try visiting your Twitter profile page. The tool will extract your contacts: 2. Now, go to Delicious home page and watch the tool extract all tags (you can search each tag on Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, etc): The tool offers a few really cool features: Its “Highlight” feature allows you to find the tag by choosing it in the drop-down; The operator can be accessed via the status bar icon (the button can be added via the Operator options dialog. Check the box that says “Display icon in status bar”) or the toolbar bar icon (The Operator toolbar button can be added to your Firefox toolbar by selecting View > Toolbars > Customize). You can add or delete data formats to be displayed. In the Operator options panel, there is a Data Formats tab. This tab has a listbox that contains all the data formats that will be displayed. You can use the New button to add data formats and the delete button to remove them. You can also change the order in which the data formats are displayed. You can also add or remove actions taken for each data format. In the Operator options panel, there is an Actions tab. This tab has a listbox that contains all the actions that will be displayed. You can check or uncheck the checkbox to determine what actions are displayed in the Operator menus. You can also install user scripts to add optional functionality. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Interact with On-Page Semantic Data with Operator FireFox
Tags:
checkbox,
data,
delicious,
firefox,
flickr,
operator,
search-engine,
semantic,
semantic-data,
seo,
tool,
toolbar,
tools
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After Yahoo! SiteExplorer and Flickr, Yahoo! Pipes is the third reason why I love Yahoo! so much. Surprisingly, I come across too many people who have no idea how to use Yahoo! Pipes and what one can do with them. This post is meant remind us of some huge possibilities behind the tool: here are 5 great Yahoo! Pipes that can be used for brand monitoring for competitive research and reputation management: Pipe URL Aggregated sites Best feature Social Media Firehose yahoo.com, google.com, technorati.com, twitter.com, blogspot.com, youtube.com, wordpress.com Search for multiple terms at a time (comma separated) Conventional & Social Media Tracker News sites [Google, Yahoo, Live]; Blogs [Google Blog Search, Bloglines, WordPress blog search, Technorati]; Social media [Twitter, Friendfeed, Youtube, Digg, Metafilter, Wired] Set the timeframe Social Site Submission Watch Dog Digg, Reddit Domain backlinks from social media sites Content Keyword RSS Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News Filters out identical content Meta Search Alerts Del.icio.us, Findory, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Google News, Google Search, Icerocket, Live Search, Technorati, Yahoo News, Yahoo Search Filters out duplicate URLs Social Media Firehose is a social media search for tracking brand or product mentions on a number of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc. It allows to filter your search by location and to block any domain or phrases from search. Conventional & Social Media Tracker combs through multiple blog and social media search engines and also allows you to filter results based on dates published. Social Site Submission Watch Dog keeps track of your domain submissions to Digg and Reddit. Content Keyword RSS aggregates news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compares content, removing same stories and outputting a unique RSS feed and also allowing you to set how many entries the feed can contain. Meta Search Alerts aggregates search results from a number of sources and ensures all the URLs are unique. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 5 Useful Yahoo! Pipes to Monitor Your
Tags:
content-keyword,
flickr,
google-news,
media,
search,
search-engine,
seo,
social,
Social Media,
technorati,
tool,
tools,
yahoo-news,
youtube
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Imagine conducting an image search whereby the search engine uses features from an image to retrieve similar images. If you thought to yourself “That’s already something Google offers”, you’d be right. However, they aren’t the only ones tinkering with similar image search technology. Last year during TechCrunch 50, Gazopa launched in private beta, meaning 99% percent of us couldn’t get in. Now, the rest of us peons finally have the chance to check it with Gazopa announcing that they’ve moved into open beta. The way that Gazopa works is it allows users to upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing, or right click on an image anywhere on the web (using a plug-in) and it will then find similar images. You can even search for videos this way, and all you need is a thumbnail of a video to search for similar videos. The search results are then filtered, mostly by analzying the color and shape of the object or person in the image. So, for example, you can give Gazopa the URL of a picture of a yellow truck and it will find pictures of similar yellow trucks online. Some of the other cool things that you can do with Gazopa include: Search Flickr photos, and tell Gazopa to sort out those that lack a Creative Commons license. Find images related to the latest news, which can be filtered by time, shape and size. With the Gazopa iPhone app, you can take and upload photos with your iPhone to get similar images off the web quickly. More than 40,000 users have tested out the service since September 2008. It’s still a little buggy at times, but sufficient for still being in beta stage. If it were a full launch and coming out of beta, well that’d be a different story. Gazopa, which is owned by Hitachi America, competes with Google in similar search, but according to project leader Hideki Kobayashi, Google doesn’t allow users to find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Another competitor of Gazopa is TinEye. TinEye doesn’t specifically look for “similar” images, and instead tries to find exact matches instead. It sounds like a promising endeavor, but I’m still not sold on it. To me, these kind specialty searches will always be a bit of a novelty, rather than something I’d first run to when I want to find an image. Let us know what you think about it in the comments section. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Gazopa Similar Image Search Enters Open
Tags:
color,
flickr,
gazopa,
hitachi-america,
image-search,
search,
search engine news,
search-engine,
search-flickr,
seo,
tools
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Google Bump is a n awesome Greasemonkey script worth giving a try. It adds some cool functionality to the Google web search: Main features include Multisearch, Image & Video results with a Player, Wikipedia definitions and links, and some clutter cleanup by Most Useful
Tags:
flickr,
google-bump,
greasemonkey,
image,
image-search,
multisearch,
remove-sidebar,
search,
search-engine,
search-engines,
searches,
seo,
tools,
video,
wikipedia