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Google has issued an official statement regarding its business operations in China, specifically its Chinese search portal – google.cn. Specifically, Google told Chinese authorities that it will stop censoring search results on the Chinese Google site. And dependeing on how things will turn out, Google might later be foreced to shut down the said site. In a long post at its official blog site, Google gave three recent discoveries/incidents that prompted its decision to stop censoring search results from its Chinese site. The first one being the fact, it was found out that recent attacks on its corporate IT infrastructure originated from China and that those attacks were not just meant for Google alone. Some other business companies were also targeted. Making things worsts is that based on Google’s investigation, it was also found out that the main objective of the attackers was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Although the attackers were not successful in achieving their target, thanks to Google’s high level of infrastructure security on its products, two Gmail accounts were jeopardized although the activity was limited only to non-essential matters and not the content of the emails. And worst of all has got to be the fact that Google also found out that even accounts of U.S., China and Europe human rights activities were accessed by third parties through malware, phising and other malicious activities. Given these conditions, Google has no recourse but to stop censoring the search results on its Chinese site. But that is of course if Google and the Chinese authorities will agree. If not, then that’s the time when Google will be force to close its Chinese site. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Will Stop Censoring Search Results in
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Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine. Well, I’m not one of those. It’s absolutely in your best interest to learn the basics of social media before risking your time and money. Jumping into social media without at least learning the basics could be a major disaster. It probably won’t ruin your company. It probably won’t ruin you. But it will be a waste of time. Why do I say that? Well an understanding of social media theory and fundamentals makes your strategy better. How, you ask? Well… 1. It Helps You Create a Starting and End Point Taking the time to learn social media fundamentals gives you a starting point. It helps you decide where you are and hopefully where you should go. If you don’t learn what the marketing technique is, how will you know what it’s capable of? How can you create goals and work towards them? Taking the time to explore social media and soak up as much information as possible gives you a better understanding of what social media can do and how to create a plan. 2. Knowledge Leads to Fewer Mistakes On social media, a misstep can spread just as fast as a good campaign and consumers can be less than forgiving. Learning how to interact and promote a business shouldn’t endanger the brand. Start with baby steps. Minimize the likelihood of something to go wrong. Learn as much as you can about web culture and online customer service. Online consumers expect something much different than offline customers. You should know how to deliver it. 3. Experience Comes With Time – Who Has the Time? Remember the common phrase, “don’t reinvent the wheel?” – Well don’t do it. Marketers have been testing and exploring social media theories and sharing them online. Why would you want to go through that powerful information and have to learn it on your own? You can test and explore and research your content, but we know that more often than not list posts go viral. There’s no need for you to take the time to test and explore that. Take advantage of other’s experiences to bolster your marketing. Don’t try to recreate or “re-find” what others have already shown works. Save your time for actual marketing. 4. Learning Keeps You From Getting Frustrated Think back to your childhood. If you’re anything like me, than math class was a horror. I’d sit there trying to do a problem and just not knowing how. After a few minutes of trying, I’d get frustrated and give up. It wasn’t until someone taught me what to do and explained to me why it is that way that I began to enjoy math. Social media is the same way. There are fundamentals and there are strategies that you should know and understand. Don’t allow frustration lead to you giving up. We know social media is a powerful marketing tool. Don’t let it go. 5. How Are You Investing In Something You Know Little About? It all comes down to money. How are you supposed to decide how much to invest in social media if you don’t know what it can do? Learn what you’ll need to invest, both time and money, before throwing resources at it. Have a plan and create a budget. This will help increase the likelihood of success. Information is key. To have a positive social media strategy you need to know as much as possible. That means both in regards to social media knowledge as well as strategies and fundamentals. How are others in your industry doing? Why did their campaigns work? How can you recreate their success without copying them verbatim? Is social media for you? If you don’t understand these fundamentals or have this information you’re marketing with a disadvantage. I’d love to know what you think. How are you learning social media? Where do you go for research and strategies? Are you learning from example or creating your own ideas? Check out Samir Balwani’s new social media guide at Training Social , a resource for anyone interested in learning social media marketing. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 5 Reasons to Learn Social
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Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Eric Schmidt’s interview on CNBC has even provoked various sentiments on privacy issues. I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook.Com has an excellent take on this one. Personally, I agree with Kalena Jordan’s conclusion on whether or not SEO can exist beyond personalization , in which she said: Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference. The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. And then there’s the launch of Real-Time search results from Google (just a few days after the rollout of personalized search). So expect conversations your favorite social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. However, I wasn’t surprise to see some questionable results in the early stages. But I won’t go on explaining what these two features mean for Search Engine Optimization. After a few weeks of reading experts’ views on the topic, by now you already know what it does for our users, what challenges it poses to us SEO’s, and what benefits Google gains out of these intriguing additions. Instead let me show you how we can still win the battle for search rankings with these new set of rules. Why don’t we explore our weapons in modern warfare? 1. Quality Content with Value – Ever since I started out as a SEO content writer 4 years ago, I’ve always been a believer in the “Content is King” school of thought. But SEO has evolved so much that great content may not be enough. Thus, you have the popular viral content and link baiting trends. I believe in today’s context, content should be beyond quality, relevancy and link worthiness. Let’s just say you’re a movie website and you want to drive visitors to your AVATAR page (oh Yes, It was phenomenal!). Typically, you’d be providing a brief synopsis of the film, movie ratings, and screening times. Will that be enough? Well you should throw in a video trailer, a listing of local cinemas in the area featuring the film, movie reviews from selected bodies like Rotten Tomatoes, tickets and seats reservation system, or maybe a list snack items your visitors might want to grab while watching (maybe that’s a bit too much, but hey it’s possible). You don’t have to be a one-stop shop website, but your site must be what your customers need and even more. Great content will not be merely something to read and understand. Great content will be something tangible, something that customers can act upon, something that entices emotion, something that is real and beyond just characters in a white space. 2. Increase ClickThrough Rate – Personalized search will mean effectively manipulating influencing your users to click on your listing. Of course you can always conduct your own tests and come up with your own tactics to exploit personalized search . Here’s one simple tip: improve your page titles and your meta descriptions. These elements will reflect how you’ll appear on the SERP’s. Your description should inform your customers who you are and what you can deliver. If you can add a call to action line in less than 160 characters of your description, you’re off on a great start. If you can capture your customers in the first 3 lines of your search listing, you’re definitely a mile ahead of the competition. 3. Brand & Online Reputation Management – When we do research on certain topics, we tend to look for sources coming from brands even though they might be beyond page 1 of our searches. In the same way we try to avoid clicking through listings which come from dubious providers despite their top positions in the results pages. The reason being – TRUST. People trust brands. People trust businesses, individuals, and groups who have made the effort of developing their brands and delivering no less than the best to their customers. You may have won the battle for the top rankings but if you’re sitting beside the big fish in your niche market, they’ll definitely choose the neighboring giant. 4. Get Active on Social Media – This goes without saying. Even before rumors of real-time search came to life, marketing, PR, and online professionals have taken advantage of social media to its fullest potential. Well for those who haven’t, now is the time to get cracking on social media optimization (SMO). If not for real-time search, then you’ve got more reasons to embrace social media in 2010 . It would be naïve for us to think that we didn’t see this coming. Personalized and real-time search was definitely the next step for Google (and probably for the rest of the search engines). And we, as SEO’s, are expected to rise up to the occasion to do what we do best – to quickly adapt to the environment and to deliver the right results. Dave is currently working as an SEO Analyst for Nurture3 , and online marketing company based in Dubai, leading a team of junior SEO?s optimizing in-house web projects. He is also the author of Click-Dubai.Com , which talks about the basic functions of organic search engine optimization and its importance in the Middle East & GCC markets. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How SEOs Win the War on Personalized & Real-Time
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It’s Christmas Eve, or the Night Before Christmas, and the time has come again to track the route of Santa Claus as he travels the globe, bringing presents to the good boys and girls. Want to track Santa’s whereabouts on Christmas Eve? Here are the online tools you need. Official NORAD Santa Tracker NORAD continues it more than 50 years tradition of tracking Santa’s whereabouts especially on Christmas Even. Read more about why NORAD tracks Santa as well as spirit of voluntarism during this event. Google
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I find it sad that many people are absolutely unaware of Google advanced operators, or even if they do know about the advanced search, they never use it. I for one use Google advanced operators all the time: when doing on-page diagnostics; searching for backlink opportunities, doing competitive research, etc, etc So in this post I decided to share the best tools and tutorials that will help you remember and learn to use the advanced search (if you are not using it already): Advanced search
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We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. The interesting part of this change is that it is not focused on one concept, but rather several, that mixed together change the face of search as we move into the new year. What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “ Search-o-morphis ” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking. Personalized Search Changes Real Time Search Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search Social Search Bing Growing into legitimate option 2 These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009. Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010: 1. Social Media 2. Mobile Search Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information. In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have? With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many. Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others. What’s our point? Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging . If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking ( ie. URL Shorteners ). If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet. How will social media effect search directly? Well these new changes are sending signals beyond search. Traffic The signal of traffic will not come simply from SERP use. The engines will be looking for how users interact with pages beyond their search product. How do they find the site? How do they share it? This can all be monitored from the methods above. Social media sites spread a ton of traffic throughout the web every day. But traffic is not measured in terms of shear numbers, the relevance of traffic to a site can be measured via conversions (sales, sign ups, shares), bounce rate, time on site (all hail video!), diversity of traffic, whether the user revisits the site, and how the site is viewed amongst its peers and followers. Engagement The more users engage with a document, the more it will show up in their personalized results. Methods and systems for personalized network searching (Google Patent) An embodiment of the present invention may comprise features to facilitate community building. For example, in one embodiment, the uniform resource locator comprises a community bookmark. The bookmark may be shared by a set of users or may be transmitted by one user and received by another. The second user can then perform personalized queries that are based, at least in part, on the shared bookmark. In another embodiment, a cluster of users is identified based at least in part on the bookmarks and annotations that they have previously identified. If a user spends a great deal of time on a site, it is identified as a bookmark for later personalized searches. In other embodiments, the implicit measure may comprise at least one of the quantity of repeat visits to the site or the quantity of click-throughs on the site…Other implicit measures include printing the page, saving the page, and the amount of scrolling performed on the page. Upstream and Downstream
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Welcome to another edition of ‘ 7 Days of Search and Social ‘ – First off, HAPPY HOLIDAYs to all those partaking. May you and yours have a safe and relaxing time! Now, I had thought things would start to slow down as we got closer to the holidays, but not so. We had a lot of interesting posts, patents and toys out there, although there was no real ‘big story’ for once (c’mon Google, yer slipping). And away we go…..
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