The Search Engine Blog
News and Tips From The Search Marketing World
Google Now Treats SubDomains as Part of the Domain
In a major shift Google has announced that they are treating sub-domain links to the primary domain as an internal link. Previously Google treated sub-domains as a separate site. For example, if you have a link from forum.picturesqueweb.com to picturesqueweb.com, it was treated as an external link. Not any longer. Will this impact a lot of web site rankings? You bet! Will our customers following our advice be affected? Not at all. If you are a marketer and didn’t see this coming, you have horse blinders on. Customers using our landing page service are unaffected by this as well as customers using our social marketing articles services.
+1 Button Does More
Two new features for the +1 button make it a time saver for sharing. Just click the +1 on any site (including your own) and it allows you to instantly post it, sharing it with your circles of friends. A snippet feature is also added showing content from the page. Web masters can control what shows in their snippets. More on the Google Blog page http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/doing-more-with-1-button-more-than-4.html.
Landing Page Guide
Picturesque has started authoring a new landing page guide at http://landing-page.picturesquesem.com. We’ve published an introduction and two chapters of information. Your opinion is requested….would you like us to finish it? Do you have any questions regarding the content? Your input and questions will help direct the content of the future chapters.
A landing page is an excellent tool to accomplish any goal including purchase of a product/service, newsletter signup, phone call inquiry, white paper download, a visit to your location, Facebook like, and anything else you could set as an online goal.
Learn more online here at the Landing Page Guide.
Google Analytics Data Will Be Off
A change in sessions definitions will result in Google Analytics reporting to be off. They’ve redefined what a session is resulting is throwing off your tracking of repeat visitors. Read more on their blog at Update to Sessions in Google Analytics.
Bing Webmaster Tools Update
Bing has updated their webmaster tools with some new features and an improved look. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
Why Bother Blogging On SEO
I got a chuckle out of a post at http://www.johnon.com/762/bloggin-on-seo.html and had to respond. We’ll see if it’s approved. I’m not certain if John Andrews is being a bit sarcastic or just really frustrated with stupidity. I do think that people need to think about what they are reading online and think about it prior to acting on it. Working in search marketing, I’ve heard some wild questions where it is obvious that the person asking just read something and swallowed it whole without chewing. These are most likely the same people who believe that someone in Madagascar is going to share twenty million dollars with them.
Google Data Feed Update
The specifications for Google product data feeds will be changing in September. By the 22nd you must meet the guidelines posted by Google or your feed could be rejected. Information is on their blog and specifications are found here. No doubt this will be costly for many people as they may have to enter data not currently in their store or have to hire a programmer to rewrite a custom export. Fortunately most of our customers use Miva Merchant so data entry will be their only major concern.
Google Health Dies
Say goodbye to a bad idea. Do you think putting your health information on the Internet is a good idea? Obviously not enough people did and just before the big FTC probe into Google, it’s shut down. What a coincidence. Read more on Google’s Blog.
Hot Tracking
Watching how users interact with your site can lead to improve site design which leads to increased sales. You can see how users interact with your site using a tool such as Mouseflow. We’ve been using it on a number of ecommerce sites and have learned things we never would have been able to learn without a lot of guess work. Check out the Mouseflow free trial.
Google Correlate: The New Google Tool
It’s a cool new tool for data junkies. Check out this write-up on the new kid on the block. Google Correlate
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